Games @lemmy.world

10mo ago

Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening

152 comments

I hate graphs that don't start the Y axis at zero.
That said, fuck ubisoft.
- That's pretty normal for financial charts like this though.
  
  And it's dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.
- Agreed. Took me a moment to realise they didn’t drop to zero. !dataisugly
  
  A stock would never drop to zero because the company would be liquidated before that happened. If the stock actually dropped to zero they would have no money they need to call bankruptcy before that point.
  
  Who's to say we can't drop them to zero :)
  
  You need to include the instance in the community name.
- It’s unfortunately standard with all stock graphs :/
- There is no point of starting the chart to 0 since it doesn't give any information other than the share price, which is already communicated by the Y axis anyways.

Ubisoft will have to get used to people not owning their games.
- Womp womp

not really news.. This is a 1 years graph.. its been going downward for some time
- Now do a 5 year graph and realise it's kinda back to pre pandemic levels.
  
  hm.. not quite.. but it certainly has seen some ups and downs, that are larger than what happened this morning. This is a graph of "all time"
  
  Yes, but it is not acceptable in today's capitalism. Only the growth of growth matters.
  If the line does not go up enough, the company is failing.
- this is great. i thought they kept making slop because it's giving them a return but I'm glad people are catching on.
- That's a massive one day spike though

I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
- I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.
- I'd say I'm happy that AAA companies are reaping what they sow from listening to their dumbass stakeholders.
  
  The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
  It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
- Valve is pretty well liked. not sure you can really call them a games publisher any more though.
  
  Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.
- I'm buying my son Xbox 360 and PS2 games
- 90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I've bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they've failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can't remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a 'favorite'.
  Also I'm growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they've shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It's off putting to me and I feel like having a 'get off my lawn' moment.
- I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
  I'm laughing a lot, is that a positive? These are all self-inflicted wounds because they mistook "shareholders" for the customers.
- Capcom has been pretty consistent.
  
  Unless you care about their use of Denuvo
- Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don't pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king
- There's probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
  The "traditional" AAA pipeline is "make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS". Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
  That's not to say there aren't good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I'd say we're nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won't want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
- I regret buying my ps5 so much.
  
  I'm not saying this to be a dick, I would just like to add, no regrets on building my PC.

It didn't tank this morning. It's been going downhill for exactly a month.
- You are correct, it's been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed
  
  A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.

You can make any graph look bad if you control the axis bounds weirdly like this.
Not that I have good things to say about ubisoft, but at a glance one would assume their stock value plummeted to zero, which is not the case.
- This was also my initial take but look at these graphs with the Y axis starting from 0
  
  Stock lost 67% value in the last year alone, and lost 85% in the past 5 years. Looks pretty dire to me. I would say this is undervalued but I have no confidence in the ubi leadership to turn it around.
  
  Might be that the CEO and upper management are dumb fucks running the company to the ground.
  No more innovation, just microtransactions in shitty games, and the same old rehashed concepts.
- You can make 20% drops in value look harmless if you flatten the graph enough

Why don't they just start using ai to generate games? Its cheaper and no one will notice.
- They're instead letting an AI generate their stock price. It is a number now.

“Tanked”
Checks graph
19% is a hit but I wouldn’t call it tanked.
Some stocks are just volatile. Here is the full history:
- Whenever I see social media say something dropped/jumped, I do the same thing as you - I visit the portfolio and take a birds eye view.
  I still think about the one time redditors celebrated a company's stock dropping by 90% over the last day.
  But what the picture left out was how the company was climbing by 1000% in a week before dropping.
- A drop this severe is tanking. Even with a stock history like the one from Ubisoft.
- did ubisoft make face masks or something wtf happened in 2020
  
  I think people were just bored out of their minds
  
  WTF you think happened in 2020? No one could leave their house, so video game went gang busters.
  I worked at a video game retailer then, and it was the busiest we've ever been.

AAAA stock
- They should be comfortable with people not owning their stocks
  
  👏👏👏

It's been tanking for a lot longer than that
- lol, it looks like a cryptocurrency chart.
  
  I wish. Crypto has been depressingly buoyant.

-20% what did I miss?!
- They're delaying AC: Shadows.
  
  I’m not sure about the need for AC when your house is in the shade, but nevertheless understandable, have a nice day
  
  And it's going to be competing with the Ghost of Tsushima sequel.
  For me they're different enough to not really be in competition, but they felt the need to issue a statement about it, so they're obviously a bit worried.
  Not that I'm that interested in either. Give me that Soul Reaver remaster baby. Inject that shit into my veins.

It's really a sad seeing Ubisoft going from a trendsetter up until Far Cry 3, to being a failed trend chaser.

You could could say their stock went limp. They be soft.
- Ubersoft

I guess the anti-woke crowd is having a hard-on rn. I don't play ubisoft's games but I know a lot of good persons who work there around Quebec, and many of them fear losing their jobs.
- To quote Jason Schreier, “whenever anything bad happens, worst people on the internet will be there to blame diversity”
  
  Disgusting.
  This isn't about being diverse. It's about making bad games.
  As a matter of fact, the new assassin's Creed is so offensive that the Japanese government is in an uproar about it.
  Ubisofts attempt to be so inclusive and sexually neutral is what's making their games bad because they're stifling good game design in the process.
  That's not to say that it's not possible to make a good game while adhering to diversification and inclusion.
  Hellblade and horizon zero Dawn are two excellent examples of incredibly good games that don't expound sexism. Hell, look at destiny 2. They handle these kinds of situations perfectly!
  But to simply imply people are upset because they don't like "woke politics" is a gross over simplification of what's happening to Ubisoft!
- When a game is successful it's because of the executive, but when it bombs it's the fault of the workers, sadly.
  
  Heads I win, tales you lose situation always

Ubisoft made some of my favorite games as a kid. Real shane shitty management and a culture of sexual harassment have ruined their legacy

Has something in particular been happening lately? I feel like Ubisoft has sucked for quite a while, but their stock price was fine until relatively recently, right?
- If games sucking was the same thing as games being unprofitable gaming would be in better shape.

i told them not to invest in DJT

There's going to be a new CEO by the end of the FY.

I thought from this graph that the stock had tanked to pennies.
It lost about 20% of its value, looks like
- FWIW, a 20% drop is borderline catastrophic for a major company. The squeeze it puts on their supply chain, ability to make payroll, and interest rates on borrowing going up, it could be enough to create a death spiral. I think ubisoft is probably managed well enough to deal with this, but this is definitely a serious situation for them.
- Look at the entire history.
  In 2018 their stock price was about 24, now it's 2.

Buy buy buy?
- You taking stock advice from Justin Timberlake or somethin'?

Am I too stupid to understand the X Axes? 1Day, 1Week... that makes no sense at all
- It's an option to filter by time; only 1 day is selected. The actual time on the x-axis is hidden.
  
  Ahh that makes sense.

Was ubisoft ever okay though? They always have problems going on whether it be a hostile takeover or this, but they always bounce back somehow surprisingly.

152 comments