Ubisoft to Shut Down ‘XDefiant,’ Nearly 300 Employees Laid Off as San Francisco and Osaka Game Studios Close
Ubisoft to Shut Down ‘XDefiant,’ Nearly 300 Employees Laid Off as San Francisco and Osaka Game Studios Close
Ubisoft will be shutting down its free-to-play first-person shooter game "XDefiant" in the new year.
Ubisoft will be shutting down its free-to-play first-person shooter game "XDefiant" in the new year.
Look, I hate Ubisoft as much as the next guy, but this shit always pisses me off. I guarantee that the reason most of these games fail or go in a bad direction is because of the parent company making poor decisions and then punishing the studios as a scape goat. Microsoft closed Arkane Studios after the disaster that was Redfall when most of the poor choices came from Bethesda and Microsoft. Arkane didn't even want to make the game in the first place, but they still got shut down and they all lost their jobs.
Fuck AAA game companies. The only clout they have is making decent games in the past when they were smaller. The only time most of these companies made any decent games (not all, but most) was when they were the indie devs competing against the big boys.
46If any child company is being blamed, it's always the parent companies fault. Not like it changes literally anything though because people keep paying these companies to be treated like garbage.
10I feel you. All my gaming friends buy the newest CoD and assassin's creed games on release every time and then spend the first few weeks just complaining about the games. And I'm like, let's go play our multiplayer Stardew Valley save that we have hundreds of hours in and actually have fun playing, my guys.
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I got the feeling Arkane was always shit at org politics, to be honest. Creative energy without corporate strategy. Big shame.
1Microsoft closed Arkane Studios after the disaster that was Redfall when most of the poor choices came from Bethesda and Microsoft
Bethesda and Arkane had a common owner, ZeniMax. Bethesda itself didn't own Arkane.
1I always forget that ZeniMax even exists, honestly. They're all just Bethesda to me. In my mind I just picture them as "big Bethesda" and "little Bethesda." Regardless, they were all bought by Microsoft so it was probably Microsoft that fucked over Arkane. So it's kind of a moot point anyways.
4
Cod shooters with gimmicky "abilities" fucking suck. No one is asking for them
8Based on the fact that I see a lot of posts complaining about Call of Duty on the Threadiverse, I'd imagine that there are at least some people who would be interested in an alternative to CoD.
7The thing is, there's not a lot you can do to be an alternative to cod, without it straying too far and just slowly dying like XDefiant. Cod is just too big to die, even when the games are actually just DLC, people buy buy buy.
The only alternative to cod that stands any chance is a remastered old cod. Ubisoft trying to battle cod was a blunder, but so is every decision at their headquarters recently.
2
If devs want to make an alternative to CoD, they need to make a fun single player FPS first and make a small but fun multiplayer component.
The problem is that publishers see the dollar signs from CoD and Fortnite and want to make a MP scam game without realizing that gamers only want to be scammed by Fortnite and CoD because they were actually fun before they became a scam.
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We have The Division, Rainbow Six, and Ghost Recon (and Farcry if you want to add that) as military shooters Ubisoft already makes.
And among the seemingly thousands of other military shooter options out there, it's hard to be surprised yet another military shooter didn't do well in this landscape.
7That's a little reductive. The Division is a primarily PVE looter shooter with MMO trappings. Rainbow 6 is a competitive hero shooter with emphasis on quick kills and gadgets. Ghost Recon is an open world action game with emphasis on stealth.
Don't get me wrong, "Ubisoft game" could be its own genre at this point, considering the amount of mechanical overlap in some areas, but most of those products do offer generally distinct gameplay experiences. Though, it does seem like Rainbow 6 and xDefiant would be positioned as rivals in market share, upon reflection.
3These are fair points.
It's like Mario Kart, GT7, and Forza are all racers, but wildly different.
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Totally didn't see that coming...
4if we want to fix job market we need more capitalism, more billionaires more wealth that will eventually trickle down,
it's simple economics
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