Everyone's favorite AAA company might be facing bankruptcy

You're right Ubisoft, I am pretty comfortable not owning your games 🥰

They ran Ass cRee into the ground and launched Uplay with privacy violations.
I boycotted them after thinking they were one of the few good AAA companies.
Now they're going to die.
Great. Maybe a better studio can reboot Ass cRee and make it wothwhile. Or you know, just leave it the fuck alone.
- Same with Far Cry which is a shame because it used to be a really fun dumbshooter series. I got FC6 on sale last month and had to slog through it, I swore off the franchise after finishing the game and haven't touched it since, even though there's plenty of post-game content left for me.
- Honestly, it wasn’t even Assassin’s Creed anymore, it was more like Warrior’s Creed starting from Odyssey to Valhalla, and then they backtracked to more assassin like gameplay with Mirage. I stopped buying their games when I realized how bad Far Cry 5 and Odyssey were.
- I got a lot of early Assassins Creed vibes from Ghost of Tsushima.

Literally all they had to do was make good games

Not sure what you mean. They needed more NFTs and AI from what I can tell! /s
Honestly though whenever I hear big companies like this fail, it keeps making me go back to the Steve Jobs interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
- How have I never seen that interview!? Thanks, great stuff...
- Exactly what is happening at Intel right now. History repeats itself.
Hey, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was great!
Sadly, that's not necessarily true: https://youtube.com/shorts/IHZru-6M8BY
- I mean, it's not true inside a bubble. I'm sure there's some incredible games that have been made by one person that didn't find the kind of success that Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, etc did. But at a giant corporation like Ubisoft, they're not on their own! They have marketing people, interns, studios and sub-studios, finance people, trend analysts, etc.
  Ubisoft has some great IPs. But all of their best games came out over 20 years ago! So yes, quality is not the only thing, but it definitely matters.

"Company fails to generate infinite revenue even after implementing every abusive tactic known".

More like, company keeps pushing for short-term profits, runs out of goodwill built up in the past.
- Ubisoft had many long standing issues, but disowning The Crew users was the worst possible move they could have made in their already dire situation.
- I want to say the same thing...
  But then you have like every other corporation on earth doing the same, and most of them see their stock price soar.
Imagine, about five years ago, they peaked at $82.
It was also during that time when they talked about getting into Crypto, NFTs, and all sorts of other get rich quick schemes.
Now look at them.

Gamers say that Ubisoft execs need to get comfortable with not being solvent.

Ubisoft execs need to get comfortable flying coach.
I'm afraid Ubisoft execs won't feel much from that.

they MBA'd themselves into extinction

edit; everyone with an mba is only qualified to be a farm laborer

Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.
They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.
Management will destroy this world.
- There’s a world where management is treated as an important but not godly position. Where they are schedulers and arbitrators of conflict, and where they aren’t free from consequences because they’re already at the top. And holy hell it’s also not the place where the position is used to promote someone out of where they’re useful simply because paying a labourer more than a manager is seen as unthinkable. It ain’t this one, but I like to think about it sometimes.
- Under New Management :)
Farm labor is complicated and specialized.
- And fucking physically hard
- Yeah then they'd get to suffer being the incompetent bumbling idiot that does the back breaking stuff. MBA appropriate due to their avarice of wanting to exploit people, to clarify.
  edit: Not trying to say farm labor isn't skill intensive, moreso giving them a taste of their own medicine
Every single MBA holder I have met has been a completely shit human being. Without exception.
They’re qualified to be pig feed.
- Well said

I guess shareholders got used to not owning their stock?

If only bankruptcy actually meant consequences for those responsible.

Pretty much. The leadership team all have a golden parachute and will be integrated back into an industry and fuck that up too.
- It's a shame that they don't have a literal golden parachute.
I sentence the investors and executives to lives of extreme luxury

I entirely stopped playing Ubisoft games because they require me to sign in to play.

I tried Anno 1800 because it was free on PS+ and immediately ran into a login wall.

Same thing when I tried Assassin’s Creed.

They’re not even online games. I get needing to log in to CoD because you’re playing online, but blocking the offline mode is asinine.

So why would I bother buying an Ubisoft title when I know I’m going to open it up and hit that stupid login wall and privacy policy.

I get needing to log in to CoD because you’re playing online
That shouldn’t be needed either. A PSN or Steam account should be enough.
- It used to be enough. I played so much COD4 back in the day on Xbox and the only login I ever needed was my Xbox account.
  But nowadays, they want more data from you than the platform is willing or allowed to share, so you need to log in to their service.
That’s why I only buy from the fitgirl store.
I entirely stopped playing Ubisoft games because they require me to sign in to play.
I straight up can't play half of their games on PlayStation because of this. I had a different PSN account 15 years ago that my Ubisoft account is associated with and apparently your Ubisoft account can only be tied to one PSN account EVER. I'm not creating a new email just to sign up for Ubisoft play. So I don't buy their games 🤷
- And that’s the kind of thing their metrics will never reveal to them.
  I think if you just asked players you’d get an overwhelming pushback on the account issues.
- fwiw you can reach out to support and they’ll change the link for you.
It fucking dropped my Far Cry game because THEIR servers had an issue, not my internet connection.
Lost progress, replayed it, it happened again, never bought anything from them again.
The rest can burn, but man, Anno 1800 really is/was the best in its series, mandatory logins or not. It's the only game I still hold on to my ubi account for, and I dread the day they'll go under, because they'll take the Mainz team and the Anno games down with them.

I took their advice and got comfortable not owning Ubisoft games.

They make it so easy: anything they release I've already played years ago already.
i quit after AC4. kept up with the news and reviews, seems I never really missed anything good.

It's because they're not AAA anymore. They went AAAA so I guess they've had a financial rating overflow and now they've gone negative.

They've gone plaid
- I always drink coffee when I watch radar.

Ubisoft executives need to become comfortable with "not being employed."

Unfortunately, that's not how this works.
This is late stage capitalism, execs are judged on how much money they managed to squeeze out before the company died. They'll be hired immediately specifically to do it again somewhere else.
The company dying in incidental.
Some will take the blame, take millions as parachute payments, then the low level workers will have their jobs cut.

I really enjoyed Driver: San Francisco. Then Ubisoft introduced UPlay and I couldn't play it anymore. That was the last time I installed anything from Ubisoft.

I tried to reinstall it recently and it complained that you can't install 32bit software from Steam anymore. I guess I'll never play another Ubisoft game.

Love this game and that is why I have a pirate copy that doesn't do any of that crap. I completed it again last year and it was good fun still!
it complained that you can’t install 32bit software from Steam anymore
Like 32 bit installers for C++ don't work or 32 bit games in general? I don't think I've ever seen that error before on windows.
- It’s a Ubisoft broken DRM thing

Do better Ubisoft

Stop fucking outsourcing and actually fund your devs, consider firing from the top down as your managers aren't doing shit for the company

I'm legitimately at the point where I hope they don't pivot and are just forced to sell off their IP. There's just too many reasons to not like them.
- Guess they better start feeling comfortable with not owning their company.
- Selling IP can go both ways. It could be picked up by someone wanting to do better, or it could be picked up by someone just after a quick buck by doing the bare minimum.
  And then there's Rocketwerkz - They originally bid to develop Kerbal Space Program 2 for Take2, but they lost the bid because the winners showed up fancy concept art while rocketwerkz focused on a solid technical foundation. And then Take2 severely botched KSP2 and the franchise is now considered dead. Rocketwerkz is now building something relevamt from scratch, with their own IP, and it looks really promising. I hope this happens to a lot more AAA titles and IP holders.
Ubisoft is owned and run by a family who are super old French aristocrats who trace their family wealth back generations. The Guillemots have zero idea what their customers want or how to make a good game. They want to make money and don't care what the poor have to say in criticism or frustration. They are too insulated to feel like they have to improve - it's the children who are wrong.
- It’s hilarious that they are trying to condition the sale of the company on letting the guillemots retaining control.
  Let it burn.
- I was never very into Ubisoft or their titles, so I'm perfectly content with everything burning to the ground, hoping it'll send a signal to franchises I actually care about:
  Stop developing games for focus panels, and try to innovate instead.
Also, please sell Nadeo to someone who deserves the Trackmania IP.
consider firing from the top down as your managers aren’t doing shit for the company
I disagree. Because of his... "antics," I know the name Bobby Kotik, and he's done nothing but good things for the company. Really uplifted them from a dark place.
- I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm.
- What does Bobby Kotick have to do with Ubisoft? He worked for Activision/Blizzard.

Ubisoft needs to get comfortoble with not owning their company

Ubisoft just needs to get comfortable with no longer owning their games. 😈

I stopped buying games that require online login. It's a real pain in the ass when I'm traveling and offline. I stopped buying anything from Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar. They made their choice, so I did too.

I hate that Halo:MCC requires my like, 28 digit Microsoft password AND 2FA to play a game from 2007. It should allow you to bypass login and just play as your steam account.
Every time I want to play it, it asks for that, and I just quit and play something that is far less of a hassle, particularly offline.
- Hey I have a real easy solution to that.
  I'm perma banned because I had the gall to play modded MCC from the steam workshop on the day it released, before the moderation team knew modding was legal. I can't even log into Halo waypoint to get help from the Halo team.
  I now can't play any Microsoft game, own an Xbox, or use game pass and I refuse to make a new account on principle.
- This bugs the hell out of me too. I don't think I've even started it yet for this very reason.

Get rid of uplay. I might buy ubisoft games if they weren't tied to that horrible service

Not just Uplay, but also their activation servers. Their games make calls to their endpoints to authenticate if you own/access the game and DLC. If those activation servers are decommissioned without a replacement, your game won’t activate and you’ll lose access to DLC.
They announced they would do this for legacy games several years ago, and I was going to lose access to all the DLC I paid for with my Splinter Cell Blacklist game that I physically owned on a Wii U disc way back in 2013. Bought all the DLC because I loved the game. After enough gamer backlash, Ubisoft backpedaled and the activation servers remain for now. However, the concern is still there that I’ll lose the stuff I paid for when they decide they can’t serve it anymore or if they go bankrupt. Without them updating the game code or open sourcing it, I lose updates, DLC, etc.
We need digital ownership reform, or else it’s piracy time again. This will especially be critical when Gabe steps down from Steam and new owners are appointed, or if Steam goes public.
- The US is kind of a lost cause, but there is an effort out there!
  https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
- My god I dread that day.
- That's awful, sorry. Sadly, until we globally overhaul the laws regarding DRM, or consumer backlash threatens to destroy the industry (like with music piracy), this kind of garbage will continue to happen.

Maybe they should just have fewer avocado toasts for a while?

But then who’s going to reskin my favourite open world games every year?

I've always thought they do such a good job at building worlds but are absolute shit on story and content. I wish there was a way they'd just build worlds and then hand it off to someone who knows how to make a decent story. Valhalla and Odyssey had amazing worlds that deserved better stories

Part of me is sad because some of my favorite games might get shitcanned as a result, but it’s a loss I’m willing to accept if it kills such a parasitic company.

I'll be sad if For Honor stops being supported
Nah, the IP will be sold off and someone else will take over your favourite tower climbers.
- I’m a degen still playing rainbow 6 siege. Here’s to hoping someone carries that torch.

Oh no.

Anyway

Came here to say this.

Ubisoft Execs Need To Get Comfortable With "Not Owning My Money".

A lot of company's should prepare for that, been running out of money for overpriced entertainment related stuff.
It used to be affordable so i had no issues with it, but now even the basics are overpriced.

Please die, please die, please die, please die

I know people working there, in towns where little other opportunities for such jobs exist. I.. really don't fancy the prospect of Ubisoft going bankrupt.
- I know people who work there that used to steal my parking spot with their baby Blue Ford Mustang, on a residential street two blocks from the Ubisoft building. They can all go away.

You love to see it

Sells licenses.

Eat shit and die motherfucker

Yeah but... You do get that you don't own any of your games on Steam, Epic, whatever either?
Just GOG is DRM free.

itch.io as well
Id just like to point out when you read the full article the context is different than the headline as usual. But regardless Ubisoft deserves their demise.
steam can be DRM free as well but it depends on the game to use or not the Steam API for license...
- Any Steam game that doesn't also use extra DRM can be cracked, too.
You're not wrong, but Ubisoft were absolutely tone deaf for saying that.

No one could have predicted this, no one.

They need to get comfortable with losing their company.

When did we get to the point where a Lemmy post got 1000+ upvotes?

As someone who posts a lot, here's my general scale for Lemmy posts by upvotes:
0-99: Niche or a joke that only sort of landed
100-250: Average
250-400: Good post
500-999: GREAT post
1000+ : Hit post!
It's been that way for a while now, but I don't remember when I first noticed it.

And nothing of value will be lost.

I remember "Far Cry Blood Dragon" as the only entry that really stood out. The gameplay was exactly what you described but dialed to 11 (as it should be).
FC 3-6 ... same game, identical mechanics, less over the top fun more boring and repetitive tasks. Somewhere at Ubisoft there is someone who is responsible for this, including all the consequences.
- FC3 was a game changer. It was absolutely wild in its time. It's just a shame that all of its successors went the same road... I stopper playing midgame FarCry V because it was... bad. The scenario was shit. The gameplay was shit. The map was huge but lacked substance.
- Blood dragon was amazing. I probably should give it a go again

Don't you mean.. AAAA company?

Make stupid choices, suffer stupid consequences.

G*mers have already grown used to not owning their games. It's called Steam.

That's not what they meant. The person who said it was "director of subscriptions." They meant gamers need to get used to all games being SaaS because they are of the opinion that that's what's going to happen. SaaS is capable of generating magnitudes more money than any other paradigm, so this is of course the wet dream of the bean counters.
The problem with the statement, of course, is threefold:
People don't like being told things that sound a lot like "just hand over your money and like it, dumbasses"
SaaS is also capable of failing spectacularly
(most important) In no conceivable world would it be possible to have every single game be a subscription service
Shit, the world can't even support half a dozen streaming video subscription services, but they think everybody's going to gladly pay monthly fees for every game they play?
You've never owned your games. It's always been a license to play the games. It's just that now they have the ability to enforce it.
- This is rather pedantic and obfuscates the reality and consumer rights. Don't shill for big corp with that narrative, you could argue you don't "own" a book either if we're just doing silly talk in here.
- It was not like this back in the '90s. Games you purchased were on disk/disks. You installed the game and played the fully completed game that did not require an online connection. You owned that game.
  After the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 things changed. So it has not always been like this.
- I don't think most people's sense of "ownership" of a copy of a game has anything to do with whether or not they've legally bought a license.
  For most of my collection, I own a physical thing, that represents the ability to play that game, using hardware I bought, whether I bought those things today, last year, or even a decade ago. Some of my games are digital, but I still have possession of a copy I bought, and can play it whenever I want. I paid money for the right to play a game when I want, and that's a notion of ownership.
  If someone can take it away from me, that isn't aligned with my notion of ownership, and also isn't worth spending money on imo. I own some GameCube games, and yes, technically that means I have a license, but they still work physically and legally. There's nothing to enforce against me.
  The thing that changed is the ability to revoke that license. And that amounts to a different concept than ownership. One not worth paying for.

I find it fascinating that they're supposedly going bankrupt.

Aren't they... big? Don't they have tons of assets? Shouldn't they be, still, sitting on a pile of cash?

Big assets also means Big liabilities.
1bn of short term and 2bn of long term debt.
This article is from That Park Place, a right-wing website, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. It's coming from "anti-woke" people who salivate over the idea of "go woke, go broke."

Ubisoft is clearly a tone-deaf company. But that doesn’t change that this comment has been frequently cited in some very out-of-context ways.

For those who don’t know, the not-owning games comment was in reply to an investor asking why people were reticent to try out Ubisoft+, their monthly service that lets people play pretty much all their games. He was suggesting many people are not used to the option of mass rental as opposed to ownership. But, many Game Pass subscribers (at least before their price increase) can attest that when the value proposition is good enough, it is an appealing option, wherein you accept impermanent access to get more games. In that sense, he was right.

So far as I can see, the intent of the comment had nothing to do with people who buy “lifetime” copies of their games. There’s separate criticisms to make about poor online implementations leading games like The Crew to be yoinked, and I’m in favor of that regulation. But Ubisoft is hardly alone in the way they’ve mishandled that, and the quote had nothing to do with it. I feel like most people pointing to it have only a vague idea of what corporate greed it represents, as though CEOs just want a way to delete your library and somehow make money from it.

The opinion isn't even incorrect. I have the XBOX game pass and the value is pretty great for pc users.
I usually pick up a game and play a while then drop it when I get bored, so having a lot of options is great.

Man Ubisoft could be so great but they just land so meh. Watchdogs, tom Clancy wildlands, the division, farcry. They all have potential but just don't have that last 15%

That's because they fear giving that 15% out for free when they could have monetized it.
- This is exactly the problem with capitalism, which is intended to be you do a thing i need/like for me i give you money
  But was infiltrated by a bunch of people whose only purpose is to give less and less of what i need for more and more money until i tell them to fuck off, meanwhile they accumulated all the money and roam to greener pastures. it is basically like cut and burn farming, where the crops are all given to very few people and all the rest are to deal with the consequences
And they killed Deus Ex
- Embracer killed Deus Ex.
Anno 1800 is a masterpiece though
- So were Rayman Origins and Legends. But those are in the past.
Splinter Cell just wasting away for years. :(

insha'Allah

Ubisoft Executives need to get comfortable not eating food anymore.

I'm sure they can wipe their tears with hundred dollar bills.
- which they got before running the company into bankruptcy?

And no one will learn anything from this.

I don't think i even play Ubisoft games, they can go down for all i care.

It feels tragic. On the one hand, they made some of my most favourite games especially the Splinter Cell series, and it would be sad to see a once great developer to go. But then on the other, the greedy bastards deserve to go under for ruining some of my most favourite games including the Splinter Cell series.

But seriously though, if Ubisoft do go under, I hope that their IP would go into safe hands, like how Baldur's Gate franchise has been handed over from Bioware to the competent team of Larian (and I do hope Larian does not enshittify unlike the fate of other companies, such as Ubisoft and EA).

Larian isn't making another Baldur's Gate.
If it's any consolation, probably all the game devs that worked on your favourite titles have left Ubisoft long ago.
They were decent to the Anno series, but honestly that's probably just because they didn't see the value in messing with the formula that Anno solidified around the time of the acquisition and it reliably boosts their numbers with strategy gamers who otherwise might not be customers of Ubisoft's at all
I do hope Larian does not enshittify
They will, as the studio is close to be owned by Tencent now.

ubisoft needs to get comfortable with not existing.

It is difficult to know where to start, since there have been a lot of unpopular actions. A lot of these are pretty standard for the triple A studios unfortunately. Think DRM with always online and authentication server issues, toxic workplace, decommissioned games by removing the servers for them and not giving ways for people to self host, rehashing existing properties to milk success, having their own launcher so having double layers of authentication, microtransactions, subscription based model pushing, game variants locking out certain content unless more money is payed etc.
- decommissioned games by removing the servers for them
  The pirated version usually works.
A year ago Ubisoft exec gave an interview where he said that the next leap in gaming industry should be fueled by gaming subscriptions, and that gamers should get comfortable playing by subscription as opposed to buying and owning game licenses.
He then proceeded to give an example on how players got comfortable switching from physical media and full ownership to digital licenses.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games
This caused a massive player backlash on the wave of protests against the migration from ownership to subscriptions (aka "You'll own nothing and be happy"). Ubisoft has got a financial dent as sales and subscriptions dropped, and is now facing a problematic financial future.

Let it die.

kinda unrelated but I'd love it if valve sold physical copies of their games to use with the successor to the steam deck

Maybe they should come as some sturdy USB stick that you just plug in the back and start playing.

That's not my favorite AAA company, it's my favorite AAAA company!

Also, the bit on the right is from a rather shitty looking, "anti woke" site.

My steam and backloggd descriptions have been "fuck ubisoft" for a while.

Ubisoft always reminds me of an old pun my Latin teacher taught us: Semper ubi sub ubi. Always where under where.

Semper ubi sub ubisoft

What kind of bankruptcy?

The kind that turns it into an other of microsofts pet toys.

Really sad because Ubisoft can make games, good ones even. But with out the freedom or time and now talent best they can do is movie licensed games.

Favorite ? No, Not really The real question is, who's going to buy them

As a whole? Hopefully no one. But a fire sale of all their properties and équipement might be interesting.
Also times like this experienced developers often start their own companies and snatch up their co-workers. Probably already happening from the mass layoffs earlier, that.
- As long as I get more proper Prince of persia & SplinterCell games, Me good
- Suckerpunch buying assassin's creed would be great, considering GoT was the best assassin's creed game to date.

A shame; the way they make their open worlds with lots of little things to collect and do are oddly pleasant to play for that. Definitely something only I really enjoy, I realize, of course.

I mean that’s a whole genre. The same could be said for Stardew Valley and that has a huge fan base.
More games should have the “lots of little things to collect and do” mechanic.
- Agreed. One reason I loved Majora's Mask was that the game was dense. Every square inch of the game was used for something and in a lot of different ways. I also appreciated a checklist for my collectables so I could pinpoint what I was missing, but that's rather off topic. I lean way away from open world games now both for excessive time commitment and most of it is just empty space.
Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla scratched an itch that few other open world action RPGs have been able to for me (of course, they were copying Witcher III, which did it far better). Despite everyone saying all their games are the same, I haven't enjoyed any of their other ones like I did those three (oh, except for Watch Dogs 2). If Shadows is the same thing again but in Japan, I'll be satisfied.

This true, because no one is buying their steam games on a USB

extaticly clapping hands

FFS just get Olden Era released and then go die in a corner somewhere, Ubisoft.

they got some good games, but the uplay shenanigans was really a deal breaker for me.

i wish gog will pick some retro up in a few years so i can get back to playing some.

Ubisoft? More like WHObisoft.

I hope someone good gets the Might and Magic license. Ubisoft just used it as a logo.

They will probably will get bought by a chinese company or Microsoft
- 🙁

How much do the Ubisoft executives earn annually? Exactly, f-them. Cliffs Over Dover may have been the last Ubisoft game I purchased.

Hehe, BoobiSoft ...

the recent good game they made they failed to market at all and then split up the developer team - no change in marketing strategy.