Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
Don’t forget AA, doing pretty good too.
Yup, AA and indie make up >90% of my gaming dollars and hours.
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
I see the points that you made to another commenter but SNES and Sega Genesis were 16-bit consoles. They were a dramatic improvement (and many games on them were the pinnacle as far as I’m concerned) over the 8-bit NES and Sega Master System. I’ll take well-designed 16-bit games over pretty much anything else.
I suggest you play some classics.
Indie games pale in comparison.
Saudi Arabia:
e-sports washing
Its not sports anymore. Its just media washing.
Comedy, games, whatever they can get their blood soaked hands on.
I remember when Ubisoft was a logo I liked seeing on my gaming screen.
Now it just looks like a flushing toilet.
I can never unsee that now.
I hear below the equator the logo spins in reverse
(Side note: this isn’t actually true - toilets swirl in a particular direction based on the design of the bowl and water jets, not whether or not they’re below the equator)
That logo quit being worthwhile seeing 15 years ago.
Yeah… I didn’t say when that was. 👴
Yeah, it was around the time when I was excited for the Assassin’s Creed games.
Far Cry 1 times.
The only possible explanation is that they didn’t use enough AI.
To make the games, or to cook their books?
Yes.
You’re correct! They should have fired at least 20% more of their staff and used AI to build everything, and not test any of it. It’s the only way.
Ubisoft better get comfortable with not owning their own company.
You cheer this on, but what are the odds that saudi arabia buys them up?
How many things do you want owned by the worst country bar none for human rights? (yes I am aware the US is racing to catch up, but is nowhere near as bad per capita).
I’m not sure how much I should care. I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game in decades anyway. They don’t make anything I need, so it’s not like it’s an inconvenience to boycott.
You don’t think the saudis having a great deal of control over the content your fellow countryman engages with has any effects you should care about?
You underestimate my level of cynicism at this point. You also underestimate my disrespect for the average gamer. If they’re not lapping up one form of propaganda, they’re lapping up another.
Absolutely the case, but we can’t throw nuance to the wind just because bad things will continue to happen. SA propaganda is definitely note worthily worse than many other forms.
Whats more, I feel that gaming generally is more focused on trying to use marketting dark patterns to encourage spending than pushing any messages typically. This makes them, in my mind, even more vulnerable as they won’t even be expecting it as their viewpoints change over time.
What’s he going to do to stop it? It’s not his fault
Where did you read me saying it was their fault, or that I expected them to stop it?
I said neither thing.
All I am saying is it’s something to pay attention to, and its not good when media sources are bought by the saudis.
Why keep this in mind? In case there is ever somewhere that does make this relevant. Like maybe it should be in the eyes of the public more such that its a political talking point so regulating agencies are less happy with letting companies be sold to SA.
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat because they’re not as worried as you are about the hypothetical odds of the buyer being Saudi Arabia, and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
It’s just a weird thing to press someone on
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat
I’m just going to stop you right there. You’re reading in a whole lot of malice into a pretty benign comment pointing out why someone might care in spite of not caring about their games.
and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
I don’t believe any specific country was named in the context of that point. The USA was only brought up to preempt comments derailing the point of my comment by bringing it up.
Let’s give Ubisoft to North Korea then
That one Steam user will be hyped as fuck.
Finally, a games company that praises the glory of the regime.
Ubisoft is a textbook example of what happens when you pin your companies revenue on a small handful of IPs and milk them to the absolute fucking limit. I like assassins creed, but I’ve played enough of them for the rest of my life. Make something new my dudes.
They have so many great IPs that are just gathering dust or in development hell, yet they keep milking the same few games every year.
I don’t think video game companies should have gotten this big and/or complex……
Professional (as in they earn money, not skill level) Xers fuck everything up. (here, X is an arbitrary verb or a brand name)
My anecdotes: Youtube was good before professional youtubers became a thing (systemic problem, people are not the issue but the environment which breeds them), now it’s attention economy and or one topic discussed for 50 minutes (a video explaining the same topic with the same intensity from 10 years ago is 2 minutes long)
Gamers were problematic but harmless, professional gamers caused betting pandemic (sponsored content).
Streamers were funny, professional streamers are sexy/deadly-sells-to-children.
I liked it when people were sharing stuff online because they were bored, and not because they were hungry.
The last line you said is top notch and sums it up well.
I’m noticing it happens with all companies.
They start out small and can’t afford to pay businesspeople to figure out how to fuck over their customers as hard as possible.
Then, after the company is successful thanks to the hard work of the workers, the business-school people start applying in droves to make sure every company operates like gas stations across the street from each other.
It results in companies making decisions like having higher budgets for advertising than what they spend on actually making a product, because the data says it will make them more money and stupid customers keep reinforcing it.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until our culture stops valuing people based on their wealth. I have no hope for that to happen in my lifetime.
This exactly what happens when you rely on rhetoric, instead of you know, making games that people like.
What did they screw up recently?
This is good news for everyone who is not an ubisoft shareholder
how so?
Why? What relevance is Ubisofts poor record keeping to non-shareholders?
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
They are also hellbent on infecting everything they touch with Denuvo malware. I haven’t bought anything of theirs in years for that reason alone.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
Oh wow you anger much less easily.
I started boycotting when they started forcing uPlay even in Steam games.
To be fair, they are too big.
They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.
My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up???
By treating their paying customers like worthless trash/criminals/scum/pirates/etc. Which is what Ubisoft has spent the past 10 years doing.
“We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…animated show!”
Or “We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…addon for an always online single player game that no one likes…"
Fans: “We get to play as Sam Fisher again? Awesome!”
UBI:
Nah fuck that if they make a new splinter cell game it would end up being open world with a cosmetic store
Not only that but E33 showed people what ex-ubisoft devs could do when you actually let them be creative.
Uh-oh! Wait, you already said that.
Ruh-roh!
The Ubisoft trading community are coping to justify holding on to their tanking investments. It’s a gambler doubling down on losing.
Christ, how the mighty Ubisoft has fallen. They will go the way of EA and become a spyware company for the decadent Arab royals. I’m just crying that Ubisoft made some of my favourite games growing up and look what they have done to my boy-- a rotting zombie 🥲
It’s disappointing. I’ve been going through some of their older catalog recently and it just has a lot more passion behind it i feel.
AC Shadows felt like when i write an essay, where i get really motivated at the start, completely drop off and try to stuff the middle with as much as possible to reach the page count, then get motivated again at the end just to finish the conclusion. They always had their bugs, but lately it’s felt soulless.
In the Ubisoft trading community that I mentioned, some folks blamed UbiSoft’s downfall for “being woke”. As if Ubisoft’s blind chasing of money, abandoning most of their IP, selling broke products, and last but not least an executive telling consumers to get used to not owning games are not bigger factors.
This is what happens when you abandon Splinter Cell.
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
Man, they have had some really good IP over the years and somehow managed to ruin all of it.
That’s what you get when you don’t want to pay people for their work and try to keep teams together. The newbies aren’t going to care about the rich history of the games they’re banging out code for at 3 AM on a Saturday.
