Waning interest in Ubisoft. Everything they touch is painfully generic and uninteresting. But sure, blame the consumers for your lack of vision, passion, and technical acumen. See how that pays off, Yves.
The Star Wars Outlaws flop - Guillemot blames waning interest in the franchise
Submitted 11 hours ago by simple@piefed.social to games@lemmy.world
Comments
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
just like the movies, the waning interest in the franchise is only because you keep making shitty games with it.
If you people start making GOOD star wars stuff again, we WILL eat it up.
Xanthobilly@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Andor is an example of excellent Star Wars content that people want to see. They just produced crap.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I actually strongly disagree.
Andor was an example of actually telling a new story. Yes, people were eager to know who Cassian was. But If you had polled the entire Star Wars fanbase, like five of us would have said “Oh, I want a deeply political story with a massive focus on social justice that heavily focuses on a politician and a spymaster’s daughter”. And we would have fully admitted we were on our bullshit.
Which was basically the problem with Outlaws. Everyone has been asking for a Han Solo game since people realized a Star Wars Pacman could be a thing. And you need to go REAL hard to make that live up to people’s expectations.
Which, getting back to Andor: I would go so far as to say everything up until The Prison is REALLY rough. You have moments of brilliance (basically any time Skarsgard is on screen) but it spends too much time on a plot point it had already dropped and Cassian is kind of a mary sue. But we were enthralled because this was something NEW (well, less so if you have ever read a political thriller but… Star Wars!). And once it found its legs… it was painful beauty in all the best ways.
And, to go back to “It is a Han Solo game” or “It is a Jedi knight but not a Jedi Knight” and so forth? It doesn’t take much to realize “I have seen this story a million times” and wander off. Like, I know I basically did that once I heard there were insta-fail stealth sections (although I generally try to not give Ubi money to begin with). Same with Ginger McBoring Face Survivor. It had an interesting hook (I LOVED Dark Times and Dass Jennir) and the gameplay was fine but when it came time to come back for seconds it was just “Eh, I’m good”.
Nah. We need more Star Wars that people don’t KNOW they want to see. Not just the tired crap that an exec would think was gold.
datavoid@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Personally I’m pretty tired of Star wars, every entertainment product doesn’t need to belong to a Disney franchise
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 11 hours ago
Same, all the Star Wars slop Disney has churned out has completely washed any lingering magic out of the fabric of the franchise for me. I don’t even feel the desire to watch supposedly good Star Wars products like Andor these days.
ijedi1234@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Unpopular Opinion: The Yuuzhan Vong Invasion would’ve been better than the Sequel Trilogy.
Seeing that business with Ithor on the big screen would’ve been great.
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Anything with a cohesive narrative would have been better than the sequel trilogy, including Dark Empire. Hell, Abrams did Dark Empire anyway, he just compressed it into a single film along with ESB and ROTJ because he’s never had a single original idea about Star Wars.
Madison420@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
They just need to focus on a planet hopping mmo that runs a real world 9 year cycle through the movie eras. No character selection, full randomized setup where you find out what you’re capable of as go. You may not end up a Jedi but you might end up the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy or you build end up born a clone dying minutes into first combat.
SheeEttin@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Star Wars rogue like? I’d play it
brsrklf@jlai.lu 7 hours ago
Not waning interest in Ubisoft?
Because, ooh boy, did my interest in Ubisoft wane year after year of overproduced cookie cutter crap. And I’m not expecting a change of phase.
Also, Guillemot, you’re talking publicly a lot for someone with (now convicted) sexual harrasser friends you’ve protected all of your career.
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
I don’t know how it has taken people so long to realize something I realized around AssCreed3, that all Ubisoft does is release the same game with a different skin over and over again.
enkonju@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I thought the game looked ok, but why would I pay $70 for a game that can disappear from my library whenever Ubisoft feels like it? They’ve demonstrated that they’re willing to permanently take games away from paying customers, so I’m not willing to spend more than the cost of a rental on one of their games.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
The game looked quite generic to me. As someone who’s not deep into Star Wars, the titular character looked more like 70s mom than space adventure. And the gameplay also looked like they just slapped yet another texture pack onto something I’ve seen a thousand times already.
So, I don’t see why you’d buy this game in particular, unless you do a lot of gaming or a lot of Star Wars. I imagine, they missed out on most sales towards the more casual crowd.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
titular character looked more like 70s mom than space adventure
So more like star wars inlaws than outlaws?
drspod@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Hermit_Lailoken@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
This is perfect.
Liome@pawb.social 10 hours ago
There is waning interest in Star Wars franchise. And Assassin’s Creed franchise. And Far Cry Franchise. Hmmm, there seems to be a pattern here…
pycorax@sh.itjust.works 36 minutes ago
Wasn’t AC Shadows one of their best selling games?
Nelots@piefed.zip 7 hours ago
Meanwhile games like Marvel Rivals are doing great.
Conclusion: People are only interested in live-service games and we're not pumping out our slop fast enough!
Grizzlyboy@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
I tried it in May/June and it was very meh. At the start I had an urge to play it, but after a day or two I had no urge to open it. A lot of it felt repetitive to a point of why bother.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
If they would’ve stuck with the old ‘gritty’ Star Wars game that was supposed to be like GTA style adult oriented Star Wars instead of this stupid shit. It would have been massively successful.
tacosanonymous@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
It just boggles my mind how execs can learn the wrong lesson 100% of the time. It seems impossible.
Regardless, they keep canning games like 1313 that get fans hyped and give us generic trash instead.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 34 minutes ago
Oh, he 100% knows the truth. He just can’t say it since admitting it’s Ubisoft’s fault would lower investor confidence (and therefore affect his personal wealth). This is the standard “blame our failures on market forces outside our control” move that all CEOs of publicly-traded are forced to do.
The stock market was a mistake.
tacosanonymous@mander.xyz 31 minutes ago
Maybe. It does kinda make sense.
These assholes are the same idiots that think they can sell the company yet maintain creative control though.
Hell yeah, comrade. Abolish the stock market.
Zahille7@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Idk, I liked Jedi: Survivor even though that one was EA.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
What? I thought Ubisoft was saying sales were really strong and how Outlaws was such a big success?
I’m going to guess this is the exact same case with Assassins Creed. An AC game set in feudal Japan should have been a Grand Slam. Literally everyone wanted it. But leave it up to Ubisoft to find ways to make money from a printer drop right into the shredder.
It’s more than just bugs and “blandness.” Clearly people aren’t buying what Ubisoft is making, and they keep changing stuff but none of the things they change are the reasons people aren’t buying their games. It is crazy to me that executives continue to learn the wrong lesson from failed games 100% of the time.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
I agree about what’s happening. They’re producing boring games and not learning anything.
But I don’t give a shit. Let them go down in flames. New indie devs an studios are popping up all the time with fresh, unique, and interesting games. I haven’t bought a AAA game in over a decade and I’m not missing a damn thing.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I partially disagree. I don’t want Ubisoft to die. I want them to make good and fun games, like they used to 15 years ago. I want AAA to be like it once was. And I reward when AAA games are like that by buying them.
Gamers want to give our money to developers and publishers. But we want good quality games that at the very least match (but ideally surpass) the quality of experiences we used to get in the past. Recently, Ubisoft has not been providing that, and thus Ubisoft sales have been plummeting. Now, is this a failure of executives? Developers? I say likely both.
Give the developers autonomy for one game, where there is zero executive involvement in the development and see how it goes. If it does well, then just let them make another game with full autonomy. If it goes poorly, make employment cuts on the team or move them around because clearly they didn’t do well even without executive direction. But also keep in mind if another huge competitor takes over, like releasing next to GTA6, pretty much every other games sales will suffer most likely (unless its $100 at launch lol).
Its not a hard decision to make when it comes to business. Any person with a single braincell can see this. The problem is that giving a studio full autonomy is a financial risk. There is great potential for failure when executives feel like they have no control. Businesses are too risk averse now to make such simple decisions. They would rather maintain control of a sinking ship instead of giving crew members autonomy to try to right the ship. Its crazy to me.
minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours ago
This statement in the same week as Yves installs his son as Co-CEO in charge of their biggest franchises. A man who entered the industry as a CEO of a mobile company and then founded a AI/NFT/crypto game company that is being liquidated now.
Pure nepotism. The Guillemont family is the parasite that is killing Ubisoft.
jontree255@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I love Star Wars and usually have a half decent time with Ubi games. You can usually pick them up for 50% off physical like a month after release.
I have never put down a game quicker than Outlaws. It’s Ubisoft open world map icon slop at its worst. The first 4 hours of story are boring and repetitive. Every mission was “sneak into an Imperial base, oh shit something went wrong! Now escape!” Progression and abilities might as well not be there.
Interest in SW isn’t waning. Companies keep making bad SW content.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 7 hours ago
Even if it was good, the formula you mentioned has been done to death. Every game they make is that. Then they say how can we possibly make an RDR2 level game, and I think to that and there was a game where honestly the gameplay was pretty repetitive - but you don’t notice because the story is so good that of course you want to keep going.
But they make these bland corporate characters with boring stories and take absolutely zero risks because what if we offend one person in Ohio - and then it sells like crap. You try to make it for everyone, you made it for no one
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
There is a waning interest, but it wasn’t the singular reason the game flopped. It’s because it was a painfully mediocre game at an extremely inflated price.
Mass-produced corporate sludge like Outlaws is exactly why interest is waning. It sucks the soul out of the franchise and makes people lose interest.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 8 hours ago
Did Guillemot not hear about Andor? The costs of a Disney Plus subscription vs a $70 game aside, that show respected the viewer's time and intelligence in all the ways Outlaws didn't. But I'm not surprised the heads of Ubisoft lack basic retrospection. Regurgitating past successes is all they know how to do, and how could they be wrong? Must be the rest of the world. :/
Treczoks@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Make boring shit, get no love from the community. It’s as easy as that.
heavy@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
I think the turnoff for me was they wanted like $90 or something. No thanks.
seathru@lemmy.sdf.org 11 hours ago
Same here. It actually looks decent. But I’m in no hurry, I’ll wait on it until the ultimate edition is $20 and it’s been patched up.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 7 hours ago
I got it for free and I still didn't finish it. It had some interesting ideas but a lot of the gameplay elements were extremely shallow, the main character was annoying, the story was boring and I couldn't get it running on Linux and I wasn't going to boot into Windows just to play this game.
I probably would've been disappointed had I paid any money for it.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I believe it ws $70 USD at launch.
garretble@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I actually really liked this game.
This was another, though, that launched with a bunch of bugs on pc. And while I didn’t run into a ton on PS5, the game crashed for me here or there. And that sucks.
But I played and beat this game. And I quite enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece or anything.
commander@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
It’s been like 4-5 years since I’ve purchased a Ubisoft game. There’s too many games out there to be spending money on a trash publishers games. Along with how slp on the wrist it seemed with their workplace sexual harassment/bullying/assault, always remember that they pioneered always online DRM for single player games. They’ve been a trash company publicly for almost 20 years. Culturally probably longer
mp3@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
Classic skill issue
QuantumTickle@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
I loved the acolyte and was sad to hear it was cancelled. Jason Mendoza, a badass sith? Sign me up!
Nico_198X@europe.pub 7 hours ago
omg yes! i’m SO pissed it’s not being followed up on.
tighten up the reins if it’s a money issue, but omg it was a great exploration of Force traditions in a cool new era!
uuuggghhhh
11111one11111@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Just started watching Star Trek and so far watched Picard, Strange New Worlds and the one with the black chick as the main character and holy fuck is star trek a waaaay better story and franchise than star wars. Star wars fuckin sucks.
MurrayL@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I’m struggling to get my head around someone who just got into Star Trek starting with Picard.
I mean, fine - if you enjoyed it that’s great! But it’s a show explicitly about exploring the later life of a franchise figurehead. If you didn’t watch any of the earlier series or movies first you’re missing 90%+ of the context for what’s happening, surely?
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Wait until you get to the real Star Trek, the actual good ones. Next Generation, DS9, Voyager, etc. Whatever they’re making now is literally garbage compared to what they used to make.
But to be fair, that is exactly the same case as Star Wars. Used to be pretty good, now Disney has run it into the floor.
JakenVeina@midwest.social 50 minutes ago
A) And yet, not long after, Andor blew people’s expectations out of the water.
B) Then stop making games exclusively based off of third party IPs.