Ubisoft isn’t a coherent entity. It doesn’t want anything.
I don’t say this to be glib, or to “well acshually” anything. I say it because it’s core to their issues. The place is a snake pit, where anyone with any kind of sway is trying to Game-of-Thrones themselves into higher positions of power and prestige. The people who are supposed to be helping you make better games are actually just focused on getting some kind of win over Jean-Michelle over on that other project, so that when the time comes to jump to a different position, you have the social capital.
This involves focusing on increasingly niche performance KPIs that change at the drop of a hat. I’m talking really boutique vanity metrics that have nothing to do with enjoyment or sales.
On the business end of things, it also means real geniuses saying things like “streamers should have to get licensing agreements before using out games”, and saying so publicly enough that everybody in the company hears that you’ve said it.
And this is without even touching on the sexual assault and harassment allegations, or the abuses of power.
Thr company cannot want anything because its constituent parts are too distracted by and busy with self-interested civil war, rather than working together to establish any kind of coherence.
Ubisoft isn’t a video game publisher. They’re an office politics survival game. I’m very glad I got out of there when I did.
Having worked in similar business environments, I could feel the pain and the deep, deep (oh, so, so very deep) frustration seeping from the post.
Or maybe I was just projecting.
Ubisoft has always struck me as the sort of place that devs would work when they just want a job in the industry, not when they have passion or vision or really care about what they produce beyond just putting in the work on some corpo gig. To hear that it’s also an ultra-cutthroat social deathmatch office environment just has me wondering why anyone would put up with it.
Nah, they pay so poorly that you actually need to be invested in actually wanting to make games to take a job there. But you have to keep in mind that about 40% of people working on a game are not what the consumer world sees as ‘creatives’. Software developers have to be invested in what they’re doing, and often have to be really creative problem solvers, but it’s not a “creative industry”, so their contributions often go overlooked.
From the game design and art side, though, it’s absolutely not an indie publisher. Development is highly collaborative, often involving thousands of contributors across multiple studios that span 2 or 3 continents. There isn’t room for an auteur junior game designer, intermediate programmer, or individual environmental artist. The people who get to exercise creative liberties are the leads, and there’s a handful of them on any game.
This is true basically on any project at any game studio of any appreciable size.
Where Ubisoft really kills the process is in editorial. All of the big publishers have editorial and marketing departments that work closely with each other to try and guide the creative outputs of those project leads towards an outcome that will see some amount of market success. The expectation and goal isn’t even a runaway hit, just for the game to find an audience large enough to pay for the endeavour.
Ubisoft’s editorial department is very influential, which you can see by how every single one of their games looks and feels exactly the fucking same. Everything interesting, unique, charming, or truly creative you do gets chiseled and sanded down into the same shape as everything else once the project actually starts coming together.
It’s a soul crushing process, and if you resist it, you get labelled as “not a team player” and slowly relegated to the back of the room.
I used to know someone who worked on Assassin’s Creed 3 (and probably other games, but idk). They told me about how surreal and disheartening it was to work somewhere so bafflingly huge. The part of the game they worked on was small and insignificant, but they were the kind of person to take pride in small things done well, and as such, they were pleased with what they had made. It was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but this was something that they had made, and they didn’t mind being a small cog.
That is, until the game released and they got to see the rest of the game. They were immensely disappointed to see that clearly many components of the game didn’t have nearly the same amount of care put into them, and furthermore, coordination between different teams/systems was poorly executed. The game wasn’t bad (imo), but it was fairly meh, and it certainly felt undeserving of the effort my friend put into it.
They ended up checking out somewhat from their work after that, because they became disillusioned with the idea of being a small cog in a big machine — part of what allowed them to do such good work was that they immersed themselves in what they and their immediate team were working on, but that approach only works if you can trust that the rest of the project is well managed and resourced.
I fell out of contact with that friend, but I often think about them, and how effectively they captured the dismay they felt to realise that in a big machine like Ubisoft, it’s probably naive to care about your work. One of their colleagues had the thing they made not even feature in the game — it was cut, fairly last minute (and they didn’t even find out until release). This story was striking because it highlights how, even in soulless AAA games, churned out by corporate behemoths, there are people who do genuinely care about their work (until the company grinds that care into dust as they wring their workers dry). It’s quite tragic, actually.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs - I know you know what they are, but for anyone reading who doesn’t) are such a terrible metric for performance. Like, yes, well performing teams generate good KPIs because they’re performing well. The minute a suit tries to actually tie a KPI to performance, people start gaming them and the product suffers.
A little bit of a segue here, but Factorio recently released some tidbits about their performance when they wrapped up development. They said they have 0.24 sales per line of code. Now they’re a very different team making a very different kind of game for a very different kind of market, so I take this as the amusing corelation it is without putting any stock into why that is.
Some project manager from Ubisoft is going to read that and think, “Well we can do better,” and start mandating more sales for less code. Next thing you know, devs are being punished for verbosity (an ironic twist on the classic and often abused KPI of how many lines of code are written) and before you know it you’ve got compound statements, nested ternaries, and inscrutable lambdas out the wazoo that make maintaining the code base impossible.
I wonder if I minified all my source code into a single line before compiling if I could game the system 🤔
Yeah, product managers and executives will never find a performance metric they won’t immediately pollute. They seem totally immune to the idea that once you start trying to directly impact them, they lose all meaning.
When I was interviewing for my first job in the video games industry, I came across an anecdote that spelled the whole thing out to me. Some game team discovered that players who completed their tutorial in under X amount of minutes (let’s say 10, to have a concrete number to play with) where significantly more likely to make an in-game purchase (I worked in mobile gaming). So, the team was instructed to reduce the length of the tutorial so that almost anyone could complete it in 10 minutes or less.
Weirdly enough, this did not work.
Decision makers who “use data” to “drive decisions” seem to totally lack the ability to consider what the data means, who their customers are, or why people behave in the ways that they do. It’s exhausting.
Hm. I wonder who is “unhappy”, exactly. The industry is super reliant on Steam data across the board, I can’t imagine Ubi’s own people would love to lose the ability to track competitors, even if they also buy estimates from other sources.
I can see how they’d be annoyed that their more console-focused games and games that have a chunk of players on non-Steam platforms, like Outlaws look worse when the only info people see is from Steam. I don’t know that the answer is to get Valve to close API access as a matter of policy. I personally would love to get similar info from Sony or Epic, which I bet would make Ubi look at least a bit better right now.
Of course, from Valve’s perspective there is no downside here. Right now I bet they have a rep telling Ubi “hey, you want to look good for investors? Prioritize Steam sales to look better on public data”, which is exactly the kind of mildly abusive crowdsourcing techbro stuff Valve loves to do.
I mean, is “do better if you want a better public image” really that “tech bro” an answer to this problem? It feels like you’re putting “don’t fuck over the customer” into the “bad” category here…
I think you’re misrepresenting the point. Valve’s hypothetical point, which would be “do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image”, but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library… The techbro approach isn’t about “don’t fuck over the customer”, it’s about “use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew”.
That’s a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.
Except their actual point would very likely be “if you want better numbers, do better” at least in response to “we don’t like our numbers, hide them”.
And all of those things aren’t exactly “gig economy”… the first and most obvious is reviews. Something that is just… normal for users to do. Unless you’re saying you want valve to be the one to decide if a game is good or not, and completely remove user feedback?
The greenlight process was less “do our job for us” and more “vote on what you like.” They explicitly held the final decision, but gave users a way to have a voice in the process. This is about as close to “gig economy” as they got.
Controller profiles are literally an easy way for users to share their profiles for games with other users. The alternative is a single profile valve thinks is best being the default, and you having to fine tune things to what you want, even if someone else says “hey man this is the perfect profile for this game.”
You seem to be taking issue with users having a say and the ability to share with each other on a platform, and you’re complaining about core things users like about Steam.
Just because users “do work” on [thing] doesn’t inherently make [thing] “gig work”. And even if it did, if users are directly asking for those features, why is that a problem?
Why is it a problem, indeed? You’re the one taking issue with someone pointing it out, even though it’s a pretty uncontroversial observation.
I mean, there’s more: there’s the NFT-like marketplace of trading cards, which itself is a spinoff of their monetized tradable asset marketplace, some of which is based on user-generated content. There’s the ongoing acquisition and monetization of mods. There’s their original plan for “Steam Machines” being basically a spec sheet and a certification badge they would sell to hardware manufacturers. And this is more insidery, but they are definitely not beyond sending marching orders to indie devs on how to spend their budget to get store placement…
Some of those I think are good ideas, some of those I don’t like at all. But they are definitely crowdsourcing effort in order to run the largest online gaming store on PC with a skeleton crew. That is not really up for debate. I don’t even think Valve would argue that’s not their approach.
And it is, very much, a techbro-y mildly abusive gig economy thing they do. They pretty much invented it. Valve is one of the earliest digital transformation media startups, right there with Amazon itself and very much a trendsetter for the Spotifys and Netflixes. This isn’t an attack, it’s a thing that happened.
or they could - and this is radical but hear me out - develop games people in the pc market actually want to play.
Sure, and then what? Remove their shitty launcher?
Since we’re fantasizing here, why don’t we go big and ask to end the hunger in the world?
Bruh, those arent even in the same ball field. Completely absurd hyperbole
Obviously we will end world hunger before ubisoft gets gud
Genuinely, I would buy some of their games on Steam if they didn’t use their launcher.
Ubisofts being anti consumer? Surprise surprise!
They’re not happy because they think people seeing other people not playing a game is the cause of the problem. They’re wrong - it is the result of the problem - they make bad games, so people don’t want to pay rip off prices for them.
Ubusift needs steam more than steam needs Ubusift. They tried to leave the platform and dictate to their users via their own store and launchers, and then realised people didn’t follow them.
Steam is no paradise - it’s basically a glorified piece of convenient DRM - but it’s popular and they have no reason to bend to the demands of Ubisoft. Plenty of other devs that make good games that are popular have had the concurrent gamers tally work in their favour - helping people see that a game is growing in popularity or unexpectedly popular.
I suspect best case for Ubisoft is their games are somehow excluded but that’ll end up being worst case because then it’ll look like no one is playing their games. And I doubt Steam will want to open the can of worms of publishers dictating which features are or are not allowed on steam.
They’re not happy because they think people seeing other people not playing a game is the cause of the problem. They’re wrong - it is the result of the problem - they make bad games, so people don’t want to pay rip off prices for them.
If you check the number of seeders/leeches in the torrents, there are some games that people don’t even want to play them.
I would love for steam to say okay we will do that … and just delist all their games and stop them from listing any future games also… No more player counts…
Steam charts taught me about the banana game.
The internet is weird.
How about no
Article is paywalled? 😤
They gotta con investors somehow!
All time peak of 2,486 players is pretty low. I wonder what the peak was when factoring in release? I understand this didn’t launch on steam day 1.
The game sold about a million copies in its first month, but that’s across all platforms, and I think that was also including the games that came bundled with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs.
So, still not super great, but likely much higher than the Steam number
Damn so Ubisofrs take-home is like $40 million for that month after platform fees. This game cost $250 - 300 million to make.
I wish they’d shut down already. Pieces of unflushuable turds.
They’re free to get off steam if they want. While they’re at it, they can get off the industry as a whole.
They already tried that with Anno 1800, didn’t work out that well.
