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LOL Like, they just now considered that?! C-Suites needed to take a pay cut instead and keep people hired to make games that would get them out of the financial fuckery the C-Suites got themselves into.
Executive paycuts aren't going to cover the delta of 1000 job cuts per year. Everyone loves to cite that one time Nintendo did that, but the math just usually doesn't work out to the point where this solves layoffs or something. What's going to get them out of financial fuckery and keep their talent retained is if they stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on projects like Hyperscape, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar that people don't want and instead make games that their customers do want.
Didn't both those games review and sell well? They were both polished and pretty fantastic actually.
I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren't free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that's still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn't mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they're generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.
I'm not familiar with hyperscape but the other two are about 70 on metacritic. That's a pretty great score considering launch performance. But then no game in the last five years at least has launched without shitty initial performance. Where are you getting information about sales numbers though? Most publishers are very vague about hard numbers what with the bullshit subscription services but I didn't see anything that indicated they lost money on either title.
Around a 70 isn't typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft's CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws' performance for failing to "meet expectations", not celebrating a success.
Seventy is good bordering on great. What the hell is this trend of everyone thinking seven out of ten is garbage when it's better than most? Seventy is a very good score. I understand that everyone says this and that, everyone says they underperformed but nobody has any hard data, and all the people that have actually played the games have a positive experience. I also don't know why everyone is automatically attributing layoffs to poor sales when literally every game company and media company and just fuckin every company is doing the same. Clearly ubisoft is suffering financially, but it isn't because they make bad games. Literally everything consumer-hostile practice they have other companies do more aggressively. Ubisoft doesn't hold a candle to the mtx fuckery of rockstar and bethesda but nobody trashes their games like the Ubisoft dogpile. Like yeah, the games are derivative and remix mechanics ad nauseum but they're high quality for the most part. You get a shit load of content, the writing is always solid, they're fun to play. I just can't help feeling like most of the people circlejerking Ubisoft hate were probably active in gamergate.
There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.
I don't care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.
Yeah but we weren't talking about the games costing more than they made, we were talking about the general online opinion that Ubisoft makes shitty games when they consistently make quality games. You're on to something with your point about the Ubisoft open world formula having generally lost favor among the masses. It seems like modern gamers that want single player experiences are looking for more focused and innovative narratives over curated playgrounds, though most of the money seems to be in online competitive games. Anyway I'm just pushing back on the assertion that Ubisoft makes bad games because that's nonsense. They make good games.
Your first question was "Didn’t both those games review and sell well?" The answer is no. That's what we were talking about, in this thread about Ubisoft laying off thousands of people.
For what it's worth, I think they made a number of good games, but there's far too much that's far too similar between them. By the time Black Flag came out the first time, I was tired of the checklist open world format, and it's why something like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring will pop off when it addresses what people like me find lacking in the Ubisoft format. These days when I get into an open world game that adheres to the same principles as Ubisoft (like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, for instance), it's often despite the format, not because of it.
I mean, they did review well. I guess not according to your unquestionable criteria but you don't get to say in the seventies is bad. And it's funny that people always mention botw and elden ring like they don't do exactly the same thing but with their own gimmicks (and intentionally bad design) attached.
Ubisoft games put a tower on your map and then reveal other activity icons on your map once you climb it that it expects you to clear. Breath of the Wild asks you to use your eyes to decide what you find interesting from the top of the tower. Elden Ring has different types of rewards tied to certain types of locations, but it expects you to put together what those rules are on your own. There's a huge difference there.
I said reviewing in the 70s tends to not result in a sales bump. In order to average in the 70s, you've got far more negative reviews in the mix than a game that reviews in the mid 80s or low 90s. It doesn't end up so unanimously praised that people can't shut up about how much they love it, which drives sales, generally. I'm not here to talk you out of a game you enjoy. I really enjoyed Screamer and Invincible VS this year, and I'd call them both great games, both rated 77 on OpenCritic. Neither sold phenomenally well. If they're lucky, those projects were scoped accordingly so that they were able to turn a profit and continue employing those developers.
Okay, criticize Ubisoft and other publishers for a lot of shit, but in my view things like Star Wars Outlaws are off limits.
Is the game amazing? No. But it’s an idea using a fresh character in an underserved IP. They put together a lot of things based on unique ideas - and it didn’t hit.
That’s a consequence of a company taking risks, even though we generally want them to take risks. They put out 8 new singleplayer IPs, 7 are junk to be forgotten while one becomes the next Halo franchise.
Taking paycuts to execs can better excuse paycuts at low level, and can slow the bleed if the company is to accept going into the red during a new game’s development.
I’ll agree with you that a lot of projects are getting overfunded. Good games don’t need thousands of people working on them. It can help with tertiary objectives like accessibility, marketing, or other features.
I have no criticisms myself for Star Wars Outlaws, as I didn't play it, but the market didn't want it, and Star Wars is for sure not underserved. I have been inundated with so much Star Wars since Disney bought it that I'm sick of it, and I'm not even seeking it out. The other thing I'm sick of is the Ubisoft Open World Game. I've played a lot of those. They built an efficient machine for churning those out. The market seems to be sick of them, too, at least relative to its former appetite. It's not surprising that people are tired of both Ubisoft's formula and Star Wars. You take a risk with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a moderately budgeted game. You don't take a risk with $200M+; that's lunacy. Even with The Lost Crown, they reminded me via their Ubisoft launcher and additional DRM why I haven't missed purchasing Ubisoft games for so many years.
That's a bit too far in the other direction, innit?
Games (or anything really) don't get immunity from criticism just because they take risks
Even I said in my comment it wasn’t a fantastic game. It likely could have been a lot better, and I don’t fault anyone bored by it. But I take issue with claims it shouldn’t have been made - that greenlighting it alone was the mistake.
“Don’t make bad game, dummy, just make good game” isn’t a tremendous observation.
Sometimes I don’t even think the way people summarize Ubisoft games as “open world” is a good descriptor of their failures. I will see people meanwhile applaud dozens of games that can all qualify as “open world”.
Maybe Ubisoft is deserving of a lot of criticism, but I’d also put them in perspective against an Xbox that is canceling studios and games left and right, and a Sony that just isn’t making anything except 8 more Last of Us remakes. No clue if EA even makes anything anymore.
Yeah outlaws was great, we get a fun non Jedi star wars story that feels part of the universe and stays open for room for more? It was a damn good time and I enjoyed Kay Vess as a character.
1000 x 70000 gross salary or whatever = 70 mil. 70 mil isn't endless amounts of money in the managerial world, actually.
Instead they can waste hundreds of millions on executive salaries.
The CEO makes $1.5M per year in cash, so I very much doubt they're spending hundreds of millions on executive salaries.
Imagine tanking a company through sheer incompetence and then being paid 1.5 million a year anyway.