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.
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.
The usual cycle. They get good, get big, get shit, get insolvent or bought up until there’s no bigger fish anymore (in which case you have to live with shit until they get insolvent after a long time).
Yikes bikes. Obviously the writing has been on the wall for a minute. But I didn’t realize it would happen in one minute.
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?
Most likely they fucked up their report and they’re using the rules of the exchange to suspend trading until they fix the mistake. But Ubisoft has been running on fumes for some time now, shitting out the same 3 or 4 games over and over again so I doubt their financials are that great.
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.
get fucked.
This is what happens when you abandon Splinter Cell.
It’s what happens when you operate your company with an accountant mentality. The focus is 100% on money, and 0% on creativity.
They always realize too late that customers won’t just give you money, you have to offer them something decent in exchange, but accountants don’t know how to do that, which is why you NEVER let accountant craft the business strategy for a company.
If they try to offer suggestions, you scream at them to get back to their hole and count the money like they’re supposed to, and when their opinion is needed, it will be solicited, which will be NEVER.
The irony is that they actually have some pretty unique and creative ideas spread out in most of their open-world games despite the jokes about how they’re all the same. If they cared about making good shit and not just money, they could have a game that rivals or surpasses Grand Theft Auto.
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
The only possible explanation is that they didn’t use enough AI.
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.
To make the games, or to cook their books?
Yes.
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).
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.
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.
Every now and then someone calls for a boycott, and I say that I’ve already been boycotting them all my life, and didn’t even know it.
Alternatively, sometimes there are calls to boycott something, and it turns out I’ve been boycotting them for years over some old atrocity. For instance, United Airlines gets boycotted regularly, but I’ve been boycotting them for decades, for lots of other shitty behavior (destroying guitars, beating up doctors who refuse to give up their paid-for seat, etc.), as well as having the highest fares in the business.
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.
I remember when Ubisoft was a logo I liked seeing on my gaming screen.
Far Cry 1 times.
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)
I saw what I imagine is a tourist attraction demonstrating that it’s “true” but you can definitely see them rotate their arm in opposite directions. They unplug a sink that that carry across 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.
For being too fat for their own good, tear the damn thing down.
Saudi Arabia:
e-sports washing
Its not sports anymore. Its just media washing.
Comedy, games, whatever they can get their blood soaked hands on.
The only games in my Steam library that I can’t play are Ubisoft.
Fuk Ubi. Forever. I would be happy if they went under.The Nestle of video games. Because just like the food empire it never got flagged by the EU for overreach.
Nintendo would like a word.
The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.
Just emulate them.
The only Ubi game I play is Just Dance Now. Sadly I can’t think of a non-Ubi alternative to that gameplay :/
The rabbit hole goes deep on this one.
I found it surreally hard to find new dance game - until I discovered that much of the player community had (I guess?) moved to an open source game engine called StepMania.
I play StepMania happily enough, now. It is nice how many different songs I can now add with community contributed step configurations.
Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.
So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c
Oh awesome! It’s like Frets on Fire but for DDR
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.
Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products
Isn’t this how the gaming boom and bust cycle always worked?
Indie(ish) games boom, AAA studios buy them and make them bust.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
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.
Genuine curiosity: does 3D really give more opportunities for asset reuse than 2D does?
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
I can understand this too.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
Got it, thanks!
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
When the bubble pops it will be destruction on a scale we’ve never seen before. The size of this mistake is absolutely staggering.
The later it pops the worse it will be.
I suggest you play some classics.
Indie games pale in comparison.
What are some examples of classics and indies you have in mind?
Play Symphony of the Night instead of the indie knockoff.
The indie market is just another tool to reduce people’s standards.
Right, Terraria and Stardew Valley constantly releasing new content for free is lowering standards… 🙄
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
No, I’m still talking about indies in general.
I gave 1 example because giving more isn’t worth my time.
the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Okay, buddy.
Both are great. Here are some great indies:
- Factorio
- Hollow Knight
- Subnautica
- Celeste
- Hades
- Tunic
That covers a wide range of genres, none are particularly derivative, and those are just off the top of my head.
I play great classics all the time, but I also play great new indies.
Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.
Either way, he recommended that everyone “freak the fuck out for the next few days and speculate as much as possible until they announce something,”
Advice after my own heart. Freaking out and speculating are always the best move.
