This article sucks. The original quote could be talking about anything, because it’s so vague. It could be about legitimate criticisms of the game, or it could be nonsense like people yelling about Sweet Baby and DEI. There’s no way to know, but the author of the article would clearly like you to ascribe it to something rational that still makes Ubisoft the bad guy.
EDIT: Original tweet is from a MAGA guy, so it’s very easily actually about shitty people.
Especially with the gamergate 2.0 that’s opening a new article-specific case on Wikipedia court for the first time in 8 years…
Can you elaborate? I haven’t heard about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin's_Creed_Shadows#Protagonists
Edit: Man, downvoted by someone without reply for providing sourced information
The criticism of SBI is often hyperbolic but there’s a real issue there. Rich people profiting off the puritanical sensibilities of the American upper middle class at time does have a negative impact on the writing of games. Management not trusting their own internal developers is usually frowned upon. That MAGA idiots are attempting to hijack this issue is not surprising, but honestly they are handed this one way too easily.
SBI is just writing work for hire. When game dev cycles get longer, you don’t need writers for the full length of it, and contract work makes more sense. The “criticism” is little more than conspiracy theory, especially since SBI’s contributions aren’t exactly itemized.
How can you wish a company to fail
Very easily, actually.
I mean, a bit of context may go a long way here.
How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the produce does not please you is beyond me. We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.
I get it, pithy joke, why let it pass, but still.
The context is irrelevant because nobody wants Ubisoft to fail because they don’t make content that caters to them. It’s a strawman argument. Does this Director of Monetization want to uplift his competitors? Absolutely not. He would love if all his competitors failed. Yet he gets on his high horse saying we must uplift his corporate venture to extract as much money as possible because we’re all in this together??
I would be a lot more willing to agree with you if “nobody” hadn’t been driving a massive harassment and hate campagin complaining about “DEI”. I mean, it pops up explicitly right in the comments of the piece linked here. “Nobody” has been busy.
I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.
FWIW, I don’t know this guy, but I don’t believe for a second that he would love it if his competitors failed. People have a wild, distorted idea of how AAA game development works and how people making it (leadership included) look at these things. The guy went online to say he’s frustrated at seeing industry insiders siding with an online hatred campaign and people are all dogpiling because hey, his title sounds like the thing I don’t like, so the assholes being assholes online must be justified this time.
Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences. Corporate dynamics are more than capable of producing dysfunctional results without an evil mastermind pulling the strings.
Also FWIW, I mostly agree with him. If you’re in the games industry get the hell off of LinkedIn comments at all (as Chassard just learned the hard way), but especially don’t be on LinkedIn cheering for colleagues doing badly. That’s just rude and unprofessional. You are allowed to keep your opinions offline and should exercise that right when it comes to commenting on your colleagues’ livelihoods.
Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences.
Sure, most people involved in these projects do. But for any given team, if you told me you knew for a fact that exactly one person in that team wasn’t, and asked me who I thought that person was, I’d guess “the money guy” every single time.
Right.
Except “the money guy” isn’t the monetization designer, which is what it seems this one guy has been his entire career. “The money guy” has some nondescript title, like “head of sales”, or is just the CFO of the company. Or isn’t even part of the company and just sits in a board with a bunch of other people and periodically shouts at the CEO to make more money.
Bet Chassard was super glad when he got promoted from being a game economy designer in a bunch of mobile games and got a fancy “monetization director” title instead. Irony is a bitch, because you KNOW he wouldn’t be getting half the crap he’s getting if he still had a job with “designer” in the name.
For the record, economy designers, monetization designers and, presumably, monetization directors, whatever the difference may be, have as much of a chance at being nice guys who care about their jobs and are attuned to their audiences as anybody else. I don’t know this guy, and I don’t know if he’s any of those things, but what he wrote doesn’t suggest that he’s not. If people dogpiling think they’re delivering karmic justice or disproving his point, they’re almost certainly doing neither.
Well, surely we can agree that it’s an unfortunate job title at least - it’s easy to see why the people are dogpiling on him. If it actually were the money guy saying this, I assume you’d have no objection to the public reaction?
It depends on what the money guy is saying and doing. I have no need to rag on people because of their job title if they’re not messing it up. Valve has had economists working on monetization for them, you don’t see audiences publicly stating that they’re sure that guy is an asshole because they work on monetization.
And no, it’s not an unfortunate job title. This may come as a shock to people, but you DO need money to make videogames. And however you’re going to monetize yoru game, you need someone looking at that. You may not like how they’ve monetized AssCreed or Outlaws or The Crew or whatever, but they also have The Division and XDefiant and Rainbow Six Siege and Brawlhalla. I would be shocked if they didn’t have a monetization design department.
Look, Ubisoft is struggling, particularly on the expensive AAA stuff that is their traditional bread and butter. I would say they are very late to the party at breaking free from their framework mindset where games are largely built on a bit of a template. They need a new approach to coming up with game concepts, if only for PR’s sake. But please, please, stop feeding the anti-woke mob’s bad faith nonsense and stop trying to find indivduals to try to pin structural anger about certain corners of game development. We can -should- be better than that as a community.
Also, good for them for reversing course on the The Crew server stuff and for doing PoP The Lost Crown, that game is awesome and underrated. Would love to see them diversify into more mid-size stuff like that, because they nail it suprisingly often when they do.
I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.
I totally agree that there has been a hate campaign about DEI right-wing complains, but there’s two subjects that came to head at the same time here because it was on the same big title:
Star Wars Outlaw and AC Shadows had the same business model, Star Wars showed that it failed, and Ubisoft got spooked and said they’d have another look at the monetization model for AC. People did get pissed at both games when their business models with passes and editions everywhere were revealed.
It’s just that AC also had at the same time the matter of racist and misogynist hate because of the protagonists. I don’t think this happened on Star Wars, and the fact that it failed too shows that it isn’t the only complain people are having against Ubisoft.
Apparently the monetization guy is stepping on the minority hate campaign subject, he’s the one conflating the two problems here just because his job title. We shouldn’t forget that Ubisoft did pull an infuriating and deplorable stunt with that monetization model.
No, he’s not conflating the thing he’s talking about with the thing he isn’t talking about because of his job title. That’s absurd.
Never mind that I’m increasingly realizing people don’t understand what his job title actually means, you’re arguing that he shouldn’t talk about an unrelated subject because you’re pissed off at something else you understood to be related to an attribute he has, not to a thing he said. That’s a bonkers argument.
I genuinely hate this train of thought, where people pick sides on anything and everything and get tribal about it regardless of how trivial it may be. The fact that it’s about something relatively mundane makes it more depressing, actually. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have issues with monetization or with AAA games or whatever, but it’s not sports or even politics, those issues are unrelated to the specific people working on it and they aren’t an existential struggle. Having those issues doesn’t mean you should join whoever is being hostile or insulting to people related to Ubisoft online.
Oh, and for the record, it totally happened on Star Wars. Even if the game didn’t exist it was in the process of happening on Star Wars as a thing everywhere. But also, it happened on Star Wars Outlaws specifically.
I’d also make a case that Outlaws didn’t do worse than expected because it had battle passes or MTX. Lots of moving parts on that one, but that’s a bigger conversation meant for a place where people aren’t having a hostility catharsis thing. We’re probably not in the collective mood for a nuanced analysis of the commercial performance of franchise creative products here.
Doesn’t matter, cause that’s not what’s happening here lol
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Ubisoft needs to get used to not owning a business anymore.
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Ubisoft MBA: Why is everyone so mean to us, we’re only trying to take your money and provide you sub-par entertainment!
“Monetization Director at Ubistft”
Get fucked, dickbag!
When I create gambling addiction to kids I’m an outstanding human being, but if gamers don’t like my games, they are horrible human beings.
This blowhard
This is what I imagine a monetization director would say if their company got shit on
It’s true.
I’m a non-decent human (but a good dog) and I think Ubisoft games are soulless garbage.
wait I thought you were two good dogs.
Issue is, gamers think the problem with games are minorities.
Maybe they should turn that mirror on themselves. Take a long look at the ‘non decent humans’ within their own ranks:
On the one hand I’m sympathetic to a lot of people in the games industry. It’s long hours, not great pay, low job security, and takes advantage of people who are passionate about games and crushes them beneath the wheels of capitalism.
On the other, anybody who’s job it is to make games worse to make a quick buck, can politely go fuck himself.
My shelf is full of Ubisoft games. I’m playing one right now in fact, Farcry 2.
Thing is, I’ve bought a lot of them based of my love of the series, and the truth is, all the recent one’s have sucked. Farcry 2,3,5, primal, AC black flag, rocksmith 2014, anything splinter cell, ghost recon wildlands, all amazing games.
Farcry 6, AC anything after black flag, breakpoint, the new rocksmith, I hated them all. Not because I want to see a company fail, but because the games just don’t have the mechanics I enjoy.
I’ve spent a lot of money in good faith because ubisoft made some of my favorite titles, but I’m done. The only games I might buy at this point on faith are GTA6, Kingdom come Deliverance 2, and Subnautica 2.
I won’t buy anything ubisoft again until I’ve seen multiple reviews telling me exactly why I’m going to love this one.
I played plenty of Ubisoft games and I believe the only game I beat was Immortal fenyx rising. I like farcry 3 & black flag but I never got to finish playing because live service games took up all my game time.
I also tried AC Odyssey and Valhalla more than once and the longest I managed was under 20hr before calling it quits.
I don’t hate their games I just don’t enjoy playing them and I don’t see myself buying anything Ubisoft because their games are just not my cup of tea as much i want it to be.
Senior Ubisoft employee. Don’t be mean and criticised us. Celebrate our shitty choices and track record. Think of the developers.
We don’t have to respond seriously to that, right? He’s clearly non-decent. Pointing and laughing seems like the appropriate response.
I mean, a significant portion of gamers are shitgibbons, but that doesn’t stop the criticism of Ubisoft and lootboxes from being true. Get fucked, Stevy Chassard
Wow, after all this they’re still in the denial stage of grief, not knowing they continue to harm themselves
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