#354: Les incompétents

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Normally, when a big company does some heinous shit — laying off workers, cancelling projects, shutting down teams etc — it is an attempt to placate the stock market. The tens of thousands of layoffs that have blighted the global game industry over the last few years have been, at their core, a sort of hypercapitalist virtue signalling, designed to show investors that company x is serious about its goals, does not shy from tough decisions, and is prepared to aggressively cut costs, destroy livelihoods, and honestly commit just about any miserable sin to keep investors sweet. More often than not, it works, or at least limits the damage. On what fans consider Xbox’s two darkest days — May 7, 2024, when Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin were shuttered, and July 2 of last year, when Everwild and Perfect Dark were cancelled and the latter’s developer The Initiative closed down — Microsoft’s share price went up. The markets, it seems, love few things like a good bloodbath.

Let us pour out yet another one, then, for Ubisoft, the increasingly addled French publisher that this week announced a sweeping restructure that reorganises the firm’s operations into five ‘creative houses’ — the latest of several not-very-magic tricks designed to reverse the company's dismal fortunes. It also sees the firm lay down a global return-to-office mandate, which will involve many more not-quite-layoffs as people unable to relocate are forced to quit, while handily, and indeed handsily, making those who remain more convenient to sexually harass. The publisher has also shuttered its studios in Stockholm and Halifax, and is swinging its layoff axe at Massive, RedLynx and its Abu Dhabi studio. Somehow even more ominously, it has delayed seven games and outright cancelled a further six, including the Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time remake it announced, my god what even is time anymore, in 2020.

If Ubisoft boss-goblin Yves Guillemot thought this would please the markets, he was wrong: the publisher’s share price plummeted by 40% off the back of the announcement. This is a terrible look even for a company whose stock has fallen by over 90% since its peak in 2018, and has already taken a pummelling this year, when Ubi sold a chunk of the rights to its biggest franchises to Tencent and investors revolted. Hit Points is no fan of the stock market, and certainly not of the outsized impact it has had on the health of the game industry in the last few years. But credit where it’s due: it’s pretty much bang on here, eh.

For once, the market’s concerns align with yours and mine. With 13 games either pushed back or completely punted off Ubisoft's release schedule, just when does this supposed videogame publisher intend to actually, y’know, publish some games? The story of Ubisoft since its pre-pandemic glory days has been of a company steadily retrenching, narrowing its focus to its handful of successful core franchises — your Assassin’s Creeds and Far Crys and whatnot — while pretending not to notice that it is taking steadily more time to make progressively worse games that find less and less acclaim from players and success at retail, while making a complete mess of just about everything else in the process.

It horribly mismanaged the sexual-harassment scandal that gutted its creative leadership. It somehow fucked up the process of taking a billion dollars from Tencent. Its comms strategy has been absolutely abysmal — the nadir probably the weirdly Gamergatey response to the Assassin’s Creed Shadows farrago — and it has failed to understand evolving player tastes and industry trends. Its press release about this week’s restructure blathers on about its renewed focus on “open-world adventures and GaaS-native experiences” with “accelerated investments behind player-facing generative AI.” Read the room, gang! Not that optics seem to be much of a concern over there these days: a company prepared to close a studio within days of its staff voting to unionise clearly stopped caring about its reputation a while ago. On this week’s evidence, that is probably for the best. Recovery, of any meaningful sort, seems staggeringly unlikely, and for once the market understands that as well as you and I.

MORE!

• Microsoft may have an even worse reputation in gaming circles than Ubisoft, but its Developer Direct last night was a reminder that its problems are very top-heavy in nature; it’s not the game teams but the divisional leadership, and their AI-obsessed overlords, that are flushing all that goodwill down the lav. Forza Horizon 6 looks great, Fable is highly promising — though the shaky framerate at this stage in development is a bit ominous, particularly when you remember the thing will have to run on Series S — and Double Fine’s Kiln looks an absolute treat. Seems like a thoroughly decent year ahead for the planet’s biggest publisher, if not quite for its hardware division.
• More bad news for Ubisoft: Julian Gerighty, creative director of The Division and Star Wars Outlaws among others, and seemingly one of the last people alive who knows how to ship a triple-A videogame on time, has buggered off to EA to work on Battlefield. Oh and former Assassin’s Creed series EP Marc-Alexis Côté is suing the publisher for €1.3m, claiming constructive dismissal — which, for non-EU readers, means he was made to feel he had no choice but to resign — after being demoted in the ‘creative house’ restructure. The suit claims that, when he asked for a severance package, Ubi put out a statement saying he had “chosen to pursue a new path”. Yikes.
• Steam has relaxed its policy on generative AI, and will now only require developers to disclose the use of the technology on a game’s Steam page if AI-made content actually features in the finished product. In other words, use of AI tools during development, for code or admin reasons or whatever else, are now deemed acceptable. This is fair enough, honestly; my take has evolved a bit over the last few months from ‘a red line in all instances’ to ‘as long as I don’t have to look at it, whatever I guess’. Shame we can’t find efficiencies without killing the planet and funnelling more money to the likes of Sam Altman though, isn’t it. What a world.
• Epic Games has also been tweaking its T&Cs, just for fun. Within a week of launching a new feature letting developers in Fortnite’s UGC ‘islands’ offer microtransactions for in-game items, Epic’s had to forbid creators from selling anything affecting prize-wheel spins, after some rather noisy community feedback about getting kids into gambling. Messy stuff, albeit entirely predictable.
• A question Hit Points has been pondering for a couple of months: is the success of Arc Raiders a good thing for Bungie’s Marathon, since it’s grown the audience for extraction-y stuff, or the final nail in its coffin? I guess we have our answer. Bungie finally slapped a March release date on the game earlier this week, opened pre-orders for it — and it promptly rocketed into the top ten on Steam. Perhaps there’s hope for the thing after all.
• There is much excitement for the last week of March at Hit Points Towers. The newly announced Life Is Strange: Reunion, the Switch 2 edition of Super Mario Bros Wonder, and the new Snail Mail album? Heavens. I’m taking a few days off.

That’s your lot! A final shout-out for the 50% off deal before it goes offline early next week, and a reminder for the subscription-averse that the Tip Jar button exists, and is below. Have a great weekend, whatever it has in store, and I’ll see you all next time.