I hate graphs that don’t start the Y axis at zero.
That said, fuck ubisoft.
And it’s dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.
Jesus fuck no, it’s a valid graph. It shows the relative trend over time and the sudden change. It may show less of a change if it was zero based, but a drastic change that is well off the normal trend is important to visualize. Also like, all exchanges have a toggle to flip to the zero based.
The axes are clearly labeled so I’m not really quite sure what the concern is.
Agreed. Took me a moment to realise they didn’t drop to zero. !dataisugly
Ubisoft will have to get used to people not owning their games.
not really news… This is a 1 years graph… its been going downward for some time
Now do a 5 year graph and realise it’s kinda back to pre pandemic levels.
hm… not quite… but it certainly has seen some ups and downs, that are larger than what happened this morning. This is a graph of “all time”
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
I’d say I’m happy that AAA companies are reaping what they sow from listening to their dumbass stakeholders.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
There’s plenty of publishers putting out interesting games.
They’re just not the traditional AAA / “AAAA” games companies because they’ve grown so big they’re hidebound.
I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.
Valve is pretty well liked. not sure you can really call them a games publisher any more though.
Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.
God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
It didn’t tank this morning. It’s been going downhill for exactly a month.
You are correct, it’s been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed
A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.
Yea. Really sad to see the price theyre paying for making the right decision once is 20% of their stock price…
It’s not much of a delay. It was supposed to come out in 2 months, but delayed another 2 months. Doesn’t seem like much time to get any real work done.
They also cancelled their premier at the Tokyo game show days before schedule. I have to wonder if they’re worried about the backlash that a lot of games are getting lately (Dustborn, Concord, etc) and just trying to push the game a little bit further out to avoid controversy?
