“Shareholders need to get comfortable not owning their yacht”
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Companies need to get comfortable not owning my money!
I for one appreciate that ubisoft chose the top down view of poop as their logo. it's the perfect symbol for everything they represent and they're incredibly brave for wearing it proudly on their chest.
I thought it was symbolizing them circling the drain, at least when it comes to quality...
Looks like gamers got comfortable with not owning Ubisoft games, just like he wanted.
They could have got away still if they actually make good games
Yup. Millions subscribe to MMOs and Game Pass. Live service games like Genshin Impact and Fate/Grand Order are incredibly popular. There are also games with crazy intrusive DRM like kernel level spyware and always online DRM that are still installed by millions. How can you look at these stats and not think people are fine with paying for temporary games? If the game is good enough, players don't care. Ubisoft's problem is their games aren't good enough.
Making good games is probably not as easy as it seems though.
you seem to be 300x more knowledgeable than the suits that run these companies
Shareholders need to get confortable not owning the value of their share.
Seriously, it in the name: they hold shares not their value.
CEO's need to get comfortable not owning anything anymore
The 5 year price graph is much nicer to view.
Ubisoft will look up and shout “save us!”
And we will whisper

Why'd you post a picture of my parents arguing about me under the word no?
Ali I see is a "pretty butterfly"
Pretty sure it's a hip bone X-ray of someone without a spine
I want to be optimistic that the industry will learn from these failures but they only ever seem to learn the wrong lessons
UbiSoft will fail and get bought up by Microsoft, who will have learned the exact opposite lesson because their stock price went up.
Meanwhile, Larian will keep churning out bangers until someone eventually offers the owners a too-stupid-amount-of-money to turn down, and then it will be folded into the enshitificatio engine, too. Or they'll release a flop, lose access to low-interest loans, and collapse under their own weight. Thus proving good games aren't worth the risk to make.
Of course I'm really not a fan of whatever they do and I would never buy an Ubisoft game for at least a decade now, but I still think that a lot of people should don't know what buying means and that they never, ever bought (and hence owned) a game or movie. Those are not material goods like a car, which you can physically transfer from one person to another. Those are intellectual goods, and ownership here means you own all rights for it, which usually only the publisher has. What you buy online or in a shop is mere a license to watch/play/use/whatever and a medium with the associated data (like a DVD).
Therefore "piracy" had never been theft (or robbery, as it is called so nicely on German news). It is a license violation. Just that doesn't sound as demonizing as the publisher want it to sound.
Pretty sure their recent stock drop has more to do with them releasing a bad game based on a dying IP than on what an exec said months ago.
I wouldn't know it's a bad game since I won't buy it because of what an exec said months ago.
Given how often we see games selling extremely well even after the companies behind them do awful stuff you're in a very small minority.
I may be. I don't care though. Every shit move they make will make more people like me and eventually the message will be heard. When their stock tanks like this, there will be changes.
The announcement of the game left an extremely bad impression too, because the game was $60 or $70 but didn't include all the content, there were three other tiers or "editions" you could buy, the last option being the $8 subscription service that had a shiny blue border around it and included all the content.
I call this "The curse of Might and Magic". This franchise was established by Jon Van Caneghem who founded New World Computing. The company later got into financial trouble and was absorbed by 3DO. Over time (mainly due to the commercial failure of its console, which came after the acquisition of the M&M property), 3DO started slipping into the hole. It dissolved, and in its fire sale, Ubi purchased the rights to Might and Magic. The rest, as they say, is history...
Ubisoft stopped priacy by making games so bland their not worth the effort to download.
I was a huge fan of Ubisoft. I basically stopped playing any of their games after Assassins Creed 3, with the exception of AC: Black Flag, which I got from the high seas, ironically.
"You will own nothing and you will be happy"
Question, is buying games on Steam "owning"?
Depends on the game.
There's a surprisingly large amount of games on steam that are DRM free, meaning once downloaded, running the game doesn't actually require steam.
They should all be like this.
Buy games on GoG when you can
I prefer to buy from Steam because they allow me to play my games easily and invest time and money in Linux which results in more freedom for all gamers. I've been very disappointed with GoG's record on Linux.
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