The business year 22/23 looks atrocious, but those cheering Ubisoft's demise might be in for a surprise.

(1) a game publisher's revenue is not constant, but rather spikes with game releases. Ask CDPR! ;)

(2) for tax reasons, it's intelligent for a company to consolidate losses in a single business year.

(3) Ubisoft's business year 23/24 (the last one) was their best one ever.

(4) Ubi grew massively somewhere around 2019, they've nearly doubled their workforce between '16 and '20. No sign of mass layoffs since two years ago. This is usually an exceptional sign of stability.

(5) The GWGB folks are wrong 99% of the time. It's like they see a bit fat lump of wrong and think "Imma swallow that whole".

(6) The big publishers will survive, it's the mid range that's erased (which fucking sucks). You either go cheap two man development army or 20,000 staff megalomaniac.

https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/activist-ubisoft-investor-open-letter-change

"Activist Ubisoft Investor Calls for "Strategic and Structural Change"

A company that serves as a "significant minority shareholder" in Ubisoft has called for major structural and strategic change at the studio and has expressed "deep dissatisfaction" with Ubisoft's current direction.

In an open letter to Ubisoft's board of directors, which CCs CEO Yves Guillemot and stakeholder Tencent, investment company AJ Investments criticizes Ubisoft's "current performance and strategic direction".

AJ Investments says Ubisoft's recent quarterly results, which saw upcoming releases The Division Resurgence and Rainbow Six Mobile pushed back beyond March next year, have "heightened" its concerns about management's ability to deliver results for shareholders.

The investor sets out four proposals to "increase [the] value of Ubisoft for all stakeholders". They include allowing Ubisoft to go private, selling the company, changing current management and ousting Guillemot as CEO, or starting a "proxy fight" via French minority law.

As for its reasoning, AJ Investors says that Ubisoft is being "mismanaged", and that shareholders are currently "hostages of Guillemot family members and Tencent who take advantages of them".

The company goes on to say that it "cannot understand" Ubisoft's management strategy, and that the studio seems more focused on "pleasing investors" rather than providing an "exceptional experience" for its fans.

AJ Investors claims that many of the studio's IPs, including Rayman, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell, are being underutilized, and that recent releases are underwhelming.

The company does, however, say that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was merely "okay", but that "nobody talks about the game anymore". That's...probably because it's a single-player game everyone's finished, guys. Not every game needs to be headline news every day of the week.

Further on into the letter, AJ Investors proposes several ways by which Ubisoft could improve its performance and its standing with shareholders.

They include taking the company private for a "fair price", as well as laying off staff, a procedure AJ Investors rather callously refers to as "optimiz[ing] staff levels". Other recommendations include refocusing on core IPs and another call for changes in management.

This letter comes after industry analyst Serkan Toto pointed out last week that investors seem "very disappointed" about the sales of Star Wars Outlaws, with shares dipping 10% in just two days. Toto followed this up with another post today noting that stocks had fallen another 9% in Paris.

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Watching the original Star Wars movie/s now is monstrously unfair. When the original movie was released (1977) it was the most advanced special effects EVA. This was before computers could generate graphics; it was the same year the Apple II was released. (All those effects were made with hands-on-film; indeed it was common to paint the backgrounds. With real paint and brushes.)

The story, although enjoying much approbation and retrospective revaluation, was (at best) the simplest plot (Campbell-Jung Monomyth) but the zeerust was a phenomenon to behold. (It was subsequently taken up by many filmmakers, like Ridley Scott for Alien and Bladerunner, to name two memorable ones.)

It is no surprise to me that younger people, not having the lived experience of an absence of digital effects, can see nothing worth remarking on it, but Star Wars was more impactful than The Matrix. (Check out an interview with Ron Howard when he explains that, after watching it for the first time he and his friends, upon leaving the cinema, joined the back of the queue to wait to watch it again.)

As for Shawshank Redemption, it was a box-office failure. It's success was due to the video market (gosh, was it VHS back then? I forget) where thousands of people rented it, without knowing it was based on a Steven King book, and were swept up in the narrative.

Circumlocution: If you think all people, even in a singular place such as gaol, are all of one type then you haven't experienced many people. Some generalities can and are made, of course, but the worst you might say is that they are all suffering various shades of anti-social disorders. (Not everyone incarcerated is a murderer.) Check out Frankie & Johnny, for a neat story about an ex-con (Al Pacino) and Michelle Pfeiffer, working in a NY diner. It's a great film.

It was only a matter of time before investors started asking questions. The progress at which Ubi stock is tanking is simply unsustainable, with another massive dip just yesterday when the market opened. It you had bought stock back on day 1, you'd now be in the negative even if things like inflation did not exist. Outlaws did nothing to slow it down (deservedly so).

Funny how going "this doesn't seem to be working chief" gets them labeled as"activists".

But it isn't. I haven't watched the at the time of release, but the thing is – the original trilogy is better than what they fiddled around with later. Star Wars suffers heavily from sequelitis. The material was enough for the first movies, but is has been stretched too thin. A prequel trilogy where everyone knows what will happen and therefore everything is on rails does not work in that genre. And the revisions – e.g. Han shooting first or not – didn't help the matter.

Not being science fiction is a problem – you can get almost arbitrary amounts of content in that genre. A space opera cannot rely on science, exploration, etc. to fill the void. It is damned to end up like those soap operas with enormous numbers of episodes.

Star Wars is like Police Academy 4–48 or whatever number of sequels they ended up making. I don't know and don't care enough to look it up.

Yep, bit of unfortunate choice of wording there.
Part of the definition still applies though:
"...one who campaigns for change."

Which this Slovakian hedge fund company is certainly doing.

Honestly agreed. Star Wars peaked at episode 5. Episode 6 was passable, but Ewoks specifically mark the start of the downhill ride of Star Wars to me. And I'm saying that as someone who only watched the movies long after they released.

Yeah, Ewoks are OK. As a kid, I liked them. Wookies would have made more sense, though. Anyways, The Return of the Jedi is still a great, entertaining movie

Don't let the others harp on you too badly for this, as i'm probably in the same boat.

I like the original movies, i enjoy the prequels, hell i even enjoy the KOTOR games. However, i don't care for the games of battlefront or X-wing fighter or anything that doesn't have the Jedi/force. Why? I just don't find war in another theme/skin to be any more appealing just because they are wearing white PVC armor shooting laser guns. The Jedi and Force have certain appeals, of what it can do and what it could mean, and how you could use it.

For a lot of people, at certain points in their life they find something they can either latch onto or something that 'clicks' an it just becomes something they love unconditionally. For me it was probably Transformers, Dinosaurs and Gargoyles (i was an 80's/90's kid). Nevermind i didn't have much in the way of Dinosaurs or Transformers to play with, and it just lingers in the back of my consciousness begging to be pulled out of the toy box and played with.


Now the current game is being trashed, and with fugly characters and bugs galore who wouldn't? BUT even assuming it was all working and beautiful, the game itself is just Assassin's Creed but with a Starwars skin, and people are kinda tired of the Assassin's creed formula. I enjoy stealth gameplay, and doing some missions on the ground along with trading like Rebel Galaxy combo sounds like it could be fun, assuming you don't have to acquire all your cargo that way, preferably heavy discount, free, or specific storyline arcs. But that's neither here nor there.

But they wouldn't, really. Ewoks actually make plenty of sense. It would make no sense for Palpatine to overlook the Wookies, these huge, powerful, space-faring, tech-savvy guys who are both dangerous and obviously going to take sides. But it makes plenty of sense for the Empire in all it's power and arrogance to ignore the small, primitive unremarkable species with no stake in, or even kowledge of galactic affairs. It makes both logical and thematic sense for Ewoks to be what dooms the Empire.

I just find it done terribly in the movie. The Imperials devolve into stumbling tards where slingshots, arrows, sticks and rocks are instagibbing fully armored soldiers. Walkers with steel plating getting squished by wooden log medieval traps like they're made of paper. Stormtroopers are famous for keeling over in large numbers whenever they make an appearance, but getting one shot with a blaster can be believable. Not this.

I'm all for defeating the big bad, but it could have been done by something else other that product marketing teddy bears. Give them energy weapons, have the Ewoks lure the imperials into swamps or mammoth traps, have them ride some giant beasts, use some strange gasses from the flora native to Endor etc. Anything except physical force basically. I can do suspension of disbelief, but everyone has their limits.

I certainly missed the original SW craze, and I saw the movie the first time somewhere in the 80s as a kid when it came from the TV.

It was an ok movie and yes I did find the final space combat scene at Deathstar quite exciting, and didn't have issue with its special effects (hey, it was the 80s and I felt the stop-motion special effects of Robocop were pretty good too even if jerky; if anything, Star Wars had considerably better special effects than Robocop even though the latter came like 10 years later).

By watching it, I understood why it was a big thing, but for me it just wasn't enough to become a hardcore SW fan. It may be a personality issue as well, I've noticed I'm not normally the kind of person who gets excited with a crowd watching "our team" win in sports, or going to concerts and thinking it was the best day in my life (I'll be the one checking my watch "I wonder how long this will still take?") etc. If I was in 1939 Germany and Hitler was giving a speech, I would have been playing some game on my mobile phone while the rest of the crowd is cheering for the speech. Maybe it is a faint sign of autism, I dunno, don't care really, as long as I am happy I am fine.

Oh and for some reason I found Luke a bit annoying, a bit too whiny to my liking I guess. He even looked unappealing to me, like some shallow surfer d00d.

I'd actually say the most excited I've been about the Star Wars universe was when I was playing X-Wing and Tie Fighter games in the 90s. Especially Tie Fighter as i found its approach to the lore quite interesting, making it seem that maybe the Empire wasn't all that bad, they had their motives which they felt were justified, keeping order and peace and whatnot while the rebels were more like Antifa today, troublemakers.
True. For me it was e.g. ninjas, Terminator, Robocop and Aliens.

Younger people who don't appreciate Darth Vader as a bad guy have no business calling themselves 'Star Wars fans'. They clearly don't understand the franchise.

Why are they even interested in it then? Why don't they go and watch/hijack something else? (It's not as if there aren't plenty of other options)

Oh yeah, because their generation seemingly isn't capable of creating original and compelling media. I forgot ... (so they have to hijack/'reimagine' ours) :-P

The funny thing is, I actually think it was done well enough to the point where (for these movies) I was okay with it. When I was rewatching the original trilogy for the first time after a looong break (I've seen them so many times as a kid even I had enough) I was actually kind of dreading that battle, thinking "this is where my childhood nostalgia dies"... but in the end I still thought it was just fine. We've already seen imperial walkers defeated with cable in the previous movie, so I didn't mind the primitve traps, actually kind of fits the bill. It looked to me like enough effort and planning went into it, and it's not like it was a one-sided battle, so it all felt earned for me, and in a movie like SW it's more important for something to feel right than to make perfect sense in terms of military tactics or physics.

Mind you, I'm not trying to convince you you're wrong. I'm just on about why it never bothered me and still doesn't.

No offence, but I always found this kind of thinking in SW audience silly at best, disturbing at worst. "Sure, it is a totalitarian dictatorship that enslaved the entire galaxy, abolished democracy and just committed genocide on a planetary scale (and planned to make it a standard tool of enforcing it's rule) but they're not all bad." I just... I can't even.