Ubisoft is a huge name in the gaming industry but...if it disappeared tomorrow, would you care? Would you be affected?

I think the DRM argument would affect people's argument but I can't think of any franchises that people would really miss.

Yep, in my book, Ubisoft is the company that made a large bunch of okay AAA games. So far, I can't say any of them were bad (the polish was there), but I can't say any of them would fall in my top 200 either.

Still, last I checked, their Montreal studio employed a lot of people here, so I wish them all the best, but purely as a gamer, I can't say I care that much.

Nice question.

I'm tempted to say no at a first glance. At a second and a third, i might show some regret towards the people who were dedicated. But no, Ubisoft feels more like a corporation in my eyes then any other developer. who misses a large corporation for its worth these days?

I mean about Ubisoft as a name? No. But they have vast swathes of legacy content I do care about. Including several pieces of my childhood vis Broderbund and The Learning Company.

I wouldn't miss them at all. Even without them stuffing 4 layers of DRM into everything, they simply stopped making anything interesting that didn't involve reskinning the same 2-3x "Tower Climbing Simulator" 'safe' IP's over & over and 'Tower Climbing Simulator Urban Edition', (WatchDogs) was already mediocre out of the gate. As for Clancy games, I think Rainbow Six / Rogue Spear were the last ones I bought (back when Tom Clancy was actually alive during the game's development so that stamping 'his' name on them made any sense...) Are they going to let the guy Rest In Peace now (10 years after his death), or keep churning out the "IP spam" until they hit the pinnacle with "Tom Clancy's Advanced Splinter Recon Rainbow Ghost Warfighter Breakpoint Cell Six Blacklist Phantom Frontline Future Wildlands Soldier Extraction Siege (2033), Buy Now!"...

Imo, it would be a good thing for gaming, if Ubisoft went bankrupt. It's about time some of these AAA publishers got their comeuppance - with the DRM and all the re-hashed, uninspired 'minimum viable products' they've been churning out in recent years. They don't have a god-given right to continue to make billions of $ in profit every year.

Tell that to their customers.

How could they fail? All they did was put all their eggs into a couple of baskets. Cancel and leave beloved ips for dead. Invest in shady ponzi schemes. Repetedly push out copy and paste game design. Trimmed their remaining offerings of any creativity or identity. Pushed their own launcher and EGS. Come to steam kicking and screaming while lacking basic features for their already old and mediocre games.

How mean how do go from all these slam dunks to failing. I just don't get it, but who am I? Some random scrub on the internet. Not a multi millionaire CEO. Clearly they must be in good hands because capitalism rewards those who are the hardest workers and best in their field. RIght? Right????

The businessman's job is to make himself rich. It doesn't matter if everything else is sacrificed to that end. Hence businesses being bought up and being worse for wear because the buyer spent too much and doesn't care for actual investment in their new toy.

Sure, but you'd think that given Yves pushed Ubisoft away from several buyouts personally, that he'd pretend to care.

For their modern games which are all uber-woke and also uber-trash, then no.

But for their older games which not all are trash, then yes. It would be a real shame for those games to become lost to history.

Awww, mobile and casual players don't buy enough microtransaction items? :D

Both of my sons keep playing on their Android tablets, but I've made sure they have no ability to buy anything, even though Google tries to trick me into it, allowing them to buy with my credit card etc.

My sons happily play free-to-play games on their tablets without buying anything (because they can't), and if they get bored with something, they just install something else. From time to time I just need to reset their tablets, removing everything they've installed on them (because the mass storage has become full from all the installations), and they start from the scratch.

I have no idea what would be the right fix for Ubisoft, but I am just glad if their current tactics of releasing safe sequels and trying to lure people to online games with microtransactions, are not paying off. Then again, I am unsure if it would help them at all if they made only DRM-free single-player games either, even though I would then most probably be a new customer for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbzRuZmqVM

Haha

Fantastic piece of music. Apt for better times :)