Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
The only possible explanation is that they didn’t use enough AI.
Ubisoft better get comfortable with not owning their own company.
I’ve never heard of this happening before? I’m sure it has, but first time for me.
Oh it has, but the implications become clear when you look at the ones that did. Like evergrand…
I remember when Ubisoft was a logo I liked seeing on my gaming screen.
That logo quit being worthwhile seeing 15 years ago.
Yeah, it was around the time when I was excited for the Assassin’s Creed games.
Now it just looks like a flushing toilet.
I can never unsee that now.
I hear below the equator the logo spins in reverse
Either way, he recommended that everyone “freak the fuck out for the next few days and speculate as much as possible until they announce something,”
Advice after my own heart. Freaking out and speculating are always the best move.
Maybe the dog ate their homework?
The only games in my Steam library that I can’t play are Ubisoft.
Fuk Ubi. Forever. I would be happy if they went under.The only Ubi game I play is Just Dance Now. Sadly I can’t think of a non-Ubi alternative to that gameplay :/
The rabbit hole goes deep on this one.
I found it surreally hard to find new dance game - until I discovered that much of the player community had (I guess?) moved to an open source game engine called StepMania.
I play StepMania happily enough, now. It is nice how many different songs I can now add with community contributed step configurations.
The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.
Just emulate them.
But how do the shareholders feel?
Like they just licked a French doods ashtray.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
To be fair, they are too big.
They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.
My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.
They are also hellbent on infecting everything they touch with Denuvo malware. I haven’t bought anything of theirs in years for that reason alone.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up???
By treating their paying customers like worthless trash/criminals/scum/pirates/etc. Which is what Ubisoft has spent the past 10 years doing.
Saudi Arabia:
e-sports washing
They should use prices of $200, 250, and 300 instead of the $70, 110, and 130 AAA reskinned games. That would work. /s
I like the way you think.
Charge the morons as much as they’re willing to pay!
I don’t think video game companies should have gotten this big and/or complex……
I’m noticing it happens with all companies.
They start out small and can’t afford to pay businesspeople to figure out how to fuck over their customers as hard as possible.
Then, after the company is successful thanks to the hard work of the workers, the business-school people start applying in droves to make sure every company operates like gas stations across the street from each other.
It results in companies making decisions like having higher budgets for advertising than what they spend on actually making a product, because the data says it will make them more money and stupid customers keep reinforcing it.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until our culture stops valuing people based on their wealth. I have no hope for that to happen in my lifetime.
Professional (as in they earn money, not skill level) Xers fuck everything up. (here, X is an arbitrary verb or a brand name)
My anecdotes: Youtube was good before professional youtubers became a thing (systemic problem, people are not the issue but the environment which breeds them), now it’s attention economy and or one topic discussed for 50 minutes (a video explaining the same topic with the same intensity from 10 years ago is 2 minutes long)
Gamers were problematic but harmless, professional gamers caused betting pandemic (sponsored content).
Streamers were funny, professional streamers are sexy/deadly-sells-to-children.
I liked it when people were sharing stuff online because they were bored, and not because they were hungry.
The last line you said is top notch and sums it up well.
A lot of very confused people here who think an earnings delay means ubi havent made much money. Cant say if they have or not, but if they havent thats still not a reason for this kind of delay
It’s not that, it’s the trade halt that points to something major (and bad for them) happening.
They haven’t been doing too well recently. The trade halt is because they’re afraid that everybody would read the halting of the report as admission they’re barely afloat and start dumping shares, killing the company.
Right, If the truth is theyre barely afloat theyre not going to change anything by delaying the report. The time its reporting has passed.
If the truth is theyre barely afloat theyre not going to change anything by delaying the report.
Sure. Long term.
But I can’t help but wonder how much a motivated executive could embezzle using some additional time…
Which is what leads me to believe that they caught an error in the report and needed to re-print it. Halting it now wouldn’t change anything financially.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products
Don’t forget AA, doing pretty good too.
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
Genuine curiosity: does 3D really give more opportunities for asset reuse than 2D does?
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
I suggest you play some classics.
Indie games pale in comparison.
What are some examples of classics and indies you have in mind?
Play Symphony of the Night instead of the indie knockoff.
The indie market is just another tool to reduce people’s standards.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
No, I’m still talking about indies in general.
I gave 1 example because giving more isn’t worth my time.
the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Okay, buddy.
Right, Terraria and Stardew Valley constantly releasing new content for free is lowering standards… 🙄
Wait…you can just do that?
You can do whatever you want there, as long as you are ok with the penalties.
