Ubisoft has some rather serious internal issues to resolve. Similar to many large AAA studios, they have been chasing trends rather than focusing on quality. No one, and I mean no one, outside of a board position would think that NFTs are a worthwhile investment at scale. If the focus is chasing trends, then what are you really doing?

The recent Prince of Persia game is an unfortunate example of this. Metroidvanias are “in”, so much so that the concepts themselves are simple enough to understand, should have a relatively “low” development cost, and are generally easy to digest by the solo gaming masses. But if you don’t understand why the genre is popular and you’re simply mimicking others, then you need to hit that thing out of the damn park! Charging AAA prices for something that is less than other smaller shops have done is insanity. Now, for a smaller shop selling 300k and making $15m would be amazing. For Ubisoft…I saw the credits roll at the end, there were a lot of people involved and this wasn’t a weekend’s effort. Would it have sold more copies at a different price point? That’s a marketing question, but a $70 entry fee when there’s a literal glut of great games out there seems an odd choice – and I won’t open up the subscription convo here.

Anyone recall the Avatar game that launched before the holidays? It was supposed to launch next to the movie, but was delayed. Next film isn’t out til 2025, so that’s a heck of a no-man’s land. No real marketing push, the game is decent (from what I hear, but I’m not paying $70 for it) and most certainly won’t make it’s money back.

For a long time, it was a developers market. It was certainly shareware city in the 90s (and virus city I guess), but the 00’s to 10’s centralized development into mega studios. For every Horizon Zero Dawn, Steam will see 20,000 games come out – admittedly of middling quality. Big studios have some existential questions facing them. It simply is not sustainable to ask 200 people to spend 5 years building something and think that’s a realistic investment. Nor would it seem like industry wants to continue that path. Quite an interesting pivot ahead.