• Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    741·
    3 个月前

    I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.

    It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.

        • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 个月前

          I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.

    • Wolfram@lemmy.worldEnglish
      37·
      3 个月前

      I’d say I’m happy that AAA companies are reaping what they sow from listening to their dumbass stakeholders.

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        3 个月前

        The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.

        It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.

        • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          3 个月前

          There’s plenty of publishers putting out interesting games.

          They’re just not the traditional AAA / “AAAA” games companies because they’ve grown so big they’re hidebound.

          • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            3 个月前

            I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.

            But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.

            • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              3 个月前

              I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.

              The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.

        • Wolfram@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 个月前

          I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.

      • arefx@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 个月前

        I’m not saying this to be a dick, I would just like to add, no regrets on building my PC.

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      3 个月前

      I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.

      I’m laughing a lot, is that a positive? These are all self-inflicted wounds because they mistook “shareholders” for the customers.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      3 个月前

      There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

      The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

      That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        3 个月前

        Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.

        • zzx@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10·
          3 个月前

          God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League

          • WhosMansIsThis@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            7·
            3 个月前

            Agreed. As someone who doesn’t really like shooters and never got into League or DOTA, I had mixed feelings about playing a ‘hero shooter/moba’. I’m actually blown away at how good it is. They did phenomenal job. 10/10.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          3 个月前

          It’s a invite only alpha and as I write this it’s #7 on the steam rankings of current players, 6 if you wanna exclude Banana which is it’s own hilarious thing

          Dota 2 is #2 and has 565k right now

    • greenskye@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      3 个月前

      90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.

      Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.

    • Sabata@ani.socialEnglish
      47·
      3 个月前

      I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.

    • delitomatoes@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      3 个月前

      Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don’t pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king

  • yamanii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 个月前

    It’s really a sad seeing Ubisoft going from a trendsetter up until Far Cry 3, to being a failed trend chaser.

    • Destide@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      422·
      3 个月前

      You are correct, it’s been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed

      • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        331·
        3 个月前

        A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.

        • tomi000@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          3 个月前

          Yea. Really sad to see the price theyre paying for making the right decision once is 20% of their stock price…

            • ours@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6·
              3 个月前

              Such a tragedy. And that was a game that just needed a tech upgrade, expand a bit, more of the same, nothing crazy.

              • tibi@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                3 个月前

                To be fair, those tech upgrades aren’t exactly trivial to do, and most programmers aren’t skilled enough to do it.

                These kinds of projects need very careful management to avoid running overtime and over budget.

                • ours@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  3 个月前

                  I don’t know, the first one was cobbled up together from early access by programmers at a marketing firm and while janky (part of the charm some would say), it was quite an achievement.

                  The approach which should have delivered better results was wrecked with takeovers and company drama then dumped to the public in a bad state.

              • M0oP0o@mander.xyzEnglish
                2·
                3 个月前

                They tryed to put a story in ksp2. That’s how bad they misunderstood the franchise.

                Oh and you can still join the discord if you want to talk to people who still believe in ksp2 (its fascinating).

        • SirDerpy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 个月前

          Quartery earnings report due 10/25. There’s no reason to sit capital here if there’s no catalyst for change.

        • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
          11·
          3 个月前

          It’s not much of a delay. It was supposed to come out in 2 months, but delayed another 2 months. Doesn’t seem like much time to get any real work done.

          They also cancelled their premier at the Tokyo game show days before schedule. I have to wonder if they’re worried about the backlash that a lot of games are getting lately (Dustborn, Concord, etc) and just trying to push the game a little bit further out to avoid controversy?

  • Obinice@lemmy.worldEnglish
    403·
    3 个月前

    You can make any graph look bad if you control the axis bounds weirdly like this.

    Not that I have good things to say about ubisoft, but at a glance one would assume their stock value plummeted to zero, which is not the case.

    • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zipEnglish
      52·
      3 个月前

      This was also my initial take but look at these graphs with the Y axis starting from 0 Stock lost 67% value in the last year alone, and lost 85% in the past 5 years. Looks pretty dire to me. I would say this is undervalued but I have no confidence in the ubi leadership to turn it around.

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        12·
        3 个月前

        Might be that the CEO and upper management are dumb fucks running the company to the ground.

        No more innovation, just microtransactions in shitty games, and the same old rehashed concepts.

        • omarfw@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 个月前

          I saw an anecdote from someone who used to work there and they said their infrastructure and resources were outdated as hell. Basically zero support or investment from leadership. Those corpos are intentionally just trying to milk them and the customers dry before total collapse or a buyout.

    • MolochAlter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      211·
      3 个月前

      You realise this isn’t make believe at all, right? Stocks are ownership.

      If a stock dips low enough it’s possible to do what microsoft did with Activision Blizzard and buy out another company wholesale, for instance.

      Speculation on the stock market isn’t the reason the market exists, it’s a side effect of its pricing mechanisms, the actual point of it is to gather money for companies and gather stake for buyers.

      If a major company like Ubisoft keeps tanking, odds are you can look forward to another major buyout and merger which will make the already horribly oligopolistic game industry even smaller, which is not good for anyone involved.

        • MolochAlter@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          3 个月前

          Sure, but the stock is tanking now, and the regulations are not on the books.

          Like, I agree there needs to be an overhaul of a bunch of regulations regarding monopolies and such, but this doesn’t help analysing the current situation where they’re not in place.

      • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
        21·
        3 个月前

        I think gaming in general have it hard now. There are millions of games and only a handful are best sellers.

        I feel the same about movies. So many, but just a few are worth watching because they are original.

        • MolochAlter@lemmy.worldEnglish
          82·
          3 个月前

          That’s just generally all of media right now. We are at perhaps the highest level of accessibility for media creation we’ve ever been, but that means that any schmuck with a pair of thumbs and time to waste can make something.

          High accessibility means abysmal signal/noise ratio, turns out.

          • TexasDrunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
            51·
            3 个月前

            It does. There are some upsides, though. One bonus is that, at least in some small ways, some of these shitbag companies that have acted terribly in the past are letting up because we have options. We don’t have to rely on a couple of big studios for every game we play. So EA has backed off of their terrible launcher.

            I also think it’s kind of cool that any schmuck can make their dream come true. I’ve definitely put out a bunch of music that I don’t market, just because I always wanted to do it. Anyone with an idea and a laptop can code up a game. The ridiculous amount of shovelware aside, I think that’s pretty cool.

            I just wish there was a better way to sift through the dreck to find the good stuff.

            • MolochAlter@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              3 个月前

              Yeah I mean, it’s got upsides and downsides, like everything. Unparalleled access means anyone can make something, which means a lot of things that have niche appeal can find their audience, etc.

              It also means a lot of things without any appeal will be out there.

              It’s not good or bad in itself but it can be impractical on the consumer side of the equation, and it makes even the remarkable stuff very likely to just disappear in the shuffle.

      • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
        6·
        3 个月前

        Investors seemed to be pushing for the company to go private, possibly for that reason.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      84·
      3 个月前

      The problem isn’t the people voluntarily participating in the world’s biggest grift losing money.

      The problem is the real world consequences for other people.

  • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25528·
    3 个月前

    I hate graphs that don’t start the Y axis at zero.

    That said, fuck ubisoft.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        3·
        3 个月前

        A stock would never drop to zero because the company would be liquidated before that happened. If the stock actually dropped to zero they would have no money they need to call bankruptcy before that point.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      3 个月前

      There is no point of starting the chart to 0 since it doesn’t give any information other than the share price, which is already communicated by the Y axis anyways.

    • huginn@feddit.itEnglish
      1246·
      3 个月前

      That’s pretty normal for financial charts like this though.

      • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
        49104·
        3 个月前

        And it’s dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.

        • ArtVandelay@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          3 个月前

          If you are trying to show year-over-year profit and you have $100 million give or take a few thousand, then starting your y-axis at zero is going to be a pretty worthless graph

        • cheddar@programming.devEnglish
          142·
          3 个月前

          And that’s why I can’t take online activists seriously. 100% of agenda, 0% of brain.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          265·
          3 个月前

          The axes are clearly labeled so I’m not really quite sure what the concern is.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
          11110·
          3 个月前

          Jesus fuck no, it’s a valid graph. It shows the relative trend over time and the sudden change. It may show less of a change if it was zero based, but a drastic change that is well off the normal trend is important to visualize. Also like, all exchanges have a toggle to flip to the zero based.

          • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2449·
            3 个月前

            Look at this thread and realize that it’s just a lie. You can show the exact same information with a starting at zero graph, but won’t be able to push the “stock is tanking!” panic point. Publishers and marketers do this on purpose to manipulate headlines. This is why the stock market is mostly just high stakes gambling. No one involved is making rational decisions, just moving from panic to mania like psychotic patients.

            • chris@l.roofo.ccEnglish
              6·
              3 个月前

              If you are not in for the dividents or the voting privileges stocks are always a game of “I hope someone is dumb enough to pay more than me for these shares”.

              • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
                11·
                3 个月前

                Or someone else is in it for those things.

                Markets aren’t based on one party being dumber than the other one. Markets work because different people value different things.

            • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
              201·
              3 个月前

              You can see right there at the top of the graph it’s down 20% in the given timeframe. There are ways to make graphs misleading, but there’s nothing misleading at all about zooming in on the data in this chart

              • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
                925·
                3 个月前

                Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.

                • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
                  172·
                  3 个月前

                  Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant

                  Yes, and that’s literally all this post is trying to convey. This post is not a news report or a economist’s dissertation, this is a screenshot of the pre-bell stock price posted to a gaming community on Lemmy

            • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
              403·
              3 个月前

              The stock is tanking. 20% is a huge drop for any massive company. Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this? From my very rough calculations, Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop. That’s more than any fine they’ve had.

              The worst day in Stock Market history was Black Thursday, the beginning of the Great Recession. The market only dropped 11% that day. (Somebody call me out if I got those numbers slightly wrong, that’s from Wikipedia). These are massive numbers, that I don’t think you fully appreciate or understand. The stock market usually deals in single digit or more likely fractional amounts of change. Double digit changes are a huge deal.

              • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
                76·
                3 个月前

                Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop.

                So they have 300 million dollars less to spend? They’re going to fire 300 million dollars worth of talent? Their bank account changed by 300 million dollars?

                No, they did not lose 300 million dollars.

              • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1730·
                3 个月前

                Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?

                I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders. Who are already in a frenzy for blood because Outlaws didn’t make all the money.

                If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s

          • yannic@lemmy.caEnglish
            81·
            3 个月前

            I’d argue it doesn’t accurately show the relative value at a cursory glance. The chart shows the area under the curve having decreased over 90%, but when looking at the y-axis, you can see that initial assessment was misled.

            In a speculative industry like finance, shouldn’t we try our best to make charts less… alarmist?

  • branch@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    3 个月前

    Was ubisoft ever okay though? They always have problems going on whether it be a hostile takeover or this, but they always bounce back somehow surprisingly.

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    333·
    3 个月前

    “Tanked”

    Checks graph

    19% is a hit but I wouldn’t call it tanked.

    Some stocks are just volatile. Here is the full history:

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
      301·
      3 个月前

      Whenever I see social media say something dropped/jumped, I do the same thing as you - I visit the portfolio and take a birds eye view.

      I still think about the one time redditors celebrated a company’s stock dropping by 90% over the last day.

      But what the picture left out was how the company was climbing by 1000% in a week before dropping.