Regardless of what you think of them, their games have sold really well up until recently. It was really just the last year or so they got into big shit, releasing failure after failure. Games based on huge franchises like Avatar and Star Wars miserably failing. That live service pirate game failing, and now the backlash to this new AC game.
Look at BioWare. Their stretch of KOTOR, Jade Empire ME and then Dragon Age was unbelievable. I thought they were going to be one of the companies that never crumbled.
TLOU2 ate quite a bit of shit for it, but it was always gonna be too big to fail.
What games have sold well up until recently? Ubisoft has been circling the drain for a decade or more.
Sorry, I got confused and thought we were talking about veilguard for some reason
Agreed on TLoU2 but I was always under the impression that had more to do with Abby killing Joel than Abby herself. Joel was viewed by lots of fans as Cyber-Jesus
Perhaps in innovation and quality. Not sales. "AC: Valhalla" alone made over a billion dollars for them. I think "Far Cry 6" might've slightly underperformed, but that's all I can think of prior to the cascade of poor releases in the past year.
There's videos out demonstrating Veilguard release and reception tanked the stock like 17%
Those things go hand in hand. Watch Dogs 2, Watchdog legion, Far Cry 6, Rb6 extraction, Hyper Scape, X Defiant, all those games underperformed or were just not good. And I could go on with even more.
Dragon age and its studios are their own shit show. Most projects that fail these days fail for obvious non political reasons in a genre where politics have always been inseparable from content.
That doesn't mean they weren't profitable, though. FC6 still managed to sell over ten million copies, for instance.
It's not just Valhalla, though. AC is a juggernaut. Origins and Odyssey were also bringing in a lot of money for them, on top of other flagship brands like FC and R6. Most companies are lucky to have ONE big cash cow franchise. These boys have three. They were doing fine and had money to burn.
That's simply not true. If what you're saying is true, you would've seen warning signs in the stock market long before it torpedoed. They were doing fine before this past year or so. They have not been "circling the drain" for a decade. They've been rather profitable up until recently. Some misses here and there of course, but nothing that would suggest they were in dire straights.
aBeing profitable isn't good enough in this day and age for the game market, you have to beat investor expectations based off activision and other big publishers. Not to mention you need huge amounts of profitability to cover huge losses like Xdefiant or the Pirate Game whose name escapes me atm.
AC is not a juggernaut financially. Origins was 2017 and Valhalla was 2020. R6 has kept Ubisoft afloat in many respects but it's super long in the tooth.
They've been a takeover target and under investor pressure for years. Again, being profitable isn't the goal here, their investors expect them to perform like a tencent or Activision or even EA, and they do not.
Riiight. A multi-billion dollar franchise isn't a juggernaut. What is your definition of a juggernaut? "Minecraft, Fortnite, GTA or bust?"
COD, most licensed sports games, Pokémon, etc. Again Valhalla did well, but that was an outlier for Ubisoft and the series.
An outlier for the series and Ubisoft? So now you're arguing that AC in general wasn't a big deal before Valhalla, and Ubisoft has never had any other big successes outside of it? Really? Yes, this mega corporation were just getting by on a few mild successes...
You didn't actually put a number on it. You were so sure that they have been failing for the past decade or so, that you completely forgot about one of their flagship franchises making over a billion dollars within that time. Now you're trying to basically say that it doesn't count, LOL.
That is some serious cope, dude. When you say they have been "circling the drain", you were not commenting on unfinished games with unrealized potential. You were suggesting that they have been failing as a company in that time from games they had been releasing. Most, up until the last year or so, were moderately to highly successful.
A quick glance shows their share price was very high from like. 2017-2021. It’s tanked massively since then. So 4-4.5 years ago they were doing well compared to their historical price .
I gave you the list of flops or misses Ubisoft has had in recent years. They honestly likely outweigh the hits at this point. They've unfortunately been coasting design wise and now you're seeing the fruits of that in player apathy.
I said they haven't been making good games consistently and that they've been circling the drain (ie the writing has been on the wall about their future prospects).
When I said circling the drain I was primarily referring to their mediocre output that was trending the wrong way, coupled with mass employee dissatisfaction and poor innovation. In sales terms, Ubisoft had some OK performance financially but a dogshit pipeline. And the latter is what the market cares more about.
How have they done compared to other publishers? Everyone did well in covid for games, so Ubisoft hasn't done much since 2019 pretty much, or the better part of the decade. Which was my original point...the company has been on a clearly questionable business trajectory for some time due to mismanagement and not updating most of their core products design wise or financially (live service).
