The problems really started when Ubisoft headquarters began interfering more and more with the studio's decisions. Because of that management pressure, a lot of the top talent just decided to leave.

Ubisoft leadership has made so many bad moves lately. They wasted huge amounts of money on NFT/crypto stuff that nobody wanted. Then they made that awful comment about how "gamers should get used to not owning their games." Even if that’s where the industry is heading, saying it out loud to your own customers is just crazy. It’s like they don't understand their own audience anymore.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBI.PA/

Graphics isn't everything, gameplay is.

As such there are more games to play than most of us care about in our lifetimes still, and not everyone suffers from FOMO, thus it is unsustainable to keep producing games that require hours of investment in double digits, new hardware all the time, 60 euros on average, with a userbase that is generaly speaking stable (e.g. there is no exponential growth of new customers).

Unfortunely MBAs don't get this, and the curve has to always go up, except it usually doesn't.

But the fact that their only answer to this is doubling down on the strategy that has stopped worked years ago does not bode well for them.

Recently Hytale, a would-be Minecraft successor, released early access. That project started around a decade ago as something of an indie project, was purchased by Riot, then cancelled by Riot, then recently sold back to the original project people... who basically undid a lot of fruitless work done by Riot and... as I said... now released as early access. A well received early access as far as I can tell.

I wonder why we don't see more indie games and new developers that are more able rising to challenge what look like dysfunctional incumbents?

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know anything about that industry, but it seems like there's space to make progress for newcomers.

The problem is the large corporation wants to remove creativity from the process. They want a repeatable formula that they can scale and infinitely reproduce.

The wet dream for the modern AAA studio is a "game" like FIFA that has annual releases and loot boxes to gamble on to get better pixels. Call of Duty and similar games are the next best because it's user-generated content ("UGC"). They still have to invest to create maps, which they don't like doing. But you still have micro-transactions for skins so that's good (for them).

I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey a lot. Some people don't like it because it's too CRPG. That's why I liked it. They paid a lot of attention to the environment. I've heard of teachers using it to portray ancient Greece.

They managed this even though it was a little formulaic. I suspect that any future AC releases will be even more formulaic.

The one exception to this "large game studio = bad" rule had been Rockstar. The various GTA3 titles and GTA4 were widely renowned because of their social commentary and wit, as well as being groundbreaking (at the time) for open world games.

But GTA5 was a turning point for me. Yes it was a sprawling, beautiful environment but the writing was complete ass. It had none of the intelligence and insight of earlier titles. The characters were awful. But Rockstar seemingly didn't care because they're discovered the GTA Online money faucet, something I don't care about at all.

I really wonder if GTA6 will be beautiful but soulless. It coudl go either way. RDR2 was released after GTA5, after all.

These big studios really do have a habit of killing successful franchises or simply sucking the life out of them. There are few bigger fumbles than the EA SimCity fiasco. I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something. But honestly I haven't really felt compelled to play the franchise much since Civ4.

I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.

Isn’t that what they’ve been doing for a decade that got them to today?

It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the journalist because what are they to do, interview a laid-off worker at the business? I doubt someone would go on the record lambasting their former employer, but it would probably turn up the truths such as fraud or waste.

The design work was complete long before anyone working on this project was hired by Ubisoft, and proven in the form of a game that shipped several console generations ago. Ubisoft presumably still has all of the original art assets for reference.

All that had to be done was to study the original game code, port it for modern systems, and then polish up the visuals some. Not a trivial amount of work by any means, but much, much easier than starting from scratch and making a game from nothing.

This should've been a layup for any competent studio given SEVEN YEARS(!!!) to work on the project.

That it wasn't, is undeniable evidence of a AAA game development competency crisis.

It's almost, almost like people are valuable and worth retaining.

(I don't think I pluralized that correctly)

Why, we have AI now ...

Activision had three or four studios dedicated to Call of Duty leapfrogging each other to release one every year. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty)

Their last (2022, pre-acquisition) annual reports literally spell that out.

> For example, in 2022, revenues associated with our three franchises—Call of Duty, Warcraft, and Candy Crush —collectively accounted for approximately 79% of our net revenues—and a significantly higher percentage of our operating income. We expect that a relatively limited number of popular franchises will continue to produce a disproportionately high percentage of our revenues and profits. - https://investor.activision.com/annual-reports

The creators and innovators in those acquired companies usually burn out from trying to work in a large, stifling corporate environment, and leave. So the large corporations are left with people who are not creators and innovators.

They are great destroying businesses, as their mental model is an exponential growth curve.

They missed out on physics class the part that is impossible when there are limited resources and everyone tries to do the same.

By putting some loot boxes and mobile purchases out there. Yes.

It only needs to work until they're on to their next job.

What are you talking about? The one remake is the thing that was cancelled.

Rockstar, CDPR (they at least made up for their big mistake), Larian, FromSoft, Naughty Dog, Valve

Civ 7 sort of killed that, unfortunately, but at least the bones are there and future updates can fix it, I think it was largely just released unfinished.

Which is another pet peeve of mine with AAA studios lately. So many are putting out what are rightfully early access/beta versions as the full release, then "fixing" it with paid DLCs down the road. At this point, I no longer by AAA games on release. I wait a few years until I can get it + all the DLC on a steam sale for half the cost.

> I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.

That still exists, you just won't get it from AAA studios. Thankfully there's a thriving indie scene and fantastic titles from smaller studios, most of which are better than the AAA slop coming out now. There's been some good releases from big names recently, mostly BG3, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk but all the others? I feel like gaming peaked, for the type that I play, with the Witcher 3 and its been downhill since then.

And lest we leave it merely implied, the problematic wages for the company are the workers, who make the products being sold. The wages of middle management + executives who allegedly steer the ship are magnitudes larger, but those are completely fine.

Umm, yes? Thats called journalism

They don't have to name people if they can get independent verification from multiple sources (standard was 3, sometimes 2)

I agree that remakes sound straightforward and it's baffling that Ubisoft couldn't get this one out the door: there are rumors that even before its announcement in 2020, the Sands of Time remake had been started, scrapped, and restarted. But even Nightdive Studios, a perennial remaster maker, struggled for many years with their System Shock remake [2] so it must be harder than it sounds.

I'd love to hear the inside story from folks who've worked on remakes (both released and cancelled) about why they aren't as straightforward as fans expect. Nightdive recently discussed the emotional toll from dealing with angry fans [3] but I haven't seen any interviews discussing the development challenges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_remake#Remaster [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_(2023_video_game) [3] https://frvr.com/blog/system-shock-remake-lead-couldnt-sleep...

The very first Prince of Persia game came out in the early 90s. It's at least 35 years old. It was noteworthy as being one of the first games (if not the first) to have ragdoll physics for the movement of the player.

It was a game of playing through 12 levels (IIRC) and if you died, you started over completely. I played it for 20 hours straight at one point and ended up beating it. I think it takes like 30-45 minutes for a full run through normally? I'm a bit fuzzy on this part. It was an amazing game.

What you're talking about is the early 2000s "reboot" that launched a new franchise under the old name and really wasn't that similar to the original other than a setting of being loosely Persian/Arabic. But it wasn't a platform game in the same sense.