Kenshiro70 wrote on Nov 27, 2024, 04:49:
I'm sure Valve is quaking in their boots at the thought of being "pressured" by Ubisoft. Much like the way an elephant fears pressure from an ant.

This really isn't about Outlaws though; that ship has sailed. It's about AC Shadows. As Ubisoft publicly announced their return to Steam, reversing that decision would show they aren't confident that AC Shadows will perform. And now they realized they've put themselves between a rock and a hard place; people are going to be hitting the refresh button on the Steam DB site and yapping about every up and down move. Hard believe they couldn't see this coming; there must be unbelievable levels of copium floating around the Ubisoft HQ.

Definitely. Also I wonder if they have preemptively asked Steam how to prevent a review bomb because there is already Concord levels of hate brewing for this title to where I'll be shocked if it gets anything higher than a, "Mixed" review.

Ubisoft, the incompetence is strong is this one...

I'm sure Valve is quaking in their boots at the thought of being "pressured" by Ubisoft. Much like the way an elephant fears pressure from an ant.

This really isn't about Outlaws though; that ship has sailed. It's about AC Shadows. As Ubisoft publicly announced their return to Steam, reversing that decision would show they aren't confident that AC Shadows will perform. And now they realized they've put themselves between a rock and a hard place; people are going to be hitting the refresh button on the Steam DB site and yapping about every up and down move. Hard believe they couldn't see this coming; there must be unbelievable levels of copium floating around the Ubisoft HQ.

"Quick! People are getting honest information about our games! We've got to make the stop so we can go back to misleading them!"

Hey, uh - Ubisoft? Fuck you.

Hell, 90% of their games are Assassin's Creed anyway. They have the third person Assassin's Creed, and they have first person Assassin's Creed (aka Far Cry.) The rest are just skins they slap on those two.

If I was a major investor reading this I'd be dumping their stock immediately. A company is stupid enough to publicly say their games aren't very good and don't sell very well and they'd rather hide that information than make better products which make more money? Yeah. Okay. Good thing the C-Suite is so well paid to come up with genius policies like this. JFC, you don't even need to reinvent the wheel, just innovate on other successful products. It's not rocket surgery. Take a game like Enshrouded. Great goddamned game. They're not doing anything new they're just doing it really well and that's reflected in the three million EA sales they have so far and still growing.

Ubisoft is a trash company. They have always been a trash company. There isn't a good old days. There isn't a "remember when...". Ubisoft is a trash company owned by a trash family that hires trash people to run it. Over and over again. Trash. They have had some great franchises to work with, I myself am partial to Heroes of Might and Magic and the M&M franchise in general, but Ubisoft's "contributions" to a game are always the worst part of the game....and usually leading the game itself to end up being garbage. Garbage from the top down. Garbage in, and garbage out. Worst publisher in the western world side of the industry. They would literally rather make you think they made a good game then actually make a good game. I don't know much about Asian or Russian publishers in terms of business practices, so I won't make a comparison by saying they are the worst in the world. It has always felt like they are to me though.

Despite all of that being my opinion on Ubisoft itself, I was initially siding with them on this. Say Valve offers in the listing agreement the option to not post certain data, including concurrent player numbers, if the publisher/developer pays a certain fee, plus an additional fee per copy sold. The fee should be high so as to make it very unlikely anyone would pay it. It also can not be changed once the game is listed and the store page should reflect the option the pub/dev has chosen.

Then I thought about it and decided I was wrong. The only publishers that wouild ever pay the fee would be 'AAA' companies with the cash to burn, making it a feature for the wealthy only. Second, the comparative transparency of Valve/Steam is part of why they are they industry standard on this platform. MS, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft....are all stockholder driven corporations and their services reflect that. They can't even provide 1/100th of the value to the customer that Valve/Steam does despite charging a monthly fee. More importantly, those companies wouldn't do so if they could. Lastly, because fuck Ubisoft.

Directly from the article:

The company allegedly wants Steam to stop showing this data in order to better manage the perception of their titles. As the Ubisoft insider told Fandom Pulse, “Ubisoft and other companies want to pressure Steam to stop Stream tracker from giving out info they want to keep to themselves.” The goal seems to be to present a more favorable picture to investors, who could be discouraged by the reality of their games’ lackluster performance.

So they want to hide the live player numbers, and then make up their own feel-good numbers. Just like everywhere else in this timeline, the facts can be disputed if you just display them differently (or don't display them at all and then you can say whatever you want when the facts are non-public).

Ah yes, the move of trying to control the court of public opinion always goes over well with the public.

If Ubisoft was a person, I'd picture him as a more than willing Jackass cast member who repeatedly punches himself in the balls for, "fun".

I don't blame them, look at fucking that trash game Cyberpunk 2077, it's lost 97.68% of its player base since release because it is trash, just like that garbage game Baldur's Gate 3 with a 92.79% loss in players. Maybe make more counterstrike.

I imagine this could look negative and there are people who will never play CP2077 or BG3 just because of the perception of concurrent player count.

Ubisoft: Get comfortable with not owning our games you buy.

Gamers: Ok, not buying one game more from you.

Ubisoft: All stores, hide games sold and engagement data !

Ubisoft isn't happy with just making crap and underwhelming games, they have to strive to be a crap and underwhelming company as well.

roguebanshee wrote on Nov 26, 2024, 12:25:
"Please don't reveal when our titles don't live up to investor expectations"

I don't think it's investors, because they can legitimately face prison time for lying to investors.
It's controlling the narrative of the game. We all know that, when a game fails, we all enjoy the game failing. It creates a horrible narrative that can't be overcome, and virtually guarantees a game can't course correct. By hiding these numbers, Ubi likely feels they can take steps like patches, price cuts, or more likely marketing spend, to help a game overcome a slow start.

But they won't do those first ones, and the last one won't help, so it's a moot point, but this is where they're coming from.

"Please don't reveal when our titles don't live up to investor expectations"