Of all the common L's that I very much expect Ubisoft to make: lasr year has proven to my absolute shock that this industry might just have a much lower tolerance point than I assumed it had. I think we might finally be getting to a point of genuine rejection where we no longer tolerate an absolute bottom-feeding tail-chasing overbloated badly managed black hole of a company to be successful anymore. Much to my utmost shock I think the industry might have finally outgrown my sworn nemesis- at least in their current form. I still attest that Ubisoft are too big to fail and, once again, too big for anyone to seriously want them to fail. The last thing we need is an accelerated industry crash because Ubisoft went belly-up. But if Ubisoft got bought out by a company that actually knows how to publish games- maybe those massive resources the company regularly squanders could be put to genuine use? (Meh, I'm getting way too hopeful, aren't I?)
The victim today for the big U was none other: than XDefiant! That's right, the Cod-like competitive shooter that Ubisoft put out this year! The struggling live-service shooter game that soundly failed to launch in the soft-spot of the Cod train, essentially leading them to lose momentum to the famous shooter literally the same year as their historic multiplatform Game Pass deal which led to the game breaking launch records. It's no secret that XDefiant dropped the bag- that was such an inevitability that if you go back- you might remember how XDefiant actually got rebranded because of how badly it's reveal came off. People already had the thing labelled as 'uncool' giving the title an uphill struggle to traverse. But positive first hand impressions did wiggle under some skin at the beginning- it's just a shame they were too late to really make something of it.
Too late, I say, because as you might have heard- XDefiant has just been given the swift boot up the ass. After the game director coming out and belly-laughing at all those worried the game was not long for this world- as it turns out the game really isn't long for this world. Without so much as seeing the end of the year- XDefiant has had it's cord cut and is currently staring down the barrel of a cut-off date midway through 2025. Refunds are on the table at the very least for microtransactions bought within a certain period- but there's no giving back all the time people invested into giving this game a shot and hoping it would carve out a space for itself in this cursed would of ours. So ends the journey of the one Ubisoft project that some people actually kinda liked for a bit.
Then we have Skull and Bones which, impossibly, has plans for a season 2 coming into this year despite the very real fact that it... has no more potential whatsoever. If anything it might have scoured members of the pirate-fantasy searching crowd had it a couple more years to work on itself, but unfortunately between hijinks-simulator 'Sea of Thieves' and the rapidly approaching 'Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii'- I'm pretty sure that crowd has been well-and-truly sniped out of the water before they could be swooped up. Shame. Pretty much the only reason Skull and Bones is still around is because everytime Ubisoft try to wiggle out of their responsibilities they catch sight of the Singaporean leg-breaker waiting at the back of the room.
Assassin's Creed Shadow is pretty much Ubisoft's only hope and though it is obviously going to hit it's more modest sales targets and probably even score some of the higher tier ones because this is a franchise that is immune from consumer backlash- I'm not sure that Ubisoft has ever had the entire weight of it's company resting on the back of a single game's success before. I wonder if a team as large as Ubisoft's can feed itself off a single hit anymore. We're not talking a Rockstar level world-wide phenom incoming- we're talking about the kind of game that is going to be picked up day one by incumbents whilst enthusiasts scoff again at another overly safe and unambitious entry in a tired franchise limiting it's immediate-audience appeal. A hit, but not a smash.
And beyond Assassin's Creed what does Ubisoft have? Maybe another NFT disaster? It utterly boggles all sensibilities that Ubisoft put out two NFT games within the past year and both were worse than what first time Unity-dev Crypto-heads have managed to scrounge together. Sure, those lot tend to use pre-built assets, but they make stuff more playable than the card game which was utterly non-functioning for it's first weekend of life. And some games with a little more playability than the glorified flash-tier Captain Lazerhawk disaster that Ubisoft spat out later. (God, the inexplicable cultural success of 'Blood Dragon' really was a latent poison, wasn't it?) This is all Ubisoft have to pad out their back catalogue. Well, that and the demi-successes.
Games that Ubisoft put out which cross the border of 'good' but lack the star power to land with a splash like they were angling for- demi-successes. I'm talking games with the vibe of 'Avatar: blah blah Frontier' which took the Far Cry formula and tweaked it just enough to fit the Avatar licence. People seem to think the game was pretty good- just not worth the AAA over-premium pricing that Ubisoft insist on out of some vain self-deserving belief system. 'Star Wars: Outlaws' is said to be half-decent once you scrub away at it's issues, but to put it as the same price point as the Black Myth game is a laughable proposition- who's gonna go for that? These games had strong brands and didn't really go the distance with them- they aren't pillars to hold up a large company.
Now with sharks in the water circling around Ubisoft's collapsing stock it feels like we might be looking at the final years of Ubisoft antics and I'll be honest- I'm not entirely sympathetic. I mean if they were going under I would be- but it looks like what we're looking at is a buy out and proceeding slow suffocation. No one who could do this company proud is interested in buying it- and I'd imagine we see a slow bleeding of talent over the following few years as Ubisoft shrivels up into a shell of it's former self- which is perhaps the most humane well to kill a beast like this, which has feasted on the blood of this industry for so long, without causing some kind of giant industry crash. Couldn't happen to a more deserving waste of a studio.
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