You can do whatever you want there, as long as you are ok with the penalties.

You... can...

But its... kind of a really bad move, from the perspective of anyone with money, involved in Ubisoft.

This is roughly the equivalent of an unannounced, sudden bank holiday, you know, right before everything over the FDIC insured 250k gets cleaned out.

Don't forget AA, doing pretty good too.

Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products

On a pedestrian level, I've really liked the slow move from "SNES aesthetic" to "PS1/PS2 aesthetic". My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.

Roguelike Deckbuilder Extraction Shooter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaahh!!!Real_Monsters(video_game)

Now it just looks like a flushing toilet.

Yeah, it was around the time when I was excited for the Assassin's Creed games.

That logo quit being worthwhile seeing 15 years ago.

Professional (as in they earn money, not skill level) Xers fuck everything up. (here, X is an arbitrary verb or a brand name)

My anecdotes: Youtube was good before professional youtubers became a thing (systemic problem, people are not the issue but the environment which breeds them), now it's attention economy and or one topic discussed for 50 minutes (a video explaining the same topic with the same intensity from 10 years ago is 2 minutes long)

Gamers were problematic but harmless, professional gamers caused betting pandemic (sponsored content).

Streamers were funny, professional streamers are sexy/deadly-sells-to-children.

I liked it when people were sharing stuff online because they were bored, and not because they were hungry.

I'm noticing it happens with all companies.

They start out small and can't afford to pay businesspeople to figure out how to fuck over their customers as hard as possible.

Then, after the company is successful thanks to the hard work of the workers, the business-school people start applying in droves to make sure every company operates like gas stations across the street from each other.

It results in companies making decisions like having higher budgets for advertising than what they spend on actually making a product, because the data says it will make them more money and stupid customers keep reinforcing it.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until our culture stops valuing people based on their wealth. I have no hope for that to happen in my lifetime.

It's disappointing. I've been going through some of their older catalog recently and it just has a lot more passion behind it i feel.

AC Shadows felt like when i write an essay, where i get really motivated at the start, completely drop off and try to stuff the middle with as much as possible to reach the page count, then get motivated again at the end just to finish the conclusion. They always had their bugs, but lately it's felt soulless.

The most recent release is probably Anno 117 which came out yesterday. While decently looking it's lacking features of the previous title (like coop mode and mod browser) with the promise they will be added later and is priced at around 60€ or 90€ if you want to gamble on the quality of the promised to be released DLC. They also relied on AI generated images in some of the assets used in the game instead of paying their artists. Optimisation for the game seems to be ok, but not great but it might be too early to judge that fully yet.

They are also hellbent on infecting everything they touch with Denuvo malware. I haven’t bought anything of theirs in years for that reason alone.

To be fair, they are too big.

They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.

My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.

Oh it has, but the implications become clear when you look at the ones that did. Like evergrand...

It's not that, it's the trade halt that points to something major (and bad for them) happening.