Ubisoft Grows Up

You know computer hardware and software as you do. We also learned how they took that business and then they built a new company centered around developing and publishing video games, and how that company, Ubisoft, grew steadily. And in the second episode, we followed up on Ubisoft having a success with a game called Raymond and an early acquisition of a US based video game developer called red Storm, and how the company launched into an era of expansion that

was impressive by any measure. The company opened up new studios, they bought out other companies, they acquired assets from organizations, some of which were also coincidentally founded by those brothers, and all while a bigger fish in the form of Electronic Arts was circling the company with a threat of

a hostile takeover. Now, at the end of that last episode, we learned that e A divested itself of a large number of shares and Ubisoft, and with the threat of a hostile takeover fading away, Ubisoft pushed even harder to grow while launching and advancing franchises like Far Cry, Assassin's Creed,

and numerous Tom Clancy related video game titles. Another asset that originally belonged to a different company founded by one of the Gilmo brothers was a Quebec studio that had been part of long Tail Studios, and that trace its origin back to Gerard Guillman. And that's a case in point right. Anyway, Ubisoft would purchase that Quebec studio from long Tail, and long Tail would retain its other studios for the time being, and then you know, Ubisoft just

folded that into Ubisoft's Quebec office. And I realized, I keep saying Quebec and Quebec and that's just me, I guess. Anyway, as I mentioned in the last episode, ubi Soft had recently purchased a company called Alliant, which what made free to play games, and we would soon see elements of the free to play micro transaction strategy work its way into various Ubisoft games, even those that are not themselves free to play games. We would see that micro transaction

make its way into Triple A titles. So let's see what happens next, because this episode should bring us up to present day, and it's going to include some particularly dramatic story, including another possible hostile takeover and widespread allegations of serious misconduct within the company. In two thousand twelve, Ubi Soft released Far Cry three. Now, if you recall, the original Far Cry game came out of a different

development studio called Crytech. Cry Tech built a game engine called the cry Engine and built the original Far Cry in that game engine. Then Ubisoft bought that i P for the Far Cry series, as well as the right to use that particular version of the cry Engine, and from that moment forward, the cry Engine forked into two pathways. At Crytech, it remained the cry Engine and continued to evolve there. Under Ubisoft it would turn into the game

engine called Dounia, and it would evolve separately. So these diverging pathways, UBI Soft continued to tweak and build onto the Dounia engine, and far Cry three came out of Dounia two, which included some new features like global lighting and lighting and video games is a really big deal, which I get sounds pretty obvious, because, after all, our vision is based off of how light interacts with the

environments around us. A lot of recent focus on video game graphics has really been about the interplay of light with different surfaces. You may have heard of ray tracing that mostly refers to the way light behaves with specific types of surfaces, like a pane of glass or a reflective puddle of water. Well, the Dounia two engine was kind of a step toward that direction, although ray tracing wouldn't really be a thing you would hear about in the video game world for a bit longer. Far Cry

threes pre sales were a little bit underwhelming. Now, just in case you're not aware somehow, pre ordering or pre sales that just means you lay down your cold hard cash for a game before that game is even available, and the idea is that the moment the game does

come out, you've secured your coppy. Now, in the old days, when physical media dominated the video game market, this was something that gamers would do at retail stores, so that when those game copies showed up to their local store, they would have a reserved copy of their own, and in theory, they wouldn't have to worry about the store having sold out of the game before they were able

to get there. Today, in the era of digital delivery, a pre order means that again in theory, anyway, you should be able to download a game the moment it goes live, and so your gaming experience will start as soon as you've got enough of the game downloaded to launch it, and so it's kind of dependent on your internet connection speed. In recent years, companies have even allowed

downloads to begin way ahead of schedule. And then the moment a game goes live is kind of like a switch turning off, and it allows gamers to access a game that has already been installed on their systems. So, let's say a game goes live of at midnight, the game has already been downloaded to the gamer's machine. It's just that the activation code isn't uh isn't actually active until midnight, and then boom, you can start playing game.

Companies love pre orders because it looks great on a balance sheet, you know, to get those revenue numbers up early. It's a great thing to share with shareholders, to say to your your stockholders, hey, this game is going to do incredibly well. It helps bring the share price of your company up, The value of your company goes up. Lots of positive things can happen due to those numbers from a corporate standpoint, and it really helps balance out

the costs of development. And I mentioned that in the last episode that those can get really high. We're gonna talk more about that in this episode. But from a gamer perspective, it satisfies an urge for gratification, at least for the feeling that you get when a game comes into your possession, But it also comes along with risks. But as of the game isn't very good or if it has a lot of bugs or other issues, then the gamers who pre ordered it are stuck with it.

You didn't give the industry time to dive into and dissected the game, right. You didn't get a chance to read the reviews and find out if the game was actually any good or if it was well made. Maybe you saw an awesome trailer for the game and that sold you on the experience, so you PLoP down your sixty dollars or whatever to pre order the game. Only when the day comes and you finally get it, you realize that the playing experience just doesn't live up to

that trailer. If you pre order, you also typically pay whatever the highest price is for that version of the game. And sometimes games will launch and for whatever reason, it becomes clear that there's just not a big place in the market for that game, at least not as big as what the company was anticipating, and typically companies will mark down the price of a game when that happens.

Recapturing some of the cost of development is better than not getting anything, so it can pay if you just wait a little bit, even just for a short while, to make sure that one the game is worth it, and to maybe the price comes down so that even if the game wasn't perfect, with the lower price, it is worth it. Pre Orders would later introduce other issues

in the gaming industry in general. For example, one way to encourage people to pre order a game is to pay exclusive content to a specific outlets pre order system. So if you were to pre order a game with one retailer, then you would get one set of exclusive content. But if you had gone with a different retailer, you would get a different set of exclusive content, and there'd be no way for a completionist to get everything because

of how that content gets sliced up like that. Now, later on you might get a Game of the Year edition that groups them all together, but that's much later, and this would be something that gamers would complain about with Ubisoft titles further on, particularly with Watchdogs. The Far Cry three numbers, as I mentioned, were a little disappointing. Now that being said, once the game came out and reviews started coming in, sales actually started to pick up.

Most reviews praised the game play and the setting. There were some criticisms that were leveled more against the story and the characters, which saw gamers take on a protagonist who is trying to rescue his friends who have been captured by modern day pirates and smugglers. Some critics felt that the speed at which your character, who kind of starts off just as a normal average guy, suddenly becomes

like an unstoppable killing machine was just unrealistic. And it also follows the trope in which you've got a group of natives who are incapable of helping themselves, and so they have to rely upon some white champion to come into the picture and save them. Ubisoft developers were creating a game in which morality wasn't an absolute, so you could play in a way that was, you know, considered

morally good or morally evil. But in the process they also relied kind of heavily on some pretty negative narrative elements. So far, Cry three would end up being a success, but it would take a little more time for those sales numbers to come up. Meanwhile, Ubisoft was really leaning heavily on the Assassin's Creed franchise, releasing Assassin's Creed three

in two thousand twelve. Now, you might have heard me say in the previous episode that Ubisoft is a company frequently associated with crunch around this time, and crunch refers to the amount of intense work that leads up to the release of a game. When you look at the release schedule of Assassin's Creed games, you start to realize that this could be a pretty grueling schedule. Uh. I'll just talk about the main release games in the Assassin's Creed series. These are the ones that came out for

consoles and computer systems. But keep in mind there were a ton of Assassin's Creed games, some of which were released for handheld systems, some for mobile devices like smartphones, some for computers and consoles, but they weren't part of the main storyline. So I'm just gonna look at the main one. You've got the first game in two thousand seven, you had Assassin's Creed two, which came out two years

later in two thousand nine. Then you've got Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and add on kind of to Part two that came out in two and Assassin's Creed Revelations in two thousand eleven, which also tied back to Assassin's Creed two. Now I just mentioned that Assassin's Creed three came out in two thousand twelve, Assassin's Creed four Black Flag, which was again my personal favorite of all the Assassin's Creed games that I have played, but I have not played

all of them. That one came out in Assassin's Creed Rogue and Assassin's Creed Unity both came out in two thousand fourteen, so we got two Assassin's Creed mainline games that year. I have a little bit more to say about unity in here. But just imagine two major releases of a flagship franchise in the same year. That is crazy.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate would follow in two thousand fifteen, and then we finally would get a one year gap between major releases in the main storyline, with Assassin's Creed Origins hitting in two thousand seventeen. Then we get Assassin's Creed Odyssey in two thousand eighteen, then we get another one year gap, and this year we got Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Now, again,

those are just the major games. There are at least an equal number of other titles that are spinoffs of this franchise, but they don't qualify as part of the main sequence of Assassin's Creed titles. Now, it was almost as if the Assassin's Creed franchise was like a sports game, because you know, every year we expect to see a new version of specific sports franchises like Madden right, and we expect to see an updated player roster to reflect

the most current version of teams in various sports. But we were getting that in this fantasy sci fi Assassin based game series. There was a real danger of oversaturating the market and burning out the player base, not to mention working the developers into an early grave. Though to be fair, it wasn't like the exact same group of

developers were making every single game in the series. This was spread out across the global network of studios at UBI Soft, with specific studios kind of taking point on the big titles. Ubisoft Montreal was largely responsible for the main development of the main series, but this also meant that as Zubi Stuft tried to keep up the pace, it would occasionally release games that, at least initially were

pretty darn broken. Assassin's Creed three had its historical setting take place during the American Revolutionary War, so it actually took place in the American colonies. The game added lots of new features to the Assassin's Creed franchise, including the ability to command a ship like a sailing ship, and that would become a much larger part in Black Flag later, obviously, because that's a that's a pirate game. But it also featured a pretty long lead up to the point where

anything assassiny happens. You're playing that game for a long time before you start getting into something that feels like Assassin's Creed. Now, overall, the game got positive reviews, though a lot of articles that rank the various entries of the Assassin Creed series will frequently put Part three in the bottom half. It's not the bottom bottom, it's not the worst of the games, but it typically does not merit inclusion in the top fifty percent on a lot

of lists. In two thousand thirteen, Ubisoft made another pair of acquisitions, purchasing the Future Games of London studio out of um well it says here London, the UK, and also the Digital Chocolate studio that was in Barcelona, Spain. Now, these studios focused primarily on developing games for mobile and social networking platforms. Also side note, the company Digital Chocolate

was founded by Trip Hawkins. Now that's the guy who founded Electronic Arts, which coincidentally was the company that for a while looked like it was on the verge of doing that hostile takeover of Ubisoft. But Trip Hawkins had left long before that. And he's also the guy who was behind the failed three D O console, which I covered in a recent tech Stuff series. Anyway, Ubisoft acquired the Barcelona studio, but not the overall company of Digital Chocolate.

Hawkins had already stepped down from leadership at Digital Chocolate a year earlier, and the company would only be in business for one more year before it sold off its games to another company, so it didn't stick around for very long. That summer, Ubisoft went public with some news that wasn't so pause. Someone had managed to find a vulnerability in Ubisoft's corporate network, probably through a web vulnerability,

and they breached Ubisoft systems. According to the company, this meant that up to fifty eight million people may have had their user names, their email addresses, and their encrypted passwords exposed. Now that's obviously not great, but it could have been a lot worse. The fact that the passwords were at least encrypted means they weren't immediately useful to the hackers. The hackers would first need to break that encryption to get at the passwords that were encrypted underneath.

But it serves as a great reminder for all of us. First, we should all choose strong passwords for the services we use. Second, we should use a unique password for every single service, because if someone manages to breach a service you use, they could potentially get at your password, And if you're using the same password everywhere. You've just handed them the key ease to everything, right. You don't want to do that.

It can really put you at risk. Or if you're trying to be really careful and you find out that your password was potentially stolen, then you have to go through the hassle of changing that password for every service you use, which is not super fun. The third point I would like to remind people to do is to get a password vault program to keep all your passwords. A lot of them also have password generators built in, and those will create really strong passwords on your behalf

and keep track of them. Uh. It takes a lot of the work out of trying to practice good security habits, so quick reminder there. Ubisoft stated that this security breach did not touch any systems that stored payment information, so that was also a big relief. People with accounts on Ubisoft services received messages that urged them to change their passwords, since a determined hacker might actually go through the trouble to decrypt passwords if they had enough time. I'm in

processing power. Security experts criticized Ubisoft, saying that it failed to be transparent about what security measures were actually in place. A few experts pointed out that while passwords may have been encrypted, there was no indication as to how Ubisoft was encrypting them, and weak encryption could really be an issue. Generally, the response was that Ubisoft's approach didn't inspire confidence, and a more recent hack this year seems to give a

bit of credence to those concerns. Now, when we come back, we'll revisit the subject of hackers, except this time it will be within the context of playing a hacker in a video game. But first, let's take a quick break. In Ubisoft launched a new I P in the form of Watchdogs. The game series is set in a world not too different from our own, one in which electronic devices gather endless amounts of data that corporations then used to make let's see, I think the technical term is

gobs of money. In each of the games, you play as a hacker protagonist or sometimes multiple protagonists, who has to navigate this dystopian surveillance world and compromise systems and turn the technology against the corporate overlords, and navigate the seed criminal underbelly of society, and generally try and accomplish

specific goals that may or may not be selfish. Ubisa Montreal was responsible for the first title in the series, and they would also create the sequel that would come out in the third game in the series, watch Dogs. Legion just recently launched in but this one actually came out of Ubisoft Toronto, not Montreal. Now, I've mentioned a few times about how games have become incredibly complex and as a result, the cost of development goes up, which in turn puts a lot more pressure on finding ways

to make a profit from a game. And just to give you some perspective, the budget for the first Watchdogs game, which had been in development since before, was nearly seventy million dollars. Now these days, it's not unusual for a triple A title to have a budget comparable to what you would see for a feature length film, which is incredible. In addition, around one thousand people worked on Watchdogs, and Ubisoft Montreal built it using a brand new game engine

called Disrupt, which Ubisoft Montreal had also built. Those guys are pretty busy. The title sold four million copies in its first week, which broke the company and the industry's then record for most copies of a brand new I P sold within that first week. It would then go on to sell at least another six million copies, So that first Watchdogs game wasn't without some road bumps upon

its release. Some people were upset that Ubisoft created not one, not two, but four different Collectors editions of the game. In addition, a few people alleged that Ubisoft had purposefully and artificially made the game look better graphically when they did a video preview of the title at E three. They claimed that the end game, the one that actually came out, that the graphics had been downgraded. Ubi Soft,

for its part, categorically denied this claim. Critics praised the game's gameplay and the setting of Chicago, but there was a less of a positive consensus about the story and the characters of the game. Now, I'm going to go ahead and close out the Watchdogs discussion here because as I just think it makes more sense to to follow up on that rather than the go year by year. So the sequel, Watchdogs Too, came out two years after

the first game. So this one came out in Twix, and this one was set in San Francisco, and the protagonist was again a hacker, but a different character than

from the first game. Would be Soft tweaked a lot of the gameplay elements after having received feedback on the first Watchdogs game, and Watchdogs two would launch with a few glitches and bugs, which frustrated critics and fans, but it would be Soft would fairly quickly follow up the launch with a game patch that helped smooth out these problems. Generally speaking, critics also seemed to like the tone of the second game more than they liked the tone of

the first game. The original Watchdogs had a fairly serious tone, and the sequel had some more lighthearted and silly moments, and also had a protagonist who wasn't so stoic as the main character of the first game. Many people, however, also pointed out that the main character of the second game, his name is Marcus, was written in such a way as to make him a good person within the narrative

of the game. And that's fine, except the game also allows players to do stuff like harm or kill innocent bystanders that doesn't affect the way the story unfolds, So you could play Marcus like a homicidal maniac, but narratively speaking, within the game, you would be treated as if you were still this really good guy with a strong moral code. So there's a bit of a disconnect there. Like Far Cry three, the pre or sales for Watchdogs two didn't

meet company projections. It would take more time for players to commit to buying the game and reaching the sales figures that Ubisoft had been hoping for. And then we've got watch Dog Legion, developed primarily by Ubisoft Toronto. This title came out in late October twenty twenty after being

delayed half a year. Um and I'll talk a little bit about the decision to postpone games towards the end of this episode, and I'm sure the pandemic didn't help at all, But this game shifts the action to London, England, and it also features a pretty neat concept for the protagonists. So instead of playing as an established main character and playing that character all the way through, in Legion, you

pick a starting character. But then you can also switch identities as you play as characters who are recruited into an underground hacker resistance organization. So recruiting someone gives you access to them as a playable character, and each in game candidate has their own skills and quirks. Some might be really good at hacking industrial equipment, some might be able to call upon friends to help them out in the scuffle. And there's also a spy who is a

total James Bond gadget guru type. London is pretty dang dystopian, even for a Watchdogs game with an authoritarian government that's cracking down on the hacker group. The game has received fairly positive reviews, though not as high as the previous games in the franchise. Also, I mentioned earlier that there was another Ubisoft data breach in and it ties into Watchdog Legion because a ransomware group. You may have remembered

that I just recently did an episode about ransomware. But a group called e Gregor claimed to have copied the source code for Watchdogs Legion and then threatened to release it if they weren't paid off. And at first there was some skepticism about whether or not they had access the the source code. Uh, and then apparently they were not paid off, and then not too long ago, the source code has been found with various tracker programs leaked on the internet. So that's kind of yikes. Alright, So

back to Ubisoft's timeline. In two thousand fourteen, Ubisoft would release Assassin's Creed Unity, often cited as one of the lesser entries in the main series because of some bugs and other issues. The company also opened up the door for more criticism as well when gamers discovered that there would be no playable female characters for multiplayer. There was a call on Ubisoft to explain why that was, and the explanation the company gave boiled down to it would

have been too hard to include playable women. Essentially, it would have been too much work to put in that art and the animations, and that in turn caused a series of discussions in which critics and even a former Ubisoft developer questioned their reasons that they gave. The messaging was clear from external sources anyway, Representation in games was really starting to matter now. You could argue actually that it always mattered, it just wasn't paid attention to until

relatively recently. Let's get back to and what would another year be like without an acquisition or fifteen would be Soft bought a French game company called Ivory Tower, which had developed the online racing game The Crew, and would be Soft also acquired a Halifax studio from a well, hey, look at that, long Tail Studios, the same Guillamont founded studio that gave UBI softmore developers in Quebec a few

years earlier. Yep, long Tail Halifax, which originally launched in two thousand nine, would become UBI Soft Halifax in two thousand fifteen. Speaking of Ubi Soft Quebec, the studio was the lead developer in its first Triple A title that year, that being Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Now. In this game, the player would be able to control a pair of protagonists and their brother and sister team, which allowed players to control a woman assassin for the first time in the

main series of games. Now, there had been smaller Assassin's Creed spinoff titles that had a female protagonist already, which was another piece of evidence actually that seemed to contradict the women are too hard to insert into the game argument that they used for Unity. Syndicate got mixed to generally positive reviews. I have this game. I've played it, but I never finished it. I think I got about maybe halfway through before I just kind of lost interest.

And I also always preferred to play as the sister ev to the brother Jacob. Uh. She was just a much more interesting character to me, much more intelligent, and was much more stealth based, and Jacob was like, I hit them with my stick real hard. Anyway. On some missions you just can't choose. You have to play one or the other. You don't get the option. So whenever I had to play Jacob, I did. But I always looked forward to switching back to Evie because I just

thought she was a more interesting character. The game was set in London in the nineteenth century. It had a very steampunk sensibility to it, like the Assassin's Hit Him Blade. You had also had like a grappling hook, something that some reviewers really didn't like because they felt that it kind of took away from the other assassin screed games. Uh.

I don't think so, but that's just my opinion. It also got dinged by critics for other gameplay features, namely trying to control a horse and cart on the streets of London and various high speed chases and race sequences, And yeah, that part of the game was not so

much fun for me. Much later, various people who worked on Syndicate would reveal that bringing Evie into the series was a serious challenge because there were internal obstacles that writers and developers had to navigate and a yield resistance to allowing the team to make Evy a significant part of the game in the first place. The general philosophy seemed to be a belief that games with a female protagonist just don't sell. I mean, that was the message

they were getting over and over again. And the gamers just don't want to play games that have women as the protagonist. They just prefer to have, you know, good old manly men instead. Now, that attitude went all the way up to Sage Escoway, who had been serving as the head of creative in Ubisoft for more than a decade, almost two decades at that point, and he could get really involved with a major plot and character decision in

Ubisoft games even at that point. So ultimately, if he didn't want it in the game, then it wasn't gonna go into the game, and he was really dead set against having according to other reports anyway, dead set against having a female protagonist. Now, sticking with us for a second, this issue would again come up in a later Assassin's

Creed entry. Out of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Now that one came out in two thousand eighteen, and recently as of this year, stories have emerged that the development team originally wanted to make a character called Cassandra the Soul protagonist for this game, but they were shot down by Askaway and his team, and the reason that they were given was that again that idea that women heroes just don't sell games, which, hey, someone should probably let the tomb

Raider teams know about that, because that seems like a problem anyway. Because of that opposition, the developer team was compelled to give gamers a choice so they could play as Cassandra, as had been intended from the start, or they could choose to play as her brother, Alexios. Now we'll get back to sexism and misogyny and stuff before the end of this episode. It is not a good look and in fact makes us look like another you B company that I've talked about in the past, that

be Uber. That's how bad it gets. But one other thing that happened in that will focus on next is remember when Electronic Arts quietly scooped up a significant percentage of ownership and Ubisoft and that led to that fear

of a hostile takeover. Well, let's get ready to repeat history like we're going into the Animus, to go back into time, because in the fall of Vivendi, another French company which has a history even more complicated than Ubisoft does, revealed that it had purchased a big chunk of uby Soft shares, And we get ready to go on that hostile takeover ride all over again. Before we do that, though,

let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Eve Guilmant stated that Ubisoft would fight off any hostile takeover attempts from Vivindy, But boy howdy, it sure did look like that was how this story was gonna go. It looked like Vivindi was ultimately going to take over ubi Soft. Between twenty fifteen and eighteen, Vivendi would continually attempt to increase its holdings and Ubisoft getting larger and larger percentages

of shares in the company. Meanwhile, the Guilman brothers, whose shares in the company amount to about nine percent of total ownership back in twenty we're doing everything they could to increase their own holding in uby Soft and secure votes from other shareholders to prevent Vivindi from taking over, and at one point, Vivindi pressured ubi Soft to try and have them include Vivendi executives on the Ubisoft board

of directors. You know, after all, according to their argument, Vivendi owned more than of the company at that point, and they argued that that should give them a seat at the table at the board of directors. But the Guilman brothers countered this argument. They said that such an arrangement would be a conflict of interests because Vivendi and

Ubisoft were competing in the same market place. So the brothers were successful and staving off that move, and the two sides were in a bit of a stalemate, and each side was trying to scoop up shares whenever they became available on the market to prevent the other side from getting controlling interest. In the meantime, even though Vivindi repeatedly said it wasn't seeking a hostile takeover, the company would acquire another Guilment operation, the game studio game Loft.

You might remember I mentioned that one in the last episode, and how did Vivendi takeover game Loft while they did it via a hostile takeover? So it would be Soft executives weren't terribly convinced of Vivendi's sincerity regarding the whole No, seriously, seriously, dude, No, I'm not after your company like that just didn't come

across as genuine. I imagine. In two thousand eighteen, after the battle of attrition in which both sides were trying desperately to counter the other, they came to some sort of agreement and Vivindi agreed that it would divest itself of its shares and Ubi software over the course of the next couple of years, and at that point, Vivindi owned more than twenty seven per cent of Ubi Soft.

That's incredible. Vivindy also agreed to a condition that it would not acquire shares a Ubisoft for at least five years. After this transaction, other investors, including the brothers themselves, would buy up some of those Vivendi shares, kind of splitting them up between them and one investor that acquired five percent of all of the shares of Ubisoft was Tencent.

That's the Chinese conglomerate that has stake in multiple companies around the world, and it has created tension in various markets, but that's a story for another time. But they are a significant holder in in the video games industry in general, and this investment represented something of real value for Ubisoft as well. It represented the chance to make a bigger impact in the Chinese market, and that represents billions of

dollars in revenue, so it wasn't an unwelcome investment. While Lubisoft and Vivendi were still jockeying for position in a battle to own the company, Ubisoft kept doing the two things that really it had become known for, publishing video games and growing, expanding the company even more so. It opened up studios in the Philippines, it opened up one in Serbia, and it acquired a mobile game studio in France called catch App. And Ubisoft did shut down one

studio in ten that was Ubisoft Casablanca in Morocco. Uh They said that the way that the video games industry was moving, there was just no real place for that studio anymore, so that one got shut down. But also in a former Ubisoft developer named Maxim Beaudoir wrote a blog post explaining his decision to leave Ubisoft, even though

it was his quote unquote dream job. Now in that post, he revealed that the process of creating a game and Ubisoft was just so gargantuan that it was hard to feel that you were actually contributing anything significant, and he explained that Ubisoft just had so many studios working on each title that development literally never stopped during the week, because while it was quitting time at one studio, there'd be another studio in a different part of the world

where the day was just getting started, and so developers would just be picking right up where the others had been leaving off. And with as many as a thousand people working on a single game, he said, you just couldn't avoid but feel like you were a little cog in a giant machine, and cogs are replaceable, which he said was having a really big negative impact on morale

and motivation. He said that if you get to a point where each person is specializing to such a minute degree because you have just so many different bodies working on this game, then it doesn't take a lot of imagination too to envision a scenario where the company replaces you, because it's a very specific task that you are doing. So he said that that was really demotivating for a

lot of people. He said that these were problems that go along with creating huge games with equally huge teams, and this was not necessarily specific to Ubisoft itself, but rather is an industry problem, and the push to crank out title after title in big franchises perpetuates this problem, and it can burn out developers in the process, and it can also have an effect on gamers who start to feel like they're getting too much of the same

sort of thing. Now, there have been a lot of pieces written about the trend of open world games in general, because those are some of the biggest, most sprawliest games in gaming, and the fact that that has on the

gaming experience. There's been a lot of criticism directed towards games that are huge and open but maybe not that interesting to inhabit or to explore or to play in, or that these games often have so much busy work in the form of like side quests or fetch quests or Lord help you if you have escort mission or or things like that, and they become tedious to play. Anecdotally, I can say at least that there are more than a few games that I've been a really big fan

of that are big and sprawling Like. I love games like Skyrim and Fallout and Assassin's Creed, Black Flag and that kind of thing, but it's actually pretty rare that I finish the storyline of those games. I will pour dozens of hours and I will chase down quests, and eventually I lose steam before I ever see the end of the story. Now, a big part of that is my fault, of course, you know, I owned up to that.

I feel compelled to complete every side quest I can before I move on with the story, because I always worry that if I continue the story, I might miss out, I might go too far to complete certain side quests. And I want to see everything until I'm just tired and I stopped. So I sabotage myself. But I'm not alone.

And recently there's been a growing kind of resistance to this trend of the big sprawling games, or at least there's been a renewed interest in games that are more compact and less dependent on this concept of it's got to be the biggest X game ever, you know, Fallout or sky Rim or Elder Scrolls, I guess I should say. And we're starting to see at least some people push back against that, although the studios are definitely still going

down that pathway. In would be Soft acquire the i P for a free to play game called grow Topia. It acquired Freestyle Games in the UK. They turned that into their own Ubisoft studio, and they opened up new studios in Berlin, in Bordeaux, in another one in Canada, another one in Stockholm, and and it released more games obviously. They released games like Ghost Recon wild Lands, and they

also released a game called for Honor. That last one was actually a new i P, which is kind of interesting, you know that you weren't seeing a lot of new ip s from moviestuft to this point. It was mostly another, you know, another entry in the various franchises, but in this one players control a warrior who belongs to one of four factions. You've got Vikings, You've got European style Nights, You've got Japanese Samurai, and you have Chinese Warriors. And

the game is primarily an online multiplayer action game. There is a single player campaign as well, and the online multiplayer has seasons of faction wars and during the faction war during a season, the activities across all playable platforms of this game determine which factions have control of different territories on the world map, which is kind of a neat idea. And early on there were some technical issues with this game, particularly like if someone left a match early,

it can crash a whole game. But it has since been patched and their ded Kids servers that have improved its stability. Uh, I don't know how healthy the traffic is, Like, I don't know how popular the game is. It does seem like Ubisoft has sort of slowed down in its support of the game. They aren't releasing as much new content for for Honor recently as they hadn't passed, but

it was interesting that they took this risk. In eighteen, UBI Soft would acquire Blue Mammoth Games, which was headquartered here in Atlanta, and they also bought four Studio. They opened up more studios around the world, including yet another in Canada, so many in Canada, another in the Ukraine, and one in India, and it launched Far Cry five and a real quick aside on that one, So Far Cry five moved the action to America and this was

a big departure for the series. In promotional materials, it looked like the antagonists in the game we're going to belong to a far right militia slash cult group, and there was a lot of buzz leading up to the game's release about what sort of political statement the game might make given the real world political climate of the United States, and much of the criticism myself for the game centered on the lack of a real perspective on

anything substantial. Some critics were a bit more devastating in their review than others. For example, Polygon reviews subtitle was a horrible story, ruins and enjoyable world. Yikes. Now, I have not played this game, so I have no stake in this. I don't doesn't do anything for me if it's good or not good. But everything I've seen tells me that I feel like I would kind of agree with that Polygon review based on what I've read. Along

with the complaints about the lack of substance. Was a continuation of a trend of building a game on top of a really heavy set of concepts, but then putting sort of frivolous and silly and arcady type things on top of that, and then on top of that creating a sense that you're a bad person for enjoying the silly things that the game has put in there for your entertainment. I've seen similar stuff in games from other publishers, like the Grand Theft Auto series. I've seen that there too,

But that's arguably a topic for another podcast. Fortunately, I have another podcast that is coming out soon. That's a that's foreshadowing. By two thousand nineteen, Ubisoft head around sixteen thousand developers in its various studios around the world, which is an astoundingly large number of developers. It was producing more Triple A titles than its competitors, sometimes two or three times as many titles per year as their competitors.

How Where, it was also lagging behind its top competitors when it came to certain metrics like the net revenue generated per employee at the company. The financials pointed to sort of a law of diminishing returns. Ubisoft made the choice to postpone half of the titles it had planned to release in twenty nineteen and pushed them back to and the goal here was to give the titles more

time to evolve and develop. Now, generally, Ubisoft had a decent reputation as far as a more typical production problem type approach, like they weren't known for crunch at this stage, not like other companies were, not like Ubisoft had been known for a few years earlier. But in another very critical way, the company's reputation was about to take a huge hit. In twenty a ton of allegations about sexual harassment, assault,

in general toxicity, and Ubisoft's management became public. Like to chronicle all of these allegations would take a full episode and it would get really ugly, but it became clear that there was a deep systemic issue with sexism, misogyny, harassment, abuse, and hiding that abuse within certain divisions of Ubisoft, particularly in Paris and in Montreal, though definitely in other offices as well. Throughout twenty numerous reports surface that detailed a

really awful situation within the company. Numerous women reported that they had either experienced or witnessed firsthand unacceptable and in some cases at least arguably criminal displays of behaviors and

management practices. It also became clear that Ubisoft's HR department had fallen far short of where it needed to be, like it should have been responding to these allegations, but in many cases it seemed as though human resource has existed largely to silence allegations and to protect a group of executives and managers who are kind of insulated from suffering any consequences. And it really did sound a lot like Uber when Uber was at its worst, before that

whole system came crashing down. These accusations went all the way up to the executive level, and a lot of them were aimed at Sair Gascuay himself. Now, as I mentioned, Escoay had served as a creative director at Ubisoft for ages, essentially having the ultimate say about what could or couldn't

go into games. Developers frequently indicated that it was Ascuay who would argue that games should feature male protagonists, and he was also said to have conducted business meetings in places like strip clubs, which I think we can all agree on is not an appropriate place to do business, unless, of course, you work at or with that club in some way, then sure, okay, but it's certainly needed a hostile work environment for a lot of people at the company.

Several women alleged that Ascaway had acted inappropriately with them or with colleagues of theirs, and that he made inappropriate comments sometimes worse, and he allowed for an extremely sexist work environment. There were claims that it was unusual to see pornographic images or videos on computers within his department, and that this was essentially overlooked or perhaps maybe even encouraged, kind of like you know, a fraternity, like the stereotypical

fraternity at a party college. And it was not, as I said, a good look under intense pressure would be soft responded by getting rid of many of those leaders who came under those allegations. Some of them resigned, being told to do that by the company. Essentially some of them were fired. There were questions about whether or not Eve Guillmant knew about these problems within the company, I mean,

he CEO after all. At least a few reporters have suggested that it would be unusual for him not to have known, because some of these complaints stretched back more than a decade now. Among those at Ubisoft who left were Ash roff Ismail, the creative director for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. He left after several uh sexual harassment claims were leveled against him. Maxim Belande, the co founder of Ubisoft Toronto and the one of the vice presidents of the editorial department.

Tommy francois another vice president of Editorial and Creative Services. Janice Mallett, the managing director of Ubisoft Studios in Canada, Cecile Cornet, the head of Global HR, and serge Ascoay himself left the company. On top of these, Michel Ansel, the creator of Raymond and Beyond Good and Evil, would also leave UBI saw on Cell came under fire for

alleged toxic leadership behaviors. Now, as far as I can tell, these did not seem to extend to sexual harassment problems, but that he did create a hostile work environment and was reportedly very difficult to work with. Now, according to the complaints, he would change the requirements of games and and throw development into chaos, and some employees said that he could be really abusive on sell for his part,

denies these allegations. He says they're not accurate, and he would go on to retire from the games industry, including his own studio that he had founded, and go to work on a wildlife sanctuary. And he continues to dispute the claims that had been made against him, since all the complaints would be soft executive leadership have made some

big changes at the company. They created some new positions to oversee workplace culture worldwide, and they created another one that will be in charge of leading initiatives to improve diversity and inclusion within the company. They also announced that bonuses for team leaders are going to be tied to creating positive work environments. Meanwhile, the company continues to conduct internal investigations as it tries to assure shareholders that real

change is happening behind the scenes. This isn't performative at least, that's the argument being made now. On top of all that, there was a recent incident at Ubisoft Montreal. A threatening call of some sort was made to the office or relayed to emergency services, which prompted the evacuation of the Ubisoft Montreal headquarters, with some Ubisoft employees essentially barricading themselves

on the offices rooftop. Initial reports indicated that there was some sort of hostage situation going on, and it was a tense situation for many hours until ultimately authorities determined that the whole thing was prompted by a hoax. There had never been a real rent as of this recording, there is no word on who made that initial call or what motivation they had for doing it. On the horizon, Ubisoft is working on the next Far Cry game, Far

Cry six. That one's due out in UH. They're still work being done on the Beyond Good and Evil two game, which I think is a prequel. UH. There is an update coming to the city building game The Settlers, which I don't think has had a game in that series

for more than a decade. So that's kind of interesting, and I'm sure at some point I will have to do a follow up episode on this series to talk about what Ubisoft has done in the wake of twenty In the meantime, it will be really interesting to see how the company handles itself and whether we will see a new Ubisoft with new games, new characters, new I p new approaches as a result of all this, because arguably it should become easier to work in things that

immediately aligned with saers Ascoway's vision of what games should be. So maybe that means in the long run, we're gonna get games that that break free of those restraints, and that could be really cool, but we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for future topics I should tackle on text Stuff reach out to me. The Twitter handle is text stuff h s W. This concludes our three part series on Ubisoft and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff

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