The WSJ Covers Video Games? Ubisoft in the Spotlight

The Wall Street Journal covers video games, because video games are Big Business. Usually. By way of MSN: Ubisoft Shares Slump After Investor Urges Assassin’s Creed Maker to Go Private

Shares of Ubisoft Entertainment plunged Monday after a minority investor called for the maker of the Assassin’s Creed videogame franchise to go private and install a new management team.

Ubisoft is a European (French) game studio. They have produced such games as the Assassin's Creed franchise, a few Avatar games, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction, the Far Cry series, and more. They just recently released Star Wars Outlaws, which failed. It didn't die a horrible, sudden death, like Concord, but it failed. Thanks to a lot of reasons; some of the reasons being Woke insanity, but mostly about the game being broken.

The protagonist in the game is clearly a gender-swapped Han Solo. Not satisfied with that, they built the model for the game on a beautiful actress, but made the character in the game ugly. Why? Because you are sexist for not knowing that the "male gaze" is evil, and so all women in video games, and movies and TV, need to be uglified. (Look at what they did to Sydney Sweeney in Madame Web.) As you can imagine, this did not go over well, even before the problems with the game-play came to light.

Star Wars Outlaws has been in development since 2018. A team of 600 developers and designers from 11 Ubisoft studios worked on the game. I can't find any info on the actual spend to build the game. It is continually listed as "Big Budget," and it is listed as having the highest marketing budget Ubisoft ever allocated. These games typically cost anywhere from $100 million to $500 million to produce. A top quality, well-received game can bring in double the production cost, or more in short order

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released in 2011, cost $100 million to produce, and brought in $620 million in earnings. Red Dead Redemption 2 cost somewhere between $80 million and $500 million, sources vary, but it earned around $1 billion. Like I said, big business. (Reference for the bugets/earnings at this link.)

The next game from Ubisoft set for release is Assassin's Creed: Shadows, due out in November. Fans of that series had wanted a version set in Japan almost from day 1, expecting to be able to play as a ninja, fighting samurai. What they got was a black samurai, of questionable historical provenance. Why? "You are racist for even asking why." In other words, because the Woke have taken over Ubisoft. People who study this kind of thing have cut their sales projections for that game significantly.

There were a few smaller titles that were set to release in this fiscal year (ending in March 2025), but they have been delayed to "meet players’ expectations." Translation: the games had as many or more problems than the Star Wars game just released, and we don't want to be the laughingstock again. And people are laughing at the problems in Star Wars Outlaws. For example see STAR WARS OUTLAWS IS A MASTERPIECE! That is 11 minutes, and highlights problems in both game design and implementation, and serious problems with storytelling.