Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
I remember when Ubisoft was a logo I liked seeing on my gaming screen.
Now it just looks like a flushing toilet.
I can never unsee that now.
Maybe the dog ate their homework?
Either way, he recommended that everyone “freak the fuck out for the next few days and speculate as much as possible until they announce something,”
Advice after my own heart. Freaking out and speculating are always the best move.
But how do the shareholders feel?
The only games in my Steam library that I can’t play are Ubisoft.
Fuk Ubi. Forever. I would be happy if they went under.The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.
Just emulate them.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
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.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up???
By treating their paying customers like worthless trash/criminals/scum/pirates/etc. Which is what Ubisoft has spent the past 10 years doing.
They should use prices of $200, 250, and 300 instead of the $70, 110, and 130 AAA reskinned games. That would work. /s
I like the way you think.
Charge the morons as much as they’re willing to pay!
Saudi Arabia:
e-sports washing
I don’t think video game companies should have gotten this big and/or complex……
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.
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.
The last line you said is top notch and sums it up well.
A lot of very confused people here who think an earnings delay means ubi havent made much money. Cant say if they have or not, but if they havent thats still not a reason for this kind of delay
It’s not that, it’s the trade halt that points to something major (and bad for them) happening.
They haven’t been doing too well recently. The trade halt is because they’re afraid that everybody would read the halting of the report as admission they’re barely afloat and start dumping shares, killing the company.
Right, If the truth is theyre barely afloat theyre not going to change anything by delaying the report. The time its reporting has passed.
Which is what leads me to believe that they caught an error in the report and needed to re-print it. Halting it now wouldn’t change anything financially.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
When the bubble pops it will be destruction on a scale we’ve never seen before. The size of this mistake is absolutely staggering.
The later it pops the worse it will be.
I suggest you play some classics.
Indie games pale in comparison.
What are some examples of classics and indies you have in mind?
Play Symphony of the Night instead of the indie knockoff.
The indie market is just another tool to reduce people’s standards.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Right, Terraria and Stardew Valley constantly releasing new content for free is lowering standards… 🙄
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
Don’t forget AA, doing pretty good too.
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.
Genuine curiosity: does 3D really give more opportunities for asset reuse than 2D does?
This exactly what happens when you rely on rhetoric, instead of you know, making games that people like.
Wait…you can just do that?
You can do whatever you want there, as long as you are ok with the penalties.
The Ubisoft trading community are coping to justify holding on to their tanking investments. It’s a gambler doubling down on losing.
Christ, how the mighty Ubisoft has fallen. They will go the way of EA and become a spyware company for the decadent Arab royals. I’m just crying that Ubisoft made some of my favourite games growing up and look what they have done to my boy-- a rotting zombie 🥲
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.
In the Ubisoft trading community that I mentioned, some folks blamed UbiSoft’s downfall for “being woke”. As if Ubisoft’s blind chasing of money, abandoning most of their IP, selling broke products, and last but not least an executive telling consumers to get used to not owning games are not bigger factors.
Ubisoft has been shit for a very long time.
I still recoil from the memory of Far Cry 3 dropping in the middle of the game because thier launcher had an issue, three times in one hour. Which reset my progress. Uninstall, never bought shit from them again.
There AAA games.
Then there’s one AAAA game.
Next must be the AAAAA game they’re working on. It’s an extraction shooter.
AAAAA
The sound one makes when they’re forced to 100% Ubishit’s sandbox games.
What do you mean markers spread everywhere isn’t gameplay?
Then there’s one AAAA game.
I mean, they claim there’s one, but evidence says otherwise. Them spending a lot on their shitty arena shooter with boats didn’t make it any higher quality.
Roguelike Deckbuilder Extraction Shooter.
