Ubisoft CEO Defends Skull and Bones' $70 Price - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  Simple solution.

  Wait, why do people still buy games from UBIsoft in the first place? If you're maso, get a dominatrix... ok, granted, a good one will cost more than 70 bucks, looking at it that way...

  • 4 hidden comments

  • Ubisoft games are for people who like to spend money, and keep spending money in high amounts for small amounts of additional content. Also, they are for people who have purchased VERY stable internet connections, since the slightest hiccup trips their DRM and boots you out of the game (or otherwise blocks your progress until you restart).

    I am not in that target market, but apparently it is a large market. Clearly somebody is still buying games from Ubisoft.

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    But only pay $70 and the dominatrix will beat you a second time!

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    It wasn't a gamer complaining about the price, it was some kind of businessman or investor that stands to make money from the company. He's asking why not make it free to play so they have more users and make more money. This caller will probably never play the game regardless, even though he can likely get it for free.

    I agree with everything else you said though, fuck Ubisoft. I won't be buying it because I have self-respect.

• The playtesters who have been invited to try many hours of supervised playtest all report that the game is pretty devoid of content beyond the core mechanics. It's missing a ton of stuff that their own AAA title AC:BlackFlag already had, or they have locked it away during the press playtest sessions. Of course playtesting can't cover storyline or plot development, but what they did cover was a janky and mostly boring repetitive mess.

• Don't worry, that $70 is unlike any other game purchase you've ever made because as this asshat has overtly stated previously, you don't own the game. Fuck you, idiot.

• If that's the quality of their AAAA games, best not to even look at their AAA games. We'll have to wait until they release AAAAA games.

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    'Fuck it, we're going to five As'
    
    Razer blades, 8 minute minute abs all suffered the same fate. Even volume can go to 11.

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      Obviously, they're copying the design (and marketing) principles used to make razors. [slate.com]

• by Mascot ( 120795 ) on Friday February 09, 2024 @04:09PM (#64228418)

  I'd heard nothing about this game until seemingly every streamer on the planet got sponsored by them. It took me about thirty seconds to notice it was from Ubisoft, and lose any interest. Ubisoft does not make games because anyone there wants to make games (that's obviously an exaggeration, someone there genuinely wants to make games because they love games, but none of those people get to make significant decisions), they make games for no other reason than to maximize income. This does not make for good games.

  I feel quite grateful we now live in an online age where shelf space is no longer the gatekeeper of games. Coincidentally, I'm sure, that did conveniently somewhat coincide with the rise of "money is all that matters" games mega corporations.

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    On the one hand, there isn't anything wrong with doing things for money. We all need money to survive, some of us have mouths to feed other than our own, and making popular entertainment products is just as good a way of earning money as any other.

    In theory they will only make money if their product satisfies the desires of their audience. Their income is proof that they did something right.

    On the other hand, Ubisoft has a history of consumer hostility, intrusive DRM, in-game ads forced on players, loads

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      My point wasn't that there's something wrong with doing things for money, it's that there is something wrong with doing things with no consideration for anything other than money. "...for no other reason than to maximize income," to quote myself.

      I disagree with the premise that making a profit necessarily indicates they're doing something right. E.g. them making a profit is not convincing evidence that drug dealers do something right (I'm not saying none of them do, but you'd need something other than them

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        It is ironic that drugs are demonized for being addictive whereas games are celebrated for it (and sometimes even state "addictive" in their marketing materials).

        But my "something right" was really meant from the perspective of their target audience. People aren't buying their games at gunpoint, after all.

        It's true that some people make a profit without contributing anything. They outright steal, or skim off the top. But in the case of Ubisoft, they make their money by selling games. People are buying t

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          I don't think we're really disagreeing all that much. Games companies are obviously not drug dealers, but many are pretty much gambling establishments at this point, and their focus is more on those mechanisms than on gaming. Talking about "addictive gameplay" back in the NES or C64 days, was talking about something very different to today's addictive gameplay, and the companies are intentionally preying on susceptible brains.

          The end result is that gameplay is kind of irrelevant, it's just a vehicle to deli

• I like the old paradigm of plunking down my $70 for a finite amount of content. As my "dollars per hour of entertainment" drops over time, I gradually get satisfied. Once it's under a dollar, I feel like I got my money's worth.

• Reminds me when Todd Howard asked by a critic about Starfield's poor performance and why they never optimized Starfield, he responded "We did! It's a next gen game!". I'm sorry, a next gen game doesn't use a old and outdated engine.

  Point being, Ubi is gaslighting you as hard as, if not harder than, Bethesda.

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    You've got to go back 10-15+ years to find a good title from most big game studios, at this point. Ubisoft, Activision, and Bethesda are the worst offenders...

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    Wrong argument. Engines can be modified and updated over their lives quite easily. Compare that to Cyberpunk2077 which was built on the RedEngine (Witcher 2) with some tweaks and updates for graphics. It was however very much a nextgen game.

    The bigger critique is that Starfield does not look or act like a nextgen game. Regardless of the engine, the framerate is garbage given the graphics being produced. The load times are garbage. The gameplay is.... well okay let's stick to topic of what makes nextgen;-)

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    Between inflation, the increasing complexity of modern games, developer crunch etc, sure, there's a legit argument to be had about the standard price point of games (don't forget gaming is also a much larger market than it was 30 years ago). But a live service game from Ubisoft of all people is not going to help that argument.

  • Re: SNES

    $49.99/$50 was common. When Street Fighter 2 came out on SNES (there was thr first release of classic SF2 on SNES alone followed by SF2 Turbo on SNES/Genesis the following summer) I remember it was $60, as well.

    BUT as more games came out - look how many fighting games alone emerged in the 2 years after Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat made their console debut - those prices predictably dropped. Now we are seeing prices increase back to old levels with games that utilize technology of today but aren't as

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      My first google search on SNES prices shows a store front with pricing labels that has Street Fighter II at $70 https://www.reddit.com/r/snes/... [reddit.com]

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    You used to only play once when you bought a game. It was also a real, tangible, object you could resell give away, ignore, or play for the next 30 years. It wasn't some ephemeral thing that could disappear at any moment.

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    On the other hand gaming was a relatively niche hobby at the time. It was something the geeks did and really no one else.

    Now essentially everyone does it, and a game costs the same to develop whether you sell 10 copies or 10 million copies. It skews what you 'need' to sell the game for in order to make a profit.

• If you want to justify cost show me your accounting books. Anything else is pathetic distraction.

• Skull and Bones has cost us over $7 trillion in the past few decades.

• Why they put this thing out when it's clearly a disaster they got a bunch of government money in particular from Singapore that funds several game studios and their contractually required to release the game even though it's painfully obvious it's not going to make much of any money.
  
  Now you never know fallout 76 looks like it was going to be a unmitigated disaster and it has some of the nastiest game mechanics I've ever seen up to and including paid repair kits but it's become very profitable for Bethes

• That's a horrible excuse. This has "No Man's Sky" flop written all over it.

  If it was that great, they'd not be trying to hide the gameplay.

  Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 is like, $30 now, and keeps getting more value...

  We're at a bit of a pivotal point where game studios are no longer able to ride stock prices for increasing investment in game development, inflation is high (pushing up prices in general), and there's an over-saturation of horrible games shipped as AAA titles. When it comes down to it, most of th

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    You mean was high. Not only are things back to normal, we've even seen some deflation in categories like food, energy, and other common item categories.

    Computer software and accessories is down more than 8%.

    My wife is the game player in the family, but the only games she's put more that a few hours into in the last five years are a Zelda game and Animal Crossing. The rest just collect dust.

    Kids only seem interested in spending money in free games, which seems absurd to me.

    I liked the shareware model. If y

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    I tend to think of that era of PC gaming as "properly targeted." Most games today are made for consoles first. With the PC ports either made after the game is mostly design / feature complete on console or after the console exclusivity contract expires.
    
    With that design choice comes very heavy limitations on the PC side. I.e. You'll never take advantage of PC only capabilities. (Because they don't exist on consoles.) Your game's complexity and detail is limited by capabilities of the lowest common denomin

• Yeah, so they'll lock you into some new bullshit DRM crap. But, hell, you don't own what you paid for, so that's OK.

• Does this game, like other Ubisoft games, required having a Ubisoft account to play, even for offline? Yes? Then I am not going to play it even for free.

• The review from my usual source said "May actually not be crap" and "special interest group only". That is more like "indie" and certainly not "quadruple-A". Guess this is "Big Lie" marketing at work.

• I just played their "open beta" for about twenty minutes. This thing is shit and doesn't introduce anything new at all. AAAA? Good Lord. Sure as hell not worth $70. I pray to God that the next Elder Scrolls isn't anything like this or I might choke on my own vomit. What this tool doesn't understand is that the concept of "AAA" is not static; the standard grows higher as technology does the same. There is no way in hell I'd consider this an AAA game, much less some kind of AAAA. If you fancy the pirate ficti

• This one goes to quadruple.