In the race to secure the title of “worst gaming company” and have a shot at “worst company overall”, Ubisoft has made strides, most recently deciding that their games don’t have enough pop-up ads in them telling people to buy more of their games, so they can probably get even more pop-up ads in those games as well. And then acting like it was a “technical issue” because clearly having working pop-up ads in a game is a glitch. And this is on top of all the other “technical issues” including those that aren’t even close to computers, such as terrible treatment of employees, getting endlessly sucked into the crypto hype, games ending up as mediocre for trying to do too much and yet not enough, still forcing people to install their proprietary launcher regardless of where the game was bought, and the list just keeps growing with offenses of all scales.
Long story short I haven’t really wanted to buy Ubisoft games since they started forcing Uplay into everything probably about a decade or longer ago at this point, and the few I ended up getting on Steam after learning about this were exceptions to the clause without that arbitrary requirement. And then there’s whatever I got on console mostly secondhand, primarily anything related to Just Dance with a few other random finds. And as far as picking up secondhand versions of Just Dance for cheap once the new version came out, they even put an end to that by turning it into a live service thing with each new “version” now just being a song pack for the base program. Granted it was pretty much that way before as rhythm games tend to do, and environmentally speaking I’d think it best for the annual sports games to go that route as well given how little seemingly changes between those versions (especially noticeable on Switch and its literal copy-paste FIFA versions), but still. They also still have the “physical” copies of Just Dance now which are literally a code in a box, so therefore not physical aside from getting a game box that may or may not hold an actual physical game even after the fact depending on how it’s molded.
I don’t think I got any Assassin’s Creed games by buying them. I’m pretty sure they were all giveaways that went into the Uplay account I had after dealing with Far Cry Blood Dragon that I’ve largely never touched, aside from using Odyssey as one of several benchmarks whenever I had to test something with a video card. I hear Black Flag is good in terms of the series but we’ll see if I get around to that. Or really a lot of Ubisoft games that take the whole “open world with a billion collectibles and a scattering of side missions” approach. I have also played a bit of Watch Dogs 2 (also one of the many games I somehow got free in that account) just to see what it was like and I don’t see myself going back to that anytime soon, even if that was the best of the series from what I hear from some folks.
Of course as far as modern Ubisoft goes, there’s still some interesting things, like the Mario and Rabbids games which mixes the two together into a decent strategy game, at the cost of needing to tolerate the presence of Rabbids, since as far as actual monetary cost these games go fairly cheap more often than a usual Nintendo game. I haven’t bothered with those, but I did give Starlink a playthrough some years back when the non-toys-to-life Switch download version was on sale at some point for the sake of seeing how Star Fox was involved in that, in terms of Ubisoft-Nintendo crossovers. Then they apparently had an adult animated show, produced by animators who have done very adult animation things previously, involving a weird franchise crossover of some type that was also well-received. And then they made NFTs of it because attempts at money again. And there’s still plans to release a straight up gay as all heck yaoi manga based on it because that’s where the money really is. Long story short I don’t really know what they’re doing now aside from throwing everything at the wall.
It’s not even much of an argument that AAA gaming has on average become a pain in the ass for everyone involved, from terrible work conditions to quite average end products designed by numbers, or things just being inconvenient for anyone not doing a specific thing related to spending more money. Things like wanting to play a singleplayer campaign mode in a game where the multiplayer takes priority, including being the thing that loads in first, and needing to more likely now switch to another program entirely to play through the campaign. Something I encountered most recently playing Halo Infinite from Game Pass but I’ve also seen in later Call of Duty games when playing those campaigns. While there were a number of highly anticipated games releasing this year, and several ended up being at least decent, on top of games that just happened to also come out this year which were also well-received, there’s still a lot of issues with big games that released as usual. Things being overhyped and mediocre largely, and that’s just the games themselves. Whatever role that plays in terms of the apparent workforce collapse in the industry is probably purely monetary decisions as usual, where a game doesn’t sell a quintillion copies because that was somehow expected and now a studio no longer exists and so on. It probably also has something to do with “AI” generative algorithms being a hyped up tool to make work more profitable by largely removing the human component as well as their entire job potentially. Or they just blew way too much on crypto crap and don’t want to cut executive level payouts.