Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.
Seventy is good bordering on great. What the hell is this trend of everyone thinking seven out of ten is garbage when it’s better than most? Seventy is a very good score. I understand that everyone says this and that, everyone says they underperformed but nobody has any hard data, and all the people that have actually played the games have a positive experience. I also don’t know why everyone is automatically attributing layoffs to poor sales when literally every game company and media company and just fuckin every company is doing the same. Clearly ubisoft is suffering financially, but it isn’t because they make bad games. Literally everything consumer-hostile practice they have other companies do more aggressively. Ubisoft doesn’t hold a candle to the mtx fuckery of rockstar and bethesda but nobody trashes their games like the Ubisoft dogpile. Like yeah, the games are derivative and remix mechanics ad nauseum but they’re high quality for the most part. You get a shit load of content, the writing is always solid, they’re fun to play. I just can’t help feeling like most of the people circlejerking Ubisoft hate were probably active in gamergate.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold.
There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.
I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.
Yeah but we weren’t talking about the games costing more than they made, we were talking about the general online opinion that Ubisoft makes shitty games when they consistently make quality games. You’re on to something with your point about the Ubisoft open world formula having generally lost favor among the masses. It seems like modern gamers that want single player experiences are looking for more focused and innovative narratives over curated playgrounds, though most of the money seems to be in online competitive games. Anyway I’m just pushing back on the assertion that Ubisoft makes bad games because that’s nonsense. They make good games.
Your first question was “Didn’t both those games review and sell well?” The answer is no. That’s what we were talking about, in this thread about Ubisoft laying off thousands of people.
For what it’s worth, I think they made a number of good games, but there’s far too much that’s far too similar between them. By the time Black Flag came out the first time, I was tired of the checklist open world format, and it’s why something like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring will pop off when it addresses what people like me find lacking in the Ubisoft format. These days when I get into an open world game that adheres to the same principles as Ubisoft (like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, for instance), it’s often despite the format, not because of it.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.
Seventy is good bordering on great. What the hell is this trend of everyone thinking seven out of ten is garbage when it’s better than most? Seventy is a very good score. I understand that everyone says this and that, everyone says they underperformed but nobody has any hard data, and all the people that have actually played the games have a positive experience. I also don’t know why everyone is automatically attributing layoffs to poor sales when literally every game company and media company and just fuckin every company is doing the same. Clearly ubisoft is suffering financially, but it isn’t because they make bad games. Literally everything consumer-hostile practice they have other companies do more aggressively. Ubisoft doesn’t hold a candle to the mtx fuckery of rockstar and bethesda but nobody trashes their games like the Ubisoft dogpile. Like yeah, the games are derivative and remix mechanics ad nauseum but they’re high quality for the most part. You get a shit load of content, the writing is always solid, they’re fun to play. I just can’t help feeling like most of the people circlejerking Ubisoft hate were probably active in gamergate.
There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.
I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.
Yeah but we weren’t talking about the games costing more than they made, we were talking about the general online opinion that Ubisoft makes shitty games when they consistently make quality games. You’re on to something with your point about the Ubisoft open world formula having generally lost favor among the masses. It seems like modern gamers that want single player experiences are looking for more focused and innovative narratives over curated playgrounds, though most of the money seems to be in online competitive games. Anyway I’m just pushing back on the assertion that Ubisoft makes bad games because that’s nonsense. They make good games.
Your first question was “Didn’t both those games review and sell well?” The answer is no. That’s what we were talking about, in this thread about Ubisoft laying off thousands of people.
For what it’s worth, I think they made a number of good games, but there’s far too much that’s far too similar between them. By the time Black Flag came out the first time, I was tired of the checklist open world format, and it’s why something like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring will pop off when it addresses what people like me find lacking in the Ubisoft format. These days when I get into an open world game that adheres to the same principles as Ubisoft (like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, for instance), it’s often despite the format, not because of it.