Ubisoft director blames gamers, says they've been exposed as 'non-decent humans'
Ubisoft director blames gamers, says they've been exposed as 'non-decent humans'
The Monetization Director at Ubisoft has said industry figures vocalizing their disagreements with Ubisoft revealed themselves as 'clearly non-decent'.
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How can you wish a company to fail
Very easily, actually.
I want most all big companies to fail. Those running it ruined the companies, and the planet. Fuck em and let them all burn and rot.
These companies have never been loyal to consumers, why the hell should anyone give a damn if they exist tomorrow. Not like they will actually honor their warranties anyways, or they just replace garbage with more garbage.
I mean, a bit of context may go a long way here.
How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the produce does not please you is beyond me. We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.
I get it, pithy joke, why let it pass, but still.
The context is irrelevant because nobody wants Ubisoft to fail because they don't make content that caters to them. It's a strawman argument. Does this Director of Monetization want to uplift his competitors? Absolutely not. He would love if all his competitors failed. Yet he gets on his high horse saying we must uplift his corporate venture to extract as much money as possible because we're all in this together??
I would be a lot more willing to agree with you if "nobody" hadn't been driving a massive harassment and hate campagin complaining about "DEI". I mean, it pops up explicitly right in the comments of the piece linked here. "Nobody" has been busy.
I can't believe we haven't learned anything since "it's about ethics in games journalism". "It's about monetization in AAA games" now, apparently.
FWIW, I don't know this guy, but I don't believe for a second that he would love it if his competitors failed. People have a wild, distorted idea of how AAA game development works and how people making it (leadership included) look at these things. The guy went online to say he's frustrated at seeing industry insiders siding with an online hatred campaign and people are all dogpiling because hey, his title sounds like the thing I don't like, so the assholes being assholes online must be justified this time.
Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences. Corporate dynamics are more than capable of producing dysfunctional results without an evil mastermind pulling the strings.
Also FWIW, I mostly agree with him. If you're in the games industry get the hell off of LinkedIn comments at all (as Chassard just learned the hard way), but especially don't be on LinkedIn cheering for colleagues doing badly. That's just rude and unprofessional. You are allowed to keep your opinions offline and should exercise that right when it comes to commenting on your colleagues' livelihoods.
I can't believe we haven't learned anything since "it's about ethics in games journalism". "It's about monetization in AAA games" now, apparently.
I totally agree that there has been a hate campaign about DEI right-wing complains, but there's two subjects that came to head at the same time here because it was on the same big title:
Star Wars Outlaw and AC Shadows had the same business model, Star Wars showed that it failed, and Ubisoft got spooked and said they'd have another look at the monetization model for AC. People did get pissed at both games when their business models with passes and editions everywhere were revealed.
It's just that AC also had at the same time the matter of racist and misogynist hate because of the protagonists. I don't think this happened on Star Wars, and the fact that it failed too shows that it isn't the only complain people are having against Ubisoft.
Apparently the monetization guy is stepping on the minority hate campaign subject, he's the one conflating the two problems here just because his job title. We shouldn't forget that Ubisoft did pull an infuriating and deplorable stunt with that monetization model.
Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences.
Sure, most people involved in these projects do. But for any given team, if you told me you knew for a fact that exactly one person in that team wasn't, and asked me who I thought that person was, I'd guess "the money guy" every single time.
Right.
Except "the money guy" isn't the monetization designer, which is what it seems this one guy has been his entire career. "The money guy" has some nondescript title, like "head of sales", or is just the CFO of the company. Or isn't even part of the company and just sits in a board with a bunch of other people and periodically shouts at the CEO to make more money.
Bet Chassard was super glad when he got promoted from being a game economy designer in a bunch of mobile games and got a fancy "monetization director" title instead. Irony is a bitch, because you KNOW he wouldn't be getting half the crap he's getting if he still had a job with "designer" in the name.
For the record, economy designers, monetization designers and, presumably, monetization directors, whatever the difference may be, have as much of a chance at being nice guys who care about their jobs and are attuned to their audiences as anybody else. I don't know this guy, and I don't know if he's any of those things, but what he wrote doesn't suggest that he's not. If people dogpiling think they're delivering karmic justice or disproving his point, they're almost certainly doing neither.
Well, surely we can agree that it's an unfortunate job title at least - it's easy to see why the people are dogpiling on him. If it actually were the money guy saying this, I assume you'd have no objection to the public reaction?
It depends on what the money guy is saying and doing. I have no need to rag on people because of their job title if they're not messing it up. Valve has had economists working on monetization for them, you don't see audiences publicly stating that they're sure that guy is an asshole because they work on monetization.
And no, it's not an unfortunate job title. This may come as a shock to people, but you DO need money to make videogames. And however you're going to monetize yoru game, you need someone looking at that. You may not like how they've monetized AssCreed or Outlaws or The Crew or whatever, but they also have The Division and XDefiant and Rainbow Six Siege and Brawlhalla. I would be shocked if they didn't have a monetization design department.
Look, Ubisoft is struggling, particularly on the expensive AAA stuff that is their traditional bread and butter. I would say they are very late to the party at breaking free from their framework mindset where games are largely built on a bit of a template. They need a new approach to coming up with game concepts, if only for PR's sake. But please, please, stop feeding the anti-woke mob's bad faith nonsense and stop trying to find indivduals to try to pin structural anger about certain corners of game development. We can -should- be better than that as a community.
Also, good for them for reversing course on the The Crew server stuff and for doing PoP The Lost Crown, that game is awesome and underrated. Would love to see them diversify into more mid-size stuff like that, because they nail it suprisingly often when they do.