Because new games come with micro transactions in fucking single player games. Actual good games still get bought like the indiana jones game was amazing and felt like a classic old school game
I’m play games. twenty year old ones.
I dunno why so many people are dunkin on Ubisoft here. Sure, they make shit, but they’re commenting on an industry wide issue.
and it’s not just their industry. People are also going out to the movies less. Restaurant profits are down as people are staying in more often. I haven’t checked, but I imagine bars are likely struggling right now as well. It’s almost like Western economies are reaching a breaking point, and people are unable to afford anything beyond the bare necessities.
Do you want to know why? Read what people are saying. Ubi’s DRM policies have caused many, many people to lose access to their games. I have at least 4 Ubi games in my Steam Library that I can’t play. So … what’s that? A good $150 they owe me that I’ll never see? Gee. Why would I dislike them? Because they personallyh fuked me.
No, people are playing other games. Ones that aren’t half-assed, overpriced, and infected with DRM malware. This is a U problem, Ubisoft.
Ubisofts full releases this year:
- AC: Shadows
- Just Dance 2026
- Anno 117
So literally all sequels. They’re just hoping people will dish out their annual franchise spending.
But the bar is so high these days. Spending millions on graphics just isn’t sufficient.
I think Ubisoft is poking at a legit issue here. A few games ‘snowball,’ especially with stuff trending on social media, and gamers spread themselves out less these days.
…Ubisoft are the absolute worst entity to say it, but still. It’s not just them that’s saying it:
There is just so much choice it’s insane, every day there’s dozens of new games out. There’s some real gems in the indie game space, I feel like gaming is kinda following how music went now. All the major labels are putting out crap, you have to look at the indie labels for good stuff, but that can be a lot of work in itself.
+1
An anecdote: I know a working couple, well off in a good house, young, no kids, like video games, nerdy to the point they self host stuff… Yet they don’t game as much this past year or two. They don’t watch as much TV either. Work drains them, so more entertainment time now consists of favored YouTubers before bed.
…What I’m getting at is that maybe the ‘gaming population’ is more drained from life, in this age? Especially when you factor in hunting for a good game, especially when a common preference is to be served choices via algorithms instead.
This tracks.
I’m so drained from work now. They keep cutting out teams and expecting more output anyway.
I changed the games I play, I no longer play RPG games that take a huge time investment and defer to Arcadey indie games I can pick up and put quickly.
Yes I’d love to play Dark Souls to completion, for example, but I don’t have the energy for that.
I also don’t engage in grind mechanics in games at all anymore. Id rather play something skill / reflex based rather than putting time investments to level up woodcutting to 99.
I’d definitely agree with that, I was a much bigger gamer when I was a kid/teen/YA, the only real franchises were Pac Man, Mario and Donkey Kong, so the field was wide open with all sorts of new and innovative games, the sorts of games that are still coming out but just harder to find. I feel like there’s a lot of people just looking a the AAA titles being announced in the presses and then just being underwhelmed when there’s a lot more going on, but as you said there’s a lot more to life as an adult so that can be too much time. On the upside, a lot of those indie games are much shorter so you can find time to play them.
And what I’m getting at is the era.
As examples, work got a lot harsher post COVID, once mandatory return-to-work kicked in. It’s almost like they’re trying to get people to quit. Interest rates went up, costs went up, financial pressure went up. Political conflict with older generations in the family is going up too.
IDK where you are; this is just my perspective from the US. But it seems like video gaming could be an early casualty of all that pressure.
You make a good point about announcements too. I feel like the video game news pipelines is a little muddy, with all the ‘oldschool’ written outlets having shrunken so much?
Yeah I gotcha, I suppose there’s two types of people in those situations: those who will put down the games and see them as a distraction or waste of time in the face of all the other things they have to do and all the serious/bad things going on in the world, or those who dive full on in and escape the world through gaming. Another perspective, games used to be light and fun, hella challenging, but still fun, you could pick them up and put them down. Nowadays if you stop playing a game for a week or two you almost have to start over, at least that’s how it is for me with my sieve brain. I’m also in the US.
That’s what years of screwing customers over does. Ubisoft is no longer a brand people associate with quality products.
This has been the case for as long as i can remember (since the early 2000s)
The reputation carried them for a while because they still sell older games, plus the occasional good new game.
“Consumers are playing fewer games, playing them for longer, and as a result, outside of a few notable exceptions, many new games are struggling to stand out and achieve the sales they may once have had, whilst the market is more volatile and the potential for any specific title less predictable as a result,”
Really, this is about buying fewer Ubisoft games.
Edit: also someone is trying to get out ahead of the next quarterly report, especially since we’re in x-mas buying season right now.
I’ll keep telling this story as long as it remains relevant:
A few years back, I picked up AC: Black Flag in a steam sale but never got around to playing it. Well, recently I’ve been trying to clear my backlog so I decided to install it and give it a play through, because honestly the game seems like it would be right up my alley.
Unfortunately, if you have not played the game on Steam before, there was an update at some point that makes the game unplayable. And I don’t mean it’s lagging, or there are graphical issues, I mean the game won’t fucking launch. It will ask you to log into your Ubisoft account, and then once you do, nothing happens. If you launch the game again… It will ask you to log in to your Ubisoft account, and the issue repeats. Apparently this is a known issue with no fix. If you’ve previously played the game on the PC you’re using, it will remember some settings and launch. But if it’s your first time? You are SOL.
Thanks Ubisoft!
Of course it had to happen to the best game to come out of the AC franchise. I freaking love black flag.
You should ask for a refund, chances are you’ll get it after explaining this ridiculous situation to Steam support
It’s this bloat and DRM that keeps me from playing any of their games now.
Why does someone have to sign in to a single player game?!?!
Fewer of your games, maybe.
Yep. Indie games are boomin as usual :D
TBH the story with indies seems to be “a few hits have it really good, but the vast majority of indie devs are struggling”
…So I wouldn’t generalized too much just because Hades 2 and Silksong are doing well.
The more accurate picture is “A/AA games are doing great in terms of creative&cultural output with many mainstream successes despite being completely choked out by out-of-touch AAA studios capturing most capital investment”. 2025 has objectively been a great year for (semi-)indie games and a humiliating slap in the face for AAA studios.
But yeah I would still strongly advise against switching to a gamedev career regardless of whether the industry eventually sees reason and shifts away from AAA to AA. As with the rest of the entertainment industry, it’s ontologically exploitative and is famously a dream-crushing machine. Too many starry-eyed kids to be a healthy job market.
Someone needs to tell Ubisoft to git gud.
They should try making good games and putting them on Steam and GOG and not their shitty launcher.
It’s so satisfying watching one of the worst actors in the gaming industry eat shit and die. I hope Activision, EA, and the other purveyors of overpriced, malware-laden, microtransaction slopware can meet the same fate one day too.
Download our shitty launcher, make an account, connect to the internet, buy the ultimate gold deluxe premium spunky cock edition, give us kernel level access to your computer! Now you can play the 1000th game we’ve released this year, and it will be vapid shit like every other one.
Even if their games were better, I still wouldn’t buy them. They are corrupt and disgusting.
Valid :) I wouldn’t either.
I’m pretty sure Ubisoft isn’t the company you go to for a focus on the customer and a thumb on the pulse of the industry. They were one of the first to require this authenticated umbilical to their servers or the game would crash, while operating from a country and era where internet wasn’t 100% solid. Many non-urban areas around me now will suffer disconnections and blips constantly as over-used infrastructure drops a random packet here and there. They know this, they knew this, and still.
Given they’ve always presented a little self-centered, I can imagine what they’re really saying is that from their point of view that Ubisoft is struggling because their customer base is dwindling from a lack of stable, playable games.
Maybe you could try putting some more money into great writers and storytellers instead of GRAPHICS GRAPHICS GRAPHICS, but no.
And then the graphics are still shit anyway, except the game now performs at <30fps on the GPU that replaced one of your kidneys
“Graphics are good enough now that literally anything in your imagination can be brought to life”
“Ok, lets make everything look as close to reality as possible :D”That reminds me, I saw some Pac Man collection the other day, the old 2600/7800/arcade games, it was a few games and some history stuff, it was 17 GIGABYTES, FOR PACMAN.
I’m guessing all the old games were most likely less than 50mb, if you include everything up to SNES, guess if you make AI upscaled images you can bloat that space.
I haven’t slowed down on gaming, I just don’t buy ubisoft bullshit
Maybe if it got rid of insisting on logging on to a Ubisoft launcher, intrusive DRM, in-game stores, buggy releases, and formulaic map exploration it could do better. That won’t happen though because it’s a piece of shit corporation that won’t give up an ounce of control for the fiduciary sake of its stockholders. I hope it shutters soon so the gaming landscape can heal a little more.
