Ubisoft will have to get used to people not owning their games.
Womp womp
I hate graphs that don’t start the Y axis at zero.
That said, fuck ubisoft.
That’s pretty normal for financial charts like this though.
And it’s dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.
Jesus fuck no, it’s a valid graph. It shows the relative trend over time and the sudden change. It may show less of a change if it was zero based, but a drastic change that is well off the normal trend is important to visualize. Also like, all exchanges have a toggle to flip to the zero based.
Look at this thread and realize that it’s just a lie. You can show the exact same information with a starting at zero graph, but won’t be able to push the “stock is tanking!” panic point. Publishers and marketers do this on purpose to manipulate headlines. This is why the stock market is mostly just high stakes gambling. No one involved is making rational decisions, just moving from panic to mania like psychotic patients.
The stock is tanking. 20% is a huge drop for any massive company. Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this? From my very rough calculations, Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop. That’s more than any fine they’ve had.
The worst day in Stock Market history was Black Thursday, the beginning of the Great Recession. The market only dropped 11% that day. (Somebody call me out if I got those numbers slightly wrong, that’s from Wikipedia). These are massive numbers, that I don’t think you fully appreciate or understand. The stock market usually deals in single digit or more likely fractional amounts of change. Double digit changes are a huge deal.
Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop.
So they have 300 million dollars less to spend? They’re going to fire 300 million dollars worth of talent? Their bank account changed by 300 million dollars?
No, they did not lose 300 million dollars.
Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?
I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders.
If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s
If you are not in for the dividents or the voting privileges stocks are always a game of “I hope someone is dumb enough to pay more than me for these shares”.
Or someone else is in it for those things.
Markets aren’t based on one party being dumber than the other one. Markets work because different people value different things.
You can see right there at the top of the graph it’s down 20% in the given timeframe. There are ways to make graphs misleading, but there’s nothing misleading at all about zooming in on the data in this chart
Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.
Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant
Yes, and that’s literally all this post is trying to convey. This post is not a news report or a economist’s dissertation, this is a screenshot of the pre-bell stock price posted to a gaming community on Lemmy
I’d argue it doesn’t accurately show the relative value at a cursory glance. The chart shows the area under the curve having decreased over 90%, but when looking at the y-axis, you can see that initial assessment was misled.
In a speculative industry like finance, shouldn’t we try our best to make charts less… alarmist?
The axes are clearly labeled so I’m not really quite sure what the concern is.
Always keep your axes labeled guys, how else would you know which one to chop an axis with?
Unless you are not just sarcastic:
Are you being paid by someone to be especially stupid today, or is this your normal level of comprehension? I hope so because right now you seem like this the sort of person that would find stairs confusing.
Y.y…y…you do know what the plural of ‘axis’ is, right?
For as much as you’re showing what you don’t know in this thread, I still can’t believe you don’t know this one.
I totally agree man. This graph is misleading.
And that’s why I can’t take online activists seriously. 100% of agenda, 0% of brain.
If you are trying to show year-over-year profit and you have $100 million give or take a few thousand, then starting your y-axis at zero is going to be a pretty worthless graph
It’s unfortunate standard with all stock graphs :/
Agreed. Took me a moment to realise they didn’t drop to zero. !dataisugly
A stock would never drop to zero because the company would be liquidated before that happened. If the stock actually dropped to zero they would have no money they need to call bankruptcy before that point.
Who’s to say we can’t drop them to zero :)
There is no point of starting the chart to 0 since it doesn’t give any information other than the share price, which is already communicated by the Y axis anyways.
There’s going to be a new CEO by the end of the FY.
Am I too stupid to understand the X Axes? 1Day, 1Week… that makes no sense at all
It’s an option to filter by time; only 1 day is selected. The actual time on the x-axis is hidden.
Ahh that makes sense.
Why don’t they just start using ai to generate games? Its cheaper and no one will notice.
They’re instead letting an AI generate their stock price. It is a number now.
not really news… This is a 1 years graph… its been going downward for some time
this is great. i thought they kept making slop because it’s giving them a return but I’m glad people are catching on.
Your mom’s been going down for some time too
hahaha goteeem
Perhaps to deliver him a sandwich in the basement?
Yeah well they brought their friends over to play Mario kart and she wanted to name sure the kiddos were getting something to snack on.
Mom definitely brought something to snack on.
What a great mommy.
That’s certainly a possibility, yes.
Please this is just childish
Now do a 5 year graph and realise it’s kinda back to pre pandemic levels.
hm… not quite… but it certainly has seen some ups and downs, that are larger than what happened this morning. This is a graph of “all time”
This thread is like a lesson in the importance of x and y axes range in time series plots
It would be cool if these graphs could be inflation adjusted.
That’s incredibly easy to do on any analysis platform.
Analysis schmanalysis
WSB detected :)
Analysis schmanalysis
Yes, but it is not acceptable in today’s capitalism. Only the growth of growth matters.
If the line does not go up enough, the company is failing.
Oh no, people trading in make-belief money are losing or gaining some of their make-belief money selling the make-belief money to each other! 😱
You realise this isn’t make believe at all, right? Stocks are ownership.
If a stock dips low enough it’s possible to do what microsoft did with Activision Blizzard and buy out another company wholesale, for instance.
Speculation on the stock market isn’t the reason the market exists, it’s a side effect of its pricing mechanisms, the actual point of it is to gather money for companies and gather stake for buyers.
If a major company like Ubisoft keeps tanking, odds are you can look forward to another major buyout and merger which will make the already horribly oligopolistic game industry even smaller, which is not good for anyone involved.
Investors settled to be pushing for the company to go private, possibly for that reason.
That would be quite smart of them tbh.
Except out doesn’t have to be that way. Bringing back anti monopoly regulation would prevent more consolidation.
Sure, but the stock is tanking now, and the regulations are not on the books.
Like, I agree there needs to be an overhaul of a bunch of regulations regarding monopolies and such, but this doesn’t help analysing the current situation where they’re not in place.
I think gaming in general have it hard now. There are millions of games and only a handful are best sellers.
I feel the same about movies. So many, but just a few are worth watching because they are original.
That’s just generally all of media right now. We are at perhaps the highest level of accessibility for media creation we’ve ever been, but that means that any schmuck with a pair of thumbs and time to waste can make something.
High accessibility means abysmal signal/noise ratio, turns out.
It does. There are some upsides, though. One bonus is that, at least in some small ways, some of these shitbag companies that have acted terribly in the past are letting up because we have options. We don’t have to rely on a couple of big studios for every game we play. So EA has backed off of their terrible launcher.
I also think it’s kind of cool that any schmuck can make their dream come true. I’ve definitely put out a bunch of music that I don’t market, just because I always wanted to do it. Anyone with an idea and a laptop can code up a game. The ridiculous amount of shovelware aside, I think that’s pretty cool.
I just wish there was a better way to sift through the dreck to find the good stuff.
Yeah I mean, it’s got upsides and downsides, like everything. Unparalleled access means anyone can make something, which means a lot of things that have niche appeal can find their audience, etc.
It also means a lot of things without any appeal will be out there.
It’s not good or bad in itself but it can be impractical on the consumer side of the equation, and it makes even the remarkable stuff very likely to just disappear in the shuffle.
The problem isn’t the people voluntarily participating in the world’s biggest grift losing money.
The problem is the real world consequences for other people.
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
Capcom has been pretty consistent.
Unless you care about their use of Denuvo
I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.
Valve is pretty well liked. not sure you can really call them a games publisher any more though.
Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.
God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League
Agreed. As someone who doesn’t really like shooters and never got into League or DOTA, I had mixed feelings about playing a ‘hero shooter/moba’. I’m actually blown away at how good it is. They did phenomenal job. 10/10.
It’s a invite only alpha and as I write this it’s #7 on the steam rankings of current players, 6 if you wanna exclude Banana which is it’s own hilarious thing
Dota 2 is #2 and has 565k right now
I’d say I’m happy that AAA companies are reaping what they sow from listening to their dumbass stakeholders.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.
There’s plenty of publishers putting out interesting games.
They’re just not the traditional AAA / “AAAA” games companies because they’ve grown so big they’re hidebound.
I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.
But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.
I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.
The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.
Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don’t pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
I’m laughing a lot, is that a positive? These are all self-inflicted wounds because they mistook “shareholders” for the customers.
I’m buying my son Xbox 360 and PS2 games
There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.
I regret buying my ps5 so much.
hiring sweet baby inc and then going full crazy on those DEI woke rubbish certainly did the job.
leave the woke bullshit to the woke idiots,leave the games alone.
Dementia is a disease to have to suffer.
i’ll ask your mom in case i forget.
WoKe wOkE WoKe wOkE
Shut the entire fuck up
People sound like chickens saying wOkE all the time.
make me shut the fuck up or read my post and seethe.
keep seething.
Nobody’s seething here, my friend. We’re all laughing at you.
That’s very woke of you
sure thing
Yep that’s a serious case of brain worms right there.
I got brain damage reading your dumb post.
We know you are a dum dum because you use the term woke unironically.
enjoy the brain damage,fuck if i care what damage you got.
what can you do other than infantile insults??
come make my toes laugh.
Buy buy buy?
You taking stock advice from Justin Timberlake or somethin’?
Has something in particular been happening lately? I feel like Ubisoft has sucked for quite a while, but their stock price was fine until relatively recently, right?
If games sucking was the same thing as games being unprofitable gaming would be in better shape.
Ubisoft made some of my favorite games as a kid. Real shane shitty management and a culture of sexual harassment have ruined their legacy
“Tanked”
Checks graph
19% is a hit but I wouldn’t call it tanked.
Some stocks are just volatile. Here is the full history:
Whenever I see social media say something dropped/jumped, I do the same thing as you - I visit the portfolio and take a birds eye view.
I still think about the one time redditors celebrated a company’s stock dropping by 90% over the last day.
But what the picture left out was how the company was climbing by 1000% in a week before dropping.
A drop this severe is tanking. Even with a stock history like the one from Ubisoft.
did ubisoft make face masks or something wtf happened in 2020
WTF you think happened in 2020? No one could leave their house, so video game went gang busters.
I worked at a video game retailer then, and it was the busiest we’ve ever been.
I think people were just bored out of their minds
I guess the anti-woke crowd is having a hard-on rn. I don’t play ubisoft’s games but I know a lot of good persons who work there around Quebec, and many of them fear losing their jobs.
When a game is successful it’s because of the executive, but when it bombs it’s the fault of the workers, sadly.
Heads I win, tales you lose situation always
To quote Jason Schreier, “whenever anything bad happens, worst people on the internet will be there to blame diversity”
Disgusting.
This isn’t about being diverse. It’s about making bad games.
As a matter of fact, the new assassin’s Creed is so offensive that the Japanese government is in an uproar about it.
Ubisofts attempt to be so inclusive and sexually neutral is what’s making their games bad because they’re stifling good game design in the process.
That’s not to say that it’s not possible to make a good game while adhering to diversification and inclusion.
Hellblade and horizon zero Dawn are two excellent examples of incredibly good games that don’t expound sexism. Hell, look at destiny 2. They handle these kinds of situations perfectly!
But to simply imply people are upset because they don’t like “woke politics” is a gross over simplification of what’s happening to Ubisoft!
In response to the whole bit about the Japanese government, it seems that the quotes were taken way more seriously than they should have been. Pretty cookie cutter responses that also say that It isn’t really their concern.
Neither of us said that people are ONLY upset because “woke politics”. Original comment is saying that those people are probably celebrating right now because they were “right” and I’m simply pointing out that whenever this happens, the anti-woke crowd think that it’s because of the woke politics. There are plethora of reason to be upset with Ubisoft, just like there were plethora of reasons to not play concord.
Nah, the Japaneses government doesn’t care about fictional characters in a videogame. Neither are French-Canadians mad about being depicted as mimes with bread sticks in South Park.
Oh and “it’s about making bad games” . The GAME ISN’T EVEN OUT YET. Just don’t buy it and stop crying because there’s a black character in fictional universe or because you don’t want to fuck the main protagonist of Star Wars game (I personally find here damn hot btw lol).
They already delayed the release due to so much negative feedback. It’s going to be a bad game. There should never have been a black person in this game at all. It’s 1600s Japan. It makes no fucking sense!
There are so many layers as to why Ubisoft is going through what it’s going through I don’t have the energy to express it here in this comment.
I can assure you, however, if they worried more about making good games and less of inclusion politics their stock would be worth a lot more than 2 bucks!
Why can’t you people can’t just fucking move on with you life and play other games? The fact that there’s a new Assassin or Star Wars doesn’t erase the previous ones, go play the previous ones, the “good” ones.
It’s going to be a bad game. Says who? Your just a rando on the internet who has not played the game, why do you think your opinion maters?
There should never have been a black person in this game at all. It’s 1600s Japan. It makes no fucking sense! IT’S A GAME, nothing makes fucking sens. Why do accept it when it’s some white dude becoming the chosen one and saving a bunch of indigenous, but rip you shirt the when a black guy (based on a real life character!!!) is one of the protagonist of a game set in a FICTIONAL Japan. It’s not real dude, people have the right can make up stories inspired by real things.
I don’t have the energy to express it here in this comment. Nobody ask you too lol. We all have youtube, if we want to hear some white dude’s (with no expertise in nothing) ridiculous outrage about a stupid videogame company, we know where to find it.
I really don’t get you gamers people. There are dozens of causes that are worth defending, why is the only fucking thing that makes you active is when there’s a black man or a woman you don’t feel like fucking in a game? That’s pretty sad and pathetic if you ask me. Just go play something that fits you narrow world view. Meanwhile, Steam rips off all creators of 30% of their revenue while employing 20 people, but you people get wet whenever your hear their name. If you want to be mad at capitalist business, at least try to find something else than “black charcater” doesn’t make sens in a universe where you can walk on walls and kill 20k people by yourself.
So let’s just address the meta here real quick. There was a comment on Lemmy to which I responded. In context the genesis of this comment is in reference to Ubisoft and the general state of inclusion politics in gaming today.
You are questioning the fundamental motivation as to why I have an opinion on the subject matter that is presented to me under the protest that “it’s just a game”.
I mean why even have an opinion? Why formulate thoughts? Why have any kind of discussions?
I am abreast of what is happening generally in gaming and the industry surrounding it because I’m interested in these things. I like playing video games.
I also have other interests. For example, I’m fairly good at playing the guitar, so there’s a lot of content in my social media about guitars and music.
I also find it entertaining to watch flat Earth debunking videos on YouTube to pass the time.
The reason I care about assassin’s Creed in particular is because I’ve been playing the game since the very first one. I like the franchise. I like the video games and watching it get ruined because of inclusion politics is heartbreaking.
Moreover, they already have the game. It’s already been made. Therefore I have the right to criticize it. Simply stating “it’s just a game” isn’t helpful.
I don’t care if there’s black people or women or LGBT people in video games. I could absolutely care less about that as long as it’s relevant to the game. If they’re just including it to be inclusive, then it’s a meaningless gesture. It brings down the game. It brings down the IP and it brings down the company that does it.
Furthermore, people play video games for a reason. Either it be escapism or immersion or simply to pass a small amount of time till whatever else they have to do. Seeing these inconsistencies in the game breaks that immersion it no longer becomes entertainment. It becomes a political statement which I have very little interest in when it comes to my entertainment.
You can pretend to be on your high horse all you want. I have no interest in seeing inclusion politics in my entertainment. It serves no beneficial purpose except to elevate the egos of people like you to make you feel as though something is being included.
Pure nonsense.
Also the new Star wars game which I don’t even remember the name of sucked universally. It didn’t make any money because people didn’t have any interest in it specifically and exclusively because of the inclusion politics added into the game. Also the main character is fucking ugly.
Was ubisoft ever okay though? They always have problems going on whether it be a hostile takeover or this, but they always bounce back somehow surprisingly.
