Last year, goofs and gags were made at Ubisoft’s expense when their annual financial report included a claim that monetization could make games “more fun” for players. In cross-examining their latest report, Stephen Totilo noticed that the audacious claim has been removed from the document. That doesn’t mean the annual report has improved on its tone deafness elsewhere.
“At Ubisoft, the golden rule when developing premium games is to allow players to enjoy the game in full without having to spend more,” read the previous report. “Our monetization offer within premium games makes the player experience more fun by allowing them to personalize their avatars or progress more quickly.”
These lengthy documents are distributed to investors and management. Though dense and littered with updated financial statistics, these often repeat established information from previous reports. That’s why the alterations, new additions or redactions, show where the real action is at. The latest report addresses the opportunity to “leverage AI at scale to enhance creativity” and hype cycle challenges. It largely includes the same copy about microtransactions. But the particular line about paying for expedited progress being “more fun” has been erased completely, the report simply moving on to the next bullet point.
Since the horse armor affair there’s been an easily spotted line between post-launch support that improves a game and predatory carrot dangling. It’s extremely common in free-to-play and mobile games, and has been making its way into full-priced experiences in kind. On top of player revolt, these practices have also caught the attention of lawmakers around the world, who are now considering if these purchases stray too close to gambling.
Unclear if they can hear themselves talking, a big new focus of the report are concerns about lengthening development cycles. The previous report was worried about too many games launching under cooked. True as that can be, present-day Ubisoft suffers the opposite. Skull and Bones was a decade-long boondoggle that landed the company in hot water with the Singapore government. The Prince of Persia remake languished without proof of life for years before being unceremoniously scrapped. And of course the crown jewels of MIA is Beyond Good & Evil 2, a near decade out from its announcement and rapidly losing the cult audience it began with.
The report points out these cycles can exhaust what hype they have and lose ground to the competition. Glad that one of their top paid executives managed to come to this conclusion. The report also points out that average wages are down.