w00tage said:
1. Ubisoft was in complete control of this new games' production from start to finish. Therefore, everything wrong with the game in the eyes of their consumers is completely their fault, and those consumers are completely in the right to hold them accountable for it. If they mismanaged the production of the game so that they couldn't deliver promised features, that is explicitly their fault and they as a whole company are liable for it. Welcome to business.
It absolutely is their fault. But assigning fault is meaningless if there is no ramifications to their actions. People have complained at length about lots of things in Assassin's Creed (to say nothing about other titles the company produced). When people then go on to buy millions of copies the next time around those complaints are hollow and
meaningless. Ubisoft exists to make money. Complaining and then
buying the game does not punish or affect them. If what Ubisoft does isn't egregious enough to undermine their sales to a great or obvious extent, no whining or moaning will alter their strategy.
w00tage said:
2. Everyone can tell you what they want at any time. It's explicitly the job of someone who is offering goods or services to people to understand what their consumers want and to deliver it. Welcome to business.
People can tell you what they want, yes. But, in general, all a consumer will be able to tell you is they want the last thing they liked but more so. People did not know they wanted a phone from Apple until Apple made a phone. People did not know they wanted Mass Effect until Bioware made Mass Effect.
w00tage said:
3. Misogyny in the form of sexploitation and second-class citizenry is an official games-industry thing. Welcome to the unholy union of Hollywood and the games industry.
It isn't official in the slightest. It is
common and very nearly
ubiquitious but that doesn't make it official. That would require actual stated policies from major companies to that end. What this means is that there is an underlying cause for this treatment and I don't have an easy explanation for why. I tend to believe it comes from the perception that men buy more games than women (which for certain genres is
absolutely the case) which means games tend to be made
for men. Simultaneously, most developers are
male. Thus you have games made
by men and
for men and with such a narrow aim and perspective it is reasonable to assume you'll end up treating a huge segment of humanity poorly.
w00tage said:
4. Ubisoft, knowing all of the above, promised a playable female main character. Welcome to making promises that hit hot-button issues and raise the hopes of your fans. Edit: and welcome to the fallout when you dump on a promise that is routinely delivered by other companies in the same industry because "it would be too hard / cost too much".
Lots of games make lots of promises and then they fail to deliver. That is part of the development process and ultimately the realities of business made Ubisoft think it was not going to be cost effective. If you
want that reality to change, then you merely need to convince a few million people to not buy the game while
simultaneously maintaining a consistent message regarding why (In this case, broken promise of a female protagonist).
This isn't acting as an apologist; this is pragmatism. Ubisoft will respond to profits and losses. They will not respond to complaining unless those complaints affect profits in a meaningful way.
w00tage said:
5. Your personal opinion (or mine) on how difficult / not difficult it is to deliver that feature is completely irrelevant, as is your and my opinion on what quality levels would be accepted by the consumer base. The fact that other game studios routinely deliver playable female main characters, and those games sell, belies any claims that Ubisoft "couldn't do it for reasons of resources" or that "it wouldn't be good enough".
It isn't that it is difficult. Ubisoft has the resources to make it happen without question. The question ultimately was if the cost of adding that feature was going to result in a larger net profit. Ubisoft determined it would not.
That is what they mean when they said it would be hard. Not that it is impossible but that adding the feature to their satisfaction would cost them more money than it would bring in.
w00tage said:
6. Re how many copies will be sold anyways, what's the historical return rate on software by dissatisfied consumers? O wait, this is a protected industry, consumer protection laws don't apply to software buyers. Therefore companies can sell complete shite all day long and use "caveat emptor" as a fig leaf for fraud. And game companies can partner with monopolistic console developers and create vast legions of captive audiences for their content, because monopoly.
Yes and while you message that companies have unfair protection is valid it dismisses the point you try and make. A game sold is a game sold. How that affects game trades, however, is a different story.
w00tage said:
You're right, a lot of copies will doubtless be sold, based on the marketing and recognition of the franchise. But let's not pretend the consumer will have, or ever has had under these monopolies, any real choice. If they want the game console to work, they have to buy games for it. Unless there's a playable demo version involved, the decision on what game to buy is not based on perceived value, it's based on promised value. And software consumers cannot return products after purchase even if they have been outright defrauded.
You are mistaken. Consumers absolutely do have a choice. There are tens of thousands of games out there and thanks to their status as a non-essential good a consumer can
absolutely choose to not buy it. Voting with you
wallet is ultimately within your power and trying to argue that you can't is foolish. Neither you nor I will suffer if we don't buy a particular game. Our lives will go on without incident. I
regularly choose to not buy games because they don't have a feature I want or, more commonly, include features I don't. That's why I don't buy Ubisoft games - Uplay is garbage that directly undermines my ability to enjoy a game thanks to it's habit of regularly booting me from a game in progress without warning or offering even a chance to save.
w00tage said:
7. Re your "real world example", I have to ask, did no one ever tell you that spinning the whole equation around to play net-profit games is a great way to reduce your gross sales and therefore your gross and net profits? You cannot assume your sales numbers will stay the same when the product has changed. And if Ubisoft guessed wrong on what features would be important to their anticipated consumer base, is that not totally their fault?
That is why companies regularly produce the same game again and again. Or they add features that were proven in different games. And why they focus group their games to a remarkable extent. That's why Call of Duty has been more or less the same game every year since 2007. That's why Mass Effect 2 is so very different from the first. That's why you only see new IP from large companies as relatively small scale and cheap projects and even then they are only common when established brands begin to flag in sales. Rewarding a company for consistently doing something you don't like buy
purchasing their games does you no favors and to act as though you must make this decision blind is absolutely false. Within 24 hours of a game being released you will have
dozens of reviews of a game from professionals and
thousands of perspectives of individual users. You also have historical trends that you could easily observe. Battlefield has consistently had launch problems since the 360 and the chances are very high that Hardline will likewise have the same problem. Ubisoft has often used DRM that undermines you ability to play on PC and thus I can simply assume that the next title they push out the door will as well.
Beyond that you point is false from the start. Companies may not be able to perfectly predict how a game will sell but they damn sure have a pretty good idea what something is going to cost. And Ubisoft could not conceive of a way adding female playable characters would increase sales enough to improve net profits. Yes, that is a failure on Ubisoft's part. If you can get a few hundred thousand people to not buy the game and then tell Ubisoft that they refused because of a lack of female characters then you will have given them substantial evidence of what they stood to gain by adding that feature. Right now, they'd only be guessing and this is an industry that, as you have pointed out, routinely assumes women don't sell games.
w00tage said:
Good try on the whole deconstruction thing, but some of us are successful because we listen to what people want, deliver as much as we can, and are completely open about what we can and can't do throughout the entire process. Companies which don't do this imo need to go the way of the dinosaurs to make room for companies that will.
Again, your argument is only valid when it starts to affect the bottom line in a way that Ubisoft cannot ignore. This back and forth on the subject doesn't mean anything unless you can convince someone to not buy the latest assassin's creed game.
But, I tell you what. I was never going to buy the game. If you can find a good place to send a complaint to at Ubisoft let me know. I will write to complain to them and I will include the lack of female playable characters as a reason I won't buy the game. Because even though I disagree regarding the why this problem happens, I
absolutely agree that it is a problem. I tried checking but sadly wasn't able to find any corporate contact that didn't involve making an international phone call. I have sadly run out of time to look into the subject due to the length of the response.
The bottom line, though, is this. When I say that Ubisoft exists to make money, it is not as a defense for Ubisoft - it is a fundamental reality of the relationship between consumer and producer and short of complete social and economic revolution that isn't going to change. By recognizing the purpose of the entity which tells us both why they do what they do and what we need to do to change it. If Ubisoft isn't convinced they can make money on female characters, then it falls to us to prove to them that they will lose money but
not including them.
