Ubisoft Considers Beyond Good & Evil a Mistake

[Jezzy54]

Here's a crazy idea: Make a good game with a less extravagant budget, and promote it like you would one of your precious franchises. Tell people why your game is worth playing.

 

[Griffolion]

A game being a mistake profit-wise does not mean a game is a mistake design-wise, I suppose.

That's the problem here, though. Ubisoft is implicitly saying the only metric to judge a game's success is the profit margin. BG&E was a huge success in terms of critical acclaim, and nowhere near a mistake judged on those terms.

 

[sdfasdfhfgfgjtyisdgdfdfj]

A game being a mistake profit-wise does not mean a game is a mistake design-wise, I suppose.

That's the problem here, though. Ubisoft is implicitly saying the only metric to judge a game's success is the profit margin. BG&E was a huge success in terms of critical acclaim, and nowhere near a mistake judged on those terms.

I get the idea that when Plourde pitched Child of Light, it was in front of your stereotypical businessmen who perhaps barely play games themselves. Is that a big problem? I think it might be far from ideal, but it seems those are the kind of people who judge a game by its profit margin (which they have to, if profit margin was ignored they'd go bankrupt).
I know, not a good excuse, but I'm not trying to make an excuse I suppose. It's a company, which has to make money. I do think it's a bit of a shame it is like that, but I'm not surprised by such a statement at all.
And yes! I get the idea that BG&E is a huge success in terms of critical acclaim (love the game as well) =)

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

*crosses ubisoft off christmas card list*

Ubisoft you absolute ********ing ******ing *******ing twats! I always felt an EA presence ever since that whole passport thing appeared which i assumed you only needed to get once, you know, like an ACTUAL passport. But fuck no. For every damn game just in case they missed out on a little profit with their pittance of a budget and all. Was paying for the game not enough to get what the game says it does?? Dont even get me started on those assassins creed 4 micro transactions just to customise your characters!

Now this...this is a true kick in the balls. That game was a fond memory on my xbox and have been planning on getting it on xbla. But they dont want to make anything 'new' and 'different' like that because of money?! which they obviously have hardly any of! Ugh! I feel ill.

Need to calm down now, wheres those skins?

 

[EvilRoy]

I don't know why people are finding this to be so tremendously awful, or even really all that surprising.

They just have to make money, that's all there is to it. It seems callous and awful that they 'don't give smaller games a chance' or that 'they stifle artistic creations', but there are some pretty serious consequences to choosing a different route. Ubisoft isn't a single entity, nor is it a zord - a huge machine controlled by a few people in the head - its a business made up of hundreds if not thousands of individuals.

When a game does poorly, decisions about how much people get paid and who gets to keep their job have to be made. When the people at the head of the company say 'we want franchises and huge commercial successes', they're basically saying 'we would really like to not have to fire anyone/cut anyones pay'. Its all well and good to want artistic endeavors, or projects not driven by any sort of profit ideal, but I sure wouldn't want to be the guy who has to go from office to office telling people that there will be no year end bonuses, raises, or company events this year because someone upstairs wanted to do an art project.

 

[Allspice]

I don't know why people are finding this to be so tremendously awful, or even really all that surprising.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't find this surprising. I know it didn't sell very well and at the end of the day, they do need to make money. I understand that. And if that was all there was to it I wouldn't be upset, just a little sad.

But that's not all there is to this. They keep getting our hopes up that there might be a chance to see a sequel. They have brought it up multiple times over the years, saying it's in the planning stages, it's in development, showing a teaser trailer, showing screenshots...hell there was even a picture of one of the main characters, Pey'j, on their Facebook page for E3 this year. That's what I'm upset about. If it's not worth the money to invest in a sequel, fine. Just stop jerking us around pretending you might actually put one out, Ubisoft.

 

[otakon17]

The hell? Beyond: Good and Evil was a brilliant game. Yes, it had its flaws but the only reason I can think of that it failed to meet expectations was because I never saw a damned advert for the thing. You can't expect something to spread on the word of mouth alone.

No, they mean a mistake in business terms.

OT: Welp videogames are business nowadays. We can't have fun anymore, we need EFFICIENCY AND PROFITS or it's considered a failure. Look at Tomb Raider, sold 2.5 million or so in the first weeks. It was considered a financial failure by Square Enix while on the same note Dark Souls sold roughly the same amount and was considered a financial success. The point of the matter is game publishers keep thinking EVERY release needs to be a blockbuster sale to justify it getting made. What happened to making games that were good and the success of them was a byproduct of that?

"AAA" game publishing is killing the industry. They all need to re-focus, make games as good as possible and stop fucking thinking of it in terms of profits alone. For some reason "Too big to fail" comes to mind when I think about "AAA" development games now...

 

[otakon17]

Oh. I'm sorry.. I thought well thought out with complex female characters would sell and it was just a misogynistic games industry holding them from being produced.
You mean women don't actually hold the conflated 48% market share of the audience share once games like farmville and bejeweled are discounted?
You mean games targeted at women don't sell (to the same degree as those aimed at men)? no. that'd just be sexist.
b-b-b..but-but Ubisoft is just a bad company! I mean it was only released during the christmas-holiday period where the highest frequency of games are sold to a string a rave reviews. I mean it would've sold dramatically more if they sold it right! I mean even though the game was continually brought up in the gaming media as subject of praise people mustn't have known about it! That must be the reason it ranked 878th in all time sales and sold BELOW THE MEAN SALES OF A PS2 GAME a console notorious for its masses of shovel ware.

Yep. 100% agree. Beyond Good and Evil is hipster garbage. Shallow gameplay, short, lacking content, incongruent design (what genre is it?) stupid name (does it have anything to do with Nietzsche?) shallow, generic character (who cares about Jade?) Just another mediocre, throwaway title, not worth remembering.

But somehow it's become the game for all the wannabe gamer snobs to declare was just "sooooooo amazeballs" and didn't get it's fair chance because of blah blah blah. Whatever. Don't listen to them, they probably never actually played it anyway. The audience is never wrong.

Oi, I played it all the way through and dammit I enjoyed the experience. Yeah it had it's flaws but everything does.

 

[otakon17]

I had to read the title twice after reading the article, because I could swear the article was about EA. Between their crappy steam rip offs and their franchise management, you'd think Ubisoft was trying to become EA.

This makes me laugh so much. The hate against EA is so ridiculous.

Let's make this clear. Every single publisher wants to make money. Period. That's what they care about. All of them. EA is no different from any other publisher out there. It's not special in any way.

True but it should be the only damn thing they care about. They should also care for the content they push out. They should care that they make quality products, not just products that sell well.

 

[EvilRoy]

I don't know why people are finding this to be so tremendously awful, or even really all that surprising.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't find this surprising. I know it didn't sell very well and at the end of the day, they do need to make money. I understand that. And if that was all there was to it I wouldn't be upset, just a little sad.

But that's not all there is to this. They keep getting our hopes up that there might be a chance to see a sequel. They have brought it up multiple times over the years, saying it's in the planning stages, it's in development, showing a teaser trailer, showing screenshots...hell there was even a picture of one of the main characters, Pey'j, on their Facebook page for E3 this year. That's what I'm upset about. If it's not worth the money to invest in a sequel, fine. Just stop jerking us around pretending you might actually put one out, Ubisoft.

If that's what they've been doing, I can tell you its not meant to be jerking around. They've probably set it up as an overhead project.

That is, when a programmer or artist working on one project runs out of stuff to do, they get shunted into the overhead project pool where they can work on chargeable projects, rather than having their hours go to unchargeable overhead. Meaning that they totally intend to sell the product eventually. In fact, if they put enough hours to it they will have no choice but to release it regardless of profit potentials because if they don't all the time spent becomes retroactively unrecoverable/unchargeable and takes profit directly off the bottom line.

I know it seems weird, but many companies in many fields do this in order to help stock price and avoid profit loss due to poor scheduling (whether or not the poor scheduling was avoidable). In fact right now that's what I'm (supposed) to be working on. Just a backburner project that will likely break even eventually, in order to keep my unbillable time from going directly to the bottom line.

Unfortunately it simultaneously means that the project may take years longer than normal, and the level of polish of the project will be directly proportional to how interested the people working on it were.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

There are plenty of game developers out there that dont pull the money making tricks that ubisoft and EA pull. Game developers with...dare i say it, LESS money and profit margins. Its not all about money. Look at the music industry, There are people who are in it for the money, then there are people who are in it for the music...
EA and Ubi are just some long running boy band producers who see franchises as guaranteed cash cows with anything else as heathenistic fund drainers.

Rockstar have plenty of money, but i certainly dont see them selling one use/one game passports and having to do yearly releases in the name of profits. They said themselves they want their games to be messages, to show people ideas etc.

Its just all bollocks, i like ubisoft games, but they do take the piss a little. Only marginally better than EA in a lesser of the two evils sort of way

 

[Brian Tams]

Funny, I didn't think I had any faith left in the AAA industry to lose, but good ol' Ubisoft comes along and proves me wrong.

Oh, by the way? Fuck you, Ubisoft. K, just wanted to make sure you understood my feelings about you.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

We all know that it has nothing to do with what gender the main character is, BG&E was released at a time where adventure platformer games just werent all that profitable, thats it, there is also Psychonauts that had the exact same fate.

As usual, the suits only see statistics so for them it will seem reasonable to make a relation between the protagonist gender and the profit.

"All our other games stared a male protagonist and made profit, this one had a female protagonist and it didnt made profit, thats probably the reason why" - suits train of thought since suits are trained to only look at statistics. If these guys had also published Psychonauts they would have an example in their database that showed that the key for it to not make profit was the genre and not the gender.

Spoiler: Warning! Gets into black humor territory towards the end

Anyways, yeah. I agree with you. People have a tendency to use sales to justify any of their positions, not just suits, though. I've heard more than one person claim that any game under EA not selling well is a sign of EA screwing the game over, and any game under EA selling well is a sign that people are mindless sheep, buying stuff just because they were told to.

 

[Lightknight]

Well fuck you too then, Ubisoft.

If you get mad at a company considering a financial failure a... well... failure, then you're going to be upset a lot.

I had to read the title twice after reading the article, because I could swear the article was about EA. Between their crappy steam rip offs and their franchise management, you'd think Ubisoft was trying to become EA.

I've generally begun to see Ubisoft as an EA in training. We'll see how they do.

 

[Ishal]

Well fuck you too then, Ubisoft.

If you get mad at a company considering a financial failure a... well... failure, then you're going to be upset a lot.

I had to read the title twice after reading the article, because I could swear the article was about EA. Between their crappy steam rip offs and their franchise management, you'd think Ubisoft was trying to become EA.

I've generally begun to see Ubisoft as an EA in training. We'll see how they do.

But this is the problem with the games industry now. There are no more low to mid budget games being made. No games (outside of indie studios and kickstarters) who work on a medium sized budget and expect a medium sized return. No companies want that anymore, all they care about is huge inflated dev costs and (expected, not guaranteed) huge returns. After all, that casual holiday X-mas time market is a potential gold mine!

 

[Allspice]

I don't know why people are finding this to be so tremendously awful, or even really all that surprising.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't find this surprising. I know it didn't sell very well and at the end of the day, they do need to make money. I understand that. And if that was all there was to it I wouldn't be upset, just a little sad.

But that's not all there is to this. They keep getting our hopes up that there might be a chance to see a sequel. They have brought it up multiple times over the years, saying it's in the planning stages, it's in development, showing a teaser trailer, showing screenshots...hell there was even a picture of one of the main characters, Pey'j, on their Facebook page for E3 this year. That's what I'm upset about. If it's not worth the money to invest in a sequel, fine. Just stop jerking us around pretending you might actually put one out, Ubisoft.

If that's what they've been doing, I can tell you its not meant to be jerking around. They've probably set it up as an overhead project.

That is, when a programmer or artist working on one project runs out of stuff to do, they get shunted into the overhead project pool where they can work on chargeable projects, rather than having their hours go to unchargeable overhead. Meaning that they totally intend to sell the product eventually. In fact, if they put enough hours to it they will have no choice but to release it regardless of profit potentials because if they don't all the time spent becomes retroactively unrecoverable/unchargeable and takes profit directly off the bottom line.

I know it seems weird, but many companies in many fields do this in order to help stock price and avoid profit loss due to poor scheduling (whether or not the poor scheduling was avoidable). In fact right now that's what I'm (supposed) to be working on. Just a backburner project that will likely break even eventually, in order to keep my unbillable time from going directly to the bottom line.

Unfortunately it simultaneously means that the project may take years longer than normal, and the level of polish of the project will be directly proportional to how interested the people working on it were.

Interesting, I've never heard of something like that. Does what various people at Ubisoft have said about it (mostly Michel Ancel, I'll put a * next to what he's said) sound consistent with that kind of project to you?:

"it's in pre-production and has been for a year" (2008)*
"it's been put on hold" (2009)
"it has not been put on hold, development is still ongoing" (2009)
"we want to keep the team as small as possible to preserve it's artistic spirit" (2010)*
"we need more power than current gen provides" (2011)*
"the entire team took a break to work on Rayman Origins" (2011)*
"it's in an active creation stage" (2012)*

The years next to them are the years those statements were made to the public, just to be clear.

That's pretty much all they've said. I was also slightly wrong on what I said has been shown. There are actually two teaser/concept trailers that were released/leaked years ago that are probably largely irrelevant now, and one screenshot that was released last year when it was announced to be in an "active creation stage", whatever that vague statement means.

To be honest, I really don't think we're going to get it at this point. I think it will keep being pushed back until Ubisoft just pulls the plug on it.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Someone needs to slap them over the face with a shovel for saying such heresy as "Beyond Good and Evil was a mistake".

The only way to repent these heinous words is to invest money and force Michel Ancell to make BG&E2, please? q.q

 

[EvilRoy]

Snip

Interesting, I've never heard of something like that. Does what various people at Ubisoft have said about it (mostly Michel Ancel, I'll put a * next to what he's said) sound consistent with that kind of project to you?:

"it's in pre-production and has been for a year" (2008)*
"it's been put on hold" (2009)
"it has not been put on hold, development is still ongoing" (2009)
"we want to keep the team as small as possible to preserve it's artistic spirit" (2010)*
"we need more power than current gen provides" (2011)*
"the entire team took a break to work on Rayman Origins" (2011)*
"it's in an active creation stage" (2012)*

The years next to them are the years those statements were made to the public, just to be clear.

That's pretty much all they've said. I was also slightly wrong on what I said has been shown. There are actually two teaser/concept trailers that were released/leaked years ago that are probably largely irrelevant now, and one screenshot that was released last year when it was announced to be in an "active creation stage", whatever that vague statement means.

To be honest, I really don't think we're going to get it at this point. I think it will keep being pushed back until Ubisoft just pulls the plug on it.

Those announcements look pretty close to what we would say... Keeping in mind I work for an engineering firm so we rarely do public announcements of course.

Basically if it was us and a potential/interested client asked about how one of our OH projects was rolling the official response would come out as "Currently we're devoting a small team to the project while we complete a few higher value projects." This is a nice way of saying "if you write a check now we'll have it done ASAP, if you don't wanna nut up it will be done when its done." The 'small team' is made up of whoever ran out of billable work.

But you can basically see what the guy is doing now that the quotes are all lined up. Not a lot of people, and they get pulled to work on higher priority projects screams overhead pool to me. The rest just seems like 'poking stick' announcements, which is kind of a meh practice but I guess it makes sense for an entertainment to continually recheck interest in slow burn projects. If people lose interest totally, that OH project gets burnt and replaced with something else. If we talked up a potential OH project and absolutely nobody cared it would stop then and there and we would find something else.

 

[Lightknight]

Well fuck you too then, Ubisoft.

If you get mad at a company considering a financial failure a... well... failure, then you're going to be upset a lot.

I had to read the title twice after reading the article, because I could swear the article was about EA. Between their crappy steam rip offs and their franchise management, you'd think Ubisoft was trying to become EA.

I've generally begun to see Ubisoft as an EA in training. We'll see how they do.

But this is the problem with the games industry now. There are no more low to mid budget games being made. No games (outside of indie studios and kickstarters) who work on a medium sized budget and expect a medium sized return. No companies want that anymore, all they care about is huge inflated dev costs and (expected, not guaranteed) huge returns. After all, that casual holiday X-mas time market is a potential gold mine!

I agree that that's a problem and would love to see these big companies having a small-games budget. But I'm not sure how that applies to a company that took a risk on a smaller game and took a hit commercially considering it to be bad.

 

[gamernerdtg2]

You know what - this proves that "art" and corporate interests often don't mix. As an artist, I know that mistakes can push people forward if you're smart enough. I just don't understand how they could be thinking that this game is a risk when so many talk about it. It's actually a good game.


You're calling this a mistake?

I call BS.