14 DAY TRIAL // A virtual video game lover who watched all the promotional videos that Ubisoft has released for Assassin’s Creed Unity but has, since the game launched, focused on other titles probably still believes that the open world game is an innovative one, with impressive graphics, a solid recreation of Paris and no launch trouble.
Those of us who live in the real word know that the publisher failed to adequately manage the launch of the title, never understood that it’s unacceptable to deliver a game which is broken for so many members of the community and also sought to make sure that negative reviews do not impact sales in any way.
Similar hypotheticals can be attached to Halo: The Master Chief Collection and even to Far Cry 4, GTA V on the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 and Advanced Warfare to some extent, games which have received major promotional campaigns from their publishers but were affected by some problems when fans got their hands on them.
I suspect that plenty of gamers have begun to be a little cynical after the problem strewn month of November and I believe that a large number of potential customers should approach all advertising and development news cautiously.
A question of time and money
A game that launches with problems is obviously a bad investment when it comes to the price that we pay in order to gain access to it, often an inflated one that’s linked to a Special Edition or a Season Pass.
But, even worse for the modern gamer that’s in his 20s or 30s is the fact that a botched launch like that of Assassin’s Creed Unity steals time.
Re-installs are time consuming, exploring forums in order to test out possible fixes is annoying and eats up hours and waiting for the development team to deliver an official update about when a fix might be deployed via patch can take days or even weeks.
Even worse there’s always the chance that some broken aspect of a game will only be fixed by a future expansion or DLC, which means that gamers need to spend even more money and time to get the experience they wanted in the first place.
Companies should place limits on their hype machines
Ubisoft clearly bears the blame for the launch troubles of Assassin’s Creed Unity just as Microsoft is responsible for Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
A good idea would be to delay titles for as long as they need in order to make sure that the quality level is satisfactory, but that’s impossible from an economics point of view.
So big publishers should try and make sure that their publicity machines are better calibrated and understand what the community is expecting to get and how it will react when it is lied to.
Ubisoft could have said that Unity has some issues and that only the hardcore gamers should pick it up on launch, with the rest of the community would probably be better off if it waited for a few days or weeks.
Gamers should also try to change their own behavior and make sure that the information they are getting about their franchises does not lead them to rash decisions.
The best move anyone can make is to simply wait two or three days before buying a game that they do not have a massive emotional attachment to as that would show companies that launching problematic titles will not be rewarded with massive day one sales.
