14 DAY TRIAL // Companies need to adapt, or they fade away by becoming irrelevant to the people who buy their products. It's a slow process, and the company doesn't usually notice until it's too late, when it starts to wonder why people don't buy their products, probably blaming the whole thing on customers.
Ubisoft is a massive game publisher that doesn't seem to learn from its mistakes and continues to make the same ones over and over again.
Ubisoft made a lot of mistakes over the years, and they bounced back each time. We could just mention Assassin's Creed Unity, and everyone would know what we're saying, but we'll go a little bit deeper.
Once upon a time there was this cool publisher named Ubisoft, and it was doing wonderful work. They released games like the first Splinter Cell or Beyond Good & Evil, and all was well.
Then, Ubisoft wanted to do something about piracy and went about it the wrong way, as most publishers do. They adopted a solution named StarForce, but that quickly turned against them. There were reports (unsubstantiated) that StarForce was messing with the optical drivers and that it cause slow-downs. Whether that was true or not doesn't really matter, but they had a PR problem on their hands. They dropped StarForce, and all was well again.
Then they decided to release the first Assassin's Creed only on consoles, and PC gamers had to wait six months for it. Not a good decision, but then they wanted to fight piracy once more, and as you would expect, they chose a stupid solution. The game had to be connected at all times to the Ubisoft servers, and it would download missing content from there.
It worked for a couple of months, but the game was pirated anyway. And Ubisoft was having a new PR problem. They soon dropped this new type of protection. You can see where this is going.
Drifting away from PC customers
Somehow, Ubisoft went from being run by people who were gamers at heart to being a company that's only about profit. As a result, the PC gamers have been pushed to the third row. They weren't giving Ubisoft enough money, so they become somewhat irrelevant.
The company drifted away from their initial fans and users and went the way of consoles. They went so far, of course, that they are now looking for guidance on how to reconnect with their PC base. Make no mistake about it, this is purely a financial decision since the PC gaming is now making a comeback.
Which brings up to their latest PR debacle, Assassin's Creed Unity. It's hard not to remember the mess that game made in the life of Ubisoft. The company is really trying to forget it, although it's trying too hard. They also forgot the mistakes they made with the game and they seem intent on repeating them.
The new Assassin's Creed Syndicate has arrived, and unlike Unity, it's not plagued by bugs, missing animations, or things like that. It's a solid game, but it also shows that Ubisoft thinks more about money than about games and gamers.
It's not OK when you have an entry in the game called eStore to buy things with real life money. The community was pretty adamant about it when Unity was released, but Ubisoft ignored them. They figured that as long as they are making it somewhat optional, it would be just fine to have them there. No, it's not, but no one at Ubisoft seems to understand this.
Assassin's Creed is a sprawling single-player game at its core. Why you would add microtransactions to something like this is beyond me. You want to buy stuff for the multiplayer and that's fine, but making those features available in a single-player campaign feels like the publisher is trying hard to make even more money with a full-priced game.
Ubisoft continues to make one stupid mistake after another. They don't understand their place in the market and they don't see how the market is evolving. They are fading away, one inch at a time. They delay the launch of the PC version of a game because they think customers are to blame for poor sales, and they think overlapping platforms is a problem and not a strength. They never once look towards themselves to see where the real problem exists.