🎮 Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Take-Two talks about Review Bombing, Skull and Bones on Steam...
Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Take-Two on Review Bombing, Skull and Bones joins Steam, Open Beta for Concord is not doing well, Star Wars Outlaws goes wild with the marketing budget...
Hello friends,
Today is July 25th 2024 and I hope you’ve had a great week 🙌
In today’s news:
🎮 Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed Shadows
🎮 Take-Two on Review Bombing
🎮 Skull and Bones joins Steam
🎮 Open Beta for Concord is not doing well
🎮 Star Wars Outlaws goes wild with the marketing budget
🎮 Warframe introduces the Romance System
All of this is brought to you in a 5 min format ⏲️
Let’s dig in!
🎮 Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed Shadows
It’s not a secret that ever since the announcement of this new project from Ubisoft it’s been a centre of a cultural controversy.
And now Ubisoft has released a lengthy statement trying to address all the concerns in one X post.
In short, they are talking about the efforts they’ve put in to be authentic, but also that this game is not trying to be 100% accurate.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is first and foremost, designed to be an enternaining video game that tells a compelling, historical fiction set in Feudal Japan.
Our team extensively collaborated with external consultans, historians, researchers, and internal teams at Ubisoft Japan to inform our creative choices.
They acknowledge that some elements in their promotional materials have “caused concern” within the Japanese community and they apologize confirming that the game will keep evolving until launch. But they also touched on the question of “creative liberties”:
While we strive for authenticity in everything that we do, Assassin’s Creed game are works of fiction inspired by real historical events and figures. From it’s inception, the series has taken creative license and incorporated fantasy elements to craft engaging and immersive experience. The representation of Yasuke in our game is an illustration of this.
Well, at least they acknowledged their mistakes, right? Based on my experience with game development, they probably crossed the point of no return long before they released their promotion materials, so I’m guessing that they won’t drastically change gears right now and change the protagonist as it will make a major impact on the game. So this whole thing reads to me like “We are sorry, but we are still moving forward”. Also, the whole thing looks a bit passive-aggressive, but maybe it’s just me… But I’d be interested to see what will change after this apology (probably not much).
The game launched on November 15 2024 on all major platforms.
🎮 Take-Two on Review Bombing
Review Bombing has become a thing during the past few years and major publishers have started to notice.
And here’s what Take-Two Interactive, the parent of Rockstar Games and publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series, thinks about it which they highlighted in a recent SEC filing:
Obtaining and maintaining high ratings of our games on the third-party platforms on which we operate are important as they help drive players to find our games. If the ratings of any of our games decline or if we receive significant negative reviews that result in a decrease in our ratings, our games could be more difficult for players to find or recommend. In addition, we may be subject to negative review campaigns or defamation campaigns intended to harm our ratings. Any such decline may lead to loss of players and revenues, additional advertising and marketing costs, and reputation harm.
Overall the sentiment is that this is a real threat, and opting to be a little more professional and brand the practice as ‘defamation campaigns’.
I find it quite interesting as they talk about defamation while working on a highly anticipated title they are about to release. They may be preparing shareholders for upcoming controversies and hoping to prepare some sort of a cover. But it looks like a lot of corporate misreading of the situation in my opinion. Most of the recent cases of Review Bombing happened only due to poor choices from studios and publishers. It’s not like gamers are showing their displeasure without any specific reason or just for the sake of dropping somebody’s stock price down. It’s the only tool we have in our arsenal to make at least some sort of a difference. But I’m eager to hear other opinions in case I’m wrong.
🎮 Skull and Bones joins Steam
Another news related to Ubisoft, the infamous ship-combat game set sails on Steam this August.
If you don’t know what it is, Skull and Bones is an online naval action RPG about “rising to become the most fearsome pirate kingpin.” The game first launched on February 13, 2024, after years of development and multiple delays, including a full reboot. And it was quite a rocky release, to say the least.
I had been looking forward to this game since the announcement a while ago, but like many other players around the world, it turned out to be quite a disappointment. At first glance, the game looks great, you have your ships, your battles, exploration, resource management etc. But the further you get into the game the more you realise that the combat simply isn't deep or engaging enough to keep you coming back for more, there’s not nearly enough content and progression and it’s essentially really boring. The whole game takes “boring” to a whole new level.
Multiple news outlets and YouTube channels released their reviews, but they all say the same, it’s just not worth it.
I’m wondering why Ubisoft decided to release it on Steam as I’m pretty sure that it will accumulate “Mostly Negative” or “Overwhelmingly Negative” reviews in no time at all. But maybe I’m biased because I had high hopes for this one.
We’ll see in August.
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🎮 Open Beta for Concord is not doing well
The game is hosting an Open Beta on both Steam and Playstation and it’s amazingly bad so far.
According to SteamDB, Concord has a peak player count of just 2,388 players, which happened on Thursday, July 18. Since then, the numbers have continued to drop from an already disappointing level to 1,117 players. And we are talking about a major game with a 40$ price tag.
So far, nobody from Firewalk or Sony said anything about this amazingly terrible experience. And I understand that we still have a month till the release, but it looks like another major flop that nobody actually wants to play. If I were them, I would consider cancelling the release and going back to the drawing board as no amount of marketing is going to make a difference with a title like this.
And again, I’m only speaking for myself here, but I think we have more than enough hero shooters right now. At the same time, I’m curious how Marvel’s experiment is going to fare as they are not really far behind with their Rivals.
Concord is currently scheduled to be released on August 23 for PC and PlayStation 5.
🎮 Star Wars Outlaws goes wild with the marketing budget
Insider Gaming recently shared that in a recent financial update, Ubisoft’s CEO revealed that the firm has put more money and effort into marketing Star Wars Outlaws than any other Ubisoft game ever released.
During the recent earnings call, Yves Guillemot (CEO) said:
What we are factoring in is a strong launch for Star Wars Outlaws. That’s the fact that it’s among the most awaited games of the industry this year and reflecting a really strong positive community sentiment, and also the fact that we are coming with the biggest marketing campaign ever so far for a Ubisoft game.
It sounds like they are putting a lot of eggs in this basket. Sure, the initial response was very positive and I’m looking forward to this title, but something still feels off. Maybe it’s all because it’s a Ubisoft game and I’m always skeptical when it comes to their games. But it looks like this game is going to be literally everywhere for better or worse.
I can see it’s going one of 2 ways. Either it’s going to be one of the most successful games in their portfolio or they just shot themselves in the foot going overboard on the marketing budget.
Star Wars Outlaws is scheduled to release on all major platforms in August 2024
🎮 Warframe introduces the Romance System
This winter a free-to-play 3rd person MMORPG developed and published by Digital Extremes will be receiving a huge upgrade. Among other things, this update will include a whole new Romance System.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3’s incredible romance system and the fan reaction to it was the major inspiration behind romance finally coming to Warframe
I think two things really gave us the courage to proceed. Of course, the success of Baldur's Gate and their romance system was like, 'okay, like, people do want this fantasy'. It does help, there's no doubt, but we did have, I should say, ambitions of it, that fit the Warframe architecture, on and off ... Baldur's Gate was the push over the cliff for sure, and I'm grateful for that, that was one of the best gaming experiences for me, ever.
I’ve been talking with one of my friends about Warframe and we were thinking about trying it. I had a couple of reservations. After all, this game is more than 10 years old. But this update definitely looks interesting even though I don’t know a single name of “romanceable” NPCs 😅
If you played Warframe or play it right now, let me know if it’s worth a try!
This is all the news I have for you folks today.
Thanks for making it this far! 🙌
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Have a great week!
Alex from Gamedev Relay.
Yasuke is literally more real than Ezio, and as a historical figure where our knowledge basically begins and ends with 'samurai under Oda who was black' he's a perfect historical fiction protagonist. I'm not even interested in Assassin's Creed but thanks to it I've now seen a lot of incredibly racist talk about Yasuke, who has appeared in Japanese made media for decades. This isn't even his video game debut, he's a playable character in Samurai Warriors 5 (a Japanese developed game) for example, which I'd much rather play.
I remember being excited for skull and bones like 6 years ago? Now I just don't really care. Feels like it missed its window for me and I got all the pirate action I was craving from sea of thieves. Haha