A stock would never drop to zero because the company would be liquidated before that happened. If the stock actually dropped to zero they would have no money they need to call bankruptcy before that point.
There is no point of starting the chart to 0 since it doesn't give any information other than the share price, which is already communicated by the Y axis anyways.
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I've bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they've failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can't remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a 'favorite'.
Also I'm growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they've shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It's off putting to me and I feel like having a 'get off my lawn' moment.
Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don't pay as well but you get life
time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king
There's probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The "traditional" AAA pipeline is "make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS". Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That's not to say there aren't good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I'd say we're nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won't want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
You are correct, it's been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed
A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.
This was also my initial take but look at these graphs with the Y axis starting from 0
Stock lost 67% value in the last year alone, and lost 85% in the past 5 years. Looks pretty dire to me. I would say this is undervalued but I have no confidence in the ubi leadership to turn it around.
And it's going to be competing with the Ghost of Tsushima sequel.
For me they're different enough to not really be in competition, but they felt the need to issue a statement about it, so they're obviously a bit worried.
Not that I'm that interested in either. Give me that Soul Reaver remaster baby. Inject that shit into my veins.
I guess the anti-woke crowd is having a hard-on rn. I don't play ubisoft's games but I know a lot of good persons who work there around Quebec, and many of them fear losing their jobs.
This isn't about being diverse. It's about making bad games.
As a matter of fact, the new assassin's Creed is so offensive that the Japanese government is in an uproar about it.
Ubisofts attempt to be so inclusive and sexually neutral is what's making their games bad because they're stifling good game design in the process.
That's not to say that it's not possible to make a good game while adhering to diversification and inclusion.
Hellblade and horizon zero Dawn are two excellent examples of incredibly good games that don't expound sexism. Hell, look at destiny 2. They handle these kinds of situations perfectly!
But to simply imply people are upset because they don't like "woke politics" is a gross over simplification of what's happening to Ubisoft!
Has something in particular been happening lately? I feel like Ubisoft has sucked for quite a while, but their stock price was fine until relatively recently, right?
FWIW, a 20% drop is borderline catastrophic for a major company. The squeeze it puts on their supply chain, ability to make payroll, and interest rates on borrowing going up, it could be enough to create a death spiral. I think ubisoft is probably managed well enough to deal with this, but this is definitely a serious situation for them.
Was ubisoft ever okay though? They always have problems going on whether it be a hostile takeover or this, but they always bounce back somehow surprisingly.