Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
Too late to short it I guess
get fucked.
I’ve never heard of this happening before? I’m sure it has, but first time for me.
Oh it has, but the implications become clear when you look at the ones that did. Like evergrand…
Same. Companies can just halt trading of their stock?
It happens sometimes. Usually it is when there are rumors that will have a significant impact on the stock. In that case the stock can be halted until the company gives a statement about it. I’m not sure if it is the company can halt it, I think they can request it and provide information why it should be halted and then it is up to the stock exchange to determine. And the stock exchange has its own rules for when to halt the trade.
I expect Ubisoft to update during the next week or perhaps already during the weekend and then the trading can continue.
Yeah, it happens to prevent a mass sell-off because of speculation.
Even if the news is positive, postponing is enough to make people speculate, so it’s a valid reason to halt trading.
Although I doubt it’s gonna be positive news for shareholders.
Yes because its all completely fabricated bullshit.
Pretty much a scam.
Wait…you can just do that?
You can do whatever you want there, as long as you are ok with the penalties.
Yes because stocks are a straight up scam. It should be able to swing up and down as the market demands, but it doesn’t because every time there’s a potentially life changing movement up or down they halt it. They’ve done it many, many times before.
You… can…
But its… kind of a really bad move, from the perspective of anyone with money, involved in Ubisoft.
This is roughly the equivalent of an unannounced, sudden bank holiday, you know, right before everything over the FDIC insured 250k gets cleaned out.
The Ubisoft trading community are coping to justify holding on to their tanking investments. It’s a gambler doubling down on losing.
Christ, how the mighty Ubisoft has fallen. They will go the way of EA and become a spyware company for the decadent Arab royals. I’m just crying that Ubisoft made some of my favourite games growing up and look what they have done to my boy-- a rotting zombie 🥲
It’s disappointing. I’ve been going through some of their older catalog recently and it just has a lot more passion behind it i feel.
AC Shadows felt like when i write an essay, where i get really motivated at the start, completely drop off and try to stuff the middle with as much as possible to reach the page count, then get motivated again at the end just to finish the conclusion. They always had their bugs, but lately it’s felt soulless.
In the Ubisoft trading community that I mentioned, some folks blamed UbiSoft’s downfall for “being woke”. As if Ubisoft’s blind chasing of money, abandoning most of their IP, selling broke products, and last but not least an executive telling consumers to get used to not owning games are not bigger factors.
Ubisoft has been shit for a very long time.
I still recoil from the memory of Far Cry 3 dropping in the middle of the game because thier launcher had an issue, three times in one hour. Which reset my progress. Uninstall, never bought shit from them again.
What did they screw up recently?
What didn’t they screw up?
Doesn’t really answer the question for people like me who didn’t follow their every action
No, sorry. Sometimes I don’t want to answer a question and just feel like being a smartass to hopefully get a chuckle from a handful of people.
Xotic56 has you covered.
Well starwars outlaws was supposed to sell 5.5 million copies to break even and they sold 1 million.
The CEO told people to get used to not owning the games they pay for
And overall every game they have made lately is soulless corporate suits driven slop.
They lost what made them special and unique and doubled down on it for years.
This is good news for everyone who is not an ubisoft shareholder
how so?
Why? What relevance is Ubisofts poor record keeping to non-shareholders?
There AAA games.
Then there’s one AAAA game.
Next must be the AAAAA game they’re working on. It’s an extraction shooter.
AAAAA
The sound one makes when they’re forced to 100% Ubishit’s sandbox games.
What do you mean markers spread everywhere isn’t gameplay?
Roguelike Deckbuilder Extraction Shooter.
Then there’s one AAAA game.
I mean, they claim there’s one, but evidence says otherwise. Them spending a lot on their shitty arena shooter with boats didn’t make it any higher quality.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_amicale_des_amateurs_d'andouillette_authentique
Sorry, the page doesn’t exist in English :(
Most likely they fucked up their report and they’re using the rules of the exchange to suspend trading until they fix the mistake. But Ubisoft has been running on fumes for some time now, shitting out the same 3 or 4 games over and over again so I doubt their financials are that great.
Sounds like their recent games that they claimed did so well probably didn’t actually, and that’s about to be a massive problem.
This exactly what happens when you rely on rhetoric, instead of you know, making games that people like.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
“We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…animated show!”
Or “We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…addon for an always online single player game that no one likes…"
Fans: “We get to play as Sam Fisher again? Awesome!”
UBI:
To be fair, they are too big.
They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.
My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.
Not only that but E33 showed people what ex-ubisoft devs could do when you actually let them be creative.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up???
By treating their paying customers like worthless trash/criminals/scum/pirates/etc. Which is what Ubisoft has spent the past 10 years doing.
They are also hellbent on infecting everything they touch with Denuvo malware. I haven’t bought anything of theirs in years for that reason alone.
Oh wow you anger much less easily.
I started boycotting when they started forcing uPlay even in Steam games.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
Nah fuck that if they make a new splinter cell game it would end up being open world with a cosmetic store
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
I see the points that you made to another commenter but SNES and Sega Genesis were 16-bit consoles. They were a dramatic improvement (and many games on them were the pinnacle as far as I’m concerned) over the 8-bit NES and Sega Master System. I’ll take well-designed 16-bit games over pretty much anything else.
Genuine curiosity: does 3D really give more opportunities for asset reuse than 2D does?
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
I can understand this too.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
Got it, thanks!
Don’t forget AA, doing pretty good too.
Yup, AA and indie make up >90% of my gaming dollars and hours.
Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products
Isn’t this how the gaming boom and bust cycle always worked?
Indie(ish) games boom, AAA studios buy them and make them bust.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
I suggest you play some classics.
Indie games pale in comparison.
What are some examples of classics and indies you have in mind?
Play Symphony of the Night instead of the indie knockoff.
The indie market is just another tool to reduce people’s standards.
Right, Terraria and Stardew Valley constantly releasing new content for free is lowering standards… 🙄
Both are great. Here are some great indies:
- Factorio
- Hollow Knight
- Subnautica
- Celeste
- Hades
- Tunic
That covers a wide range of genres, none are particularly derivative, and those are just off the top of my head.
I play great classics all the time, but I also play great new indies.
Yeah, I think all of those games are trash.
But I’m glad you like them.
Your standards are weird. Several of these games are considered the current pinnacle of their genres.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
No, I’m still talking about indies in general.
I gave 1 example because giving more isn’t worth my time.
the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Okay, buddy.
Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.
The only games in my Steam library that I can’t play are Ubisoft.
Fuk Ubi. Forever. I would be happy if they went under.The only Ubi game I play is Just Dance Now. Sadly I can’t think of a non-Ubi alternative to that gameplay :/
The rabbit hole goes deep on this one.
I found it surreally hard to find new dance game - until I discovered that much of the player community had (I guess?) moved to an open source game engine called StepMania.
I play StepMania happily enough, now. It is nice how many different songs I can now add with community contributed step configurations.
Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.
So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c
Oh awesome! It’s like Frets on Fire but for DDR
The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.
Just emulate them.
The Nestle of video games. Because just like the food empire it never got flagged by the EU for overreach.
Nintendo would like a word.
Maybe the dog ate their homework?
