Ubisoft needs a reboot

engadget.com:

At some point in the last console generation, Ubisoft lost its soul. It was a piecemeal erosion process that started in 2015, and it finally resulted in a complete identity collapse somewhere between the studio’s unironic rollout of in-game NFTs and its sixth delay of Skull & Bones. Ubisoft has 40 years of AAA hits and weird licensing deals to its name, and it used to be a pillar of European innovation – but in 2023, it’s selling live-service blandness, mobile ports with microtransactions and unreliable release dates. What even is Ubisoft anymore?

Ubisoft has been a company longer than most of its players have been alive. It’s responsible for developing and publishing hundreds of games, including iconic franchises like Prince of Persia, Far Cry, Trackmania, the Toms Clancy, Rabbids, Rayman, Just Dance and, of course, Assassin’s Creed.

At the company’s Summer Game Fest show we got reveals of Massive Entertainment’s big licensed games, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws, as well as a proper look at the new 2D Prince of Persia game, which actually seems pretty good. But for the most part we saw sequels, live-service games and mobile titles. XDefiant is a free-to-play team-based shooter, and following an off-key sea shanty performance, we saw Skull & Bones – a live-service game we actually played in 2017 and 2018, but has since been delayed to oblivion. Then there were several mobile-first games like The Division Resurgence and Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade, and a new Crew game, The Crew Motorfest. We also got another Ubisoft TV show and a look at the Assassin’s Creed VR game. It was far from the worst stream of the Summer Game Fest, but it didn’t do much to make people excited about Ubisoft.

So, let’s talk