Business Video game maker Ubisoft in chaos after anti-DEI backlash - The ‘Assassin’s Creed’ game maker delayed its biggest launch of the year, reduced forecasts, and is facing calls to sell, in what is being called an ‘incel victory.’

[Source Photos: Ubisoft and Pixabay]

On September 24, Ubisoft abruptly canceled its appearance at the Tokyo Game Show and postponed all press previews of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Wednesday, we learned why. Anti-DEI backlash has sent the company spinning.

The Paris-based video game publisher pushed the release of its biggest game of the year from November 12 to February 14 of next year—and warned investors that net bookings would no longer exceed the 2.3 billion euros of last year, but come in at a disappointing 1.95 billion euros. That sent shares lower Thursday, continuing a rough year for the company (UBI.PA). Year to date, shares are down 57%, which has stirred up some activist investors to call for a sale.

The bookings’ shortfall was, technically, due to the delay and disappointing sales of Star Wars: Outlaws. However, the underlying reason for both of those, at least in part, is the far-right opposition to diversity and inclusion.

Outlaws, which has a female lead character, received mostly solid reviews from professional critics; but many players gave it a zero rating out of 10 on Metacritic, citing “forced DEI narratives” and claiming the developers “spent more time on the woke culture than on the story and gameplay.” Some players were also unhappy with the optional season pass model that tacked an additional $40 onto the game’s price for extra missions. (The season pass/downloadable content model has been a popular one in the industry for many publishers, and is used in Fortnite and Dark Souls 3.)

That review bombing, driven by anti-DEI backlash, seemingly worked—and set off a chain of events that led to Wednesday’s announcement.

“We believe Star Wars Outlaws was impacted by a coordinated effort that sought to troll Ubisoft games specifically and Star Wars content in general,” wrote Michael Pachter of Wedbush in an analyst’s note. “This is a case of a rare incel victory that led to Ubisoft having to take down its numbers.”

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot addressed the controversy directly in announcing the revised guidance.

“Let me address some of the polarized comments around Ubisoft lately,” he wrote. “I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda. We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy.”

That’s unlikely to quiet far-right critics. In fact, the delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which was already under fire by that group for having a female ninja and a Black samurai as lead characters in a game set in feudal Japan, could embolden detractors. GamerGate-friendly forums on Reddit are already celebrating the announcement and taking a victory lap, with a few racist comments thrown in.

But gameplay mechanics weren’t what caused the prerelease backlash of Shadows. As far back as July, the development team has found itself on the defensive for its choice to include a Black protagonist in the game. (That character, Yasuke, is based on an actual Black samurai from the 16th century.)

“While we strive for authenticity in everything that we do, Assassin’s Creed games are works of fiction inspired by real historical events and figures,” the development team wrote in July. “From its inception, the series has taken creative license and incorporated fantasy elements to craft engaging and immersive experiences. The representation of Yasuke in our game is an illustration of this. His unique and mysterious life made him an ideal candidate to tell an Assassin’s Creed story with the setting of feudal Japan as a backdrop.”

Despite the anti-DEI backlash, Ubisoft doesn’t seem like it’s making radical changes to the next Assassin’s Creed. The company, in its announcement Wednesday, vowed to “[fulfill] the promise of our dual-protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay styles.” To boost sales, the company said it would give anyone who preorders the game the first expansion for free.

Pachter said he still expects the game to sell more than 7 million copies, adding “this game has the potential to be one of Ubisoft’s bestsellers ever.”

That might not be enough for some investors. Reuters, on Thursday, reported an activist investor, pushing for the sale of Ubisoft to a third-party or private equity investors, claimed to have the support of 10% of the company’s shareholders.

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[AnOminous]

Just leaving this here.

This guy needs to die choking on a million cocks.

 

[Cuckoman]

So, there is talk about Tencent buying them. Ok.
They would be buying them for their IP, not for their workforce. That is for sure.

If tencent buys them then pretty much everyone will eventually be laid off and replaced with developers working from china.
They have plenty of developers locally and do not need to deal with crazy faggots on the other side of the planet refusing to follow orders from head office.
Orders like "No, no nigger or trannie worship" or "make the women look attractive" ...

With a chineese owner I don't think there will be very many nergroes or trannies or sex-offender flags in future games.
That sounds like total victory for us gamers.

 

[Dafuqisdis?]

To be fair, from my recollection the historical Yasuke was allowed to carry a sword, albeit probably a shortsword.

There's absolutely no evidence in the historical record that says that he was a warrior or ever carried a sword. Anything to the contrary was made up by a British fag named Thomas Lockley, a guy who even put all the stuff about Yasuke being a samurai into the fake news wikipedia entry (citing his fictionalized book of course).

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

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Just leaving this here.

I find it interesting how it's always entertainment industry fags (most notably movies and gayming) who cry about le ebil chudz not liking the sloppa and how they should just buy their games/tickets to their movies no questions asked. Phone and internet companies are notoriously shit in my country and I still manage to pay around 50% less on my phone and internet bill than most people, why? Because whenever they renegotiate my contract to say that I'll be paying more from now on I show that I found a rival company with a better deal, so they just give me an even better one. They'd rather do that for me than lose a customer, and the reason why they get away with the shit they do in my country is because most people just don't give a shit about complaining sadly. On the other hand when people criticize the modern gaming industry all they do is cry and bitch about how we're evil chudz and how they don't need us. Fine, if you don't need us, I don't need you either.

And that's why I merely dislike internet company employees while I absolutely despise faggots who work in the AAA industry and I only hope for Amazon warehouses, bauxite mining and cement mixing in their future careers.

 

[Anime Waifu NFT collector]

And that's why I merely dislike internet company employees while I absolutely despise faggots who work in the AAA industry and I only hope for Amazon warehouses, bauxite mining and cement mixing in your future employment careers.

These industry fags are so bitchmade, they don't even have a real job and they still complain about le evil chudz, the dude writing that probably has a job that requires doing nothing all day except going to meetings and doing other unproductive things, while there are game devs working 60 hours per week of an actual job to make the game come out of time , just shut up and enjoy your cushy job parasite, it's not that hard.

These people self pity about you shouldn't be hateful to them, and on top of that how you should be appreciative of their efforts to turn everything into a scam wealth funnel, these wastes of biomass make a living creating innovative methods of manipulating retards into making bad financial decisions and they still bitch that you don't like them.

 

[AnOminous]

What the fuck is a "Monetization Director?" It sounds like someone who needs to be put against a wall.

Apparently it's a French Canadian faggot and on top of that a "Monetization Director" so that's like 18 different reasons this faggot should be put against a wall.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevychassard/?originalSubdomain=ca

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Nobody's mad about Naoe. She's the one positive from what I've seen. Its the baffling decision to add Yasuke. Like yeah AC should not be used to ace your history exams but Yasuke.......uhh.......unless the japs are gonna actually be racist to him as they should be for the time period.....this will not bode well.

I would rather play a game entirely focused on Naoe. Take some elements from Aveline like the disguise system and refine them to work with Naoe and it could be fun. Sneaking around royal quarters in traditional kimono slitting throats or setting the buildings on fire, come on now. Hell one disguise could even be her donning a type of samurai armor that would have realistically worked like it did for Tomoe Gozen, for example. Add this to all the elements they already have for her in the game and she's one of the most unique and entertaining assassins since Kenway.

 

[Snekposter]

Nobody's mad about Naoe. She's the one positive from what I've seen. Its the baffling decision to add Yasuke. Like yeah AC should not be used to ace your history exams but Yasuke.......uhh.......unless the japs are gonna actually be racist to him as they should be for the time period.....this will not bode well.

I would rather play a game entirely focused on Naoe. Take some elements from Aveline like the disguise system and refine them to work with Naoe and it could be fun. Sneaking around royal quarters in traditional kimono slitting throats or setting the buildings on fire, come on now. Hell one disguise could even be her donning a type of samurai armor that would have realistically worked like it did for Tomoe Gozen, for example. Add this to all the elements they already have for her in the game and she's one of the most unique and entertaining assassins since Kenway.

You know if they're worried about not being woke enough they can always go back to France and go with Julie d'Aubigny, bisexual tomboy opera star and master sword duelist who once infiltrated a convent and then burned part of it down just to escape with one of her girlfriends who had been sent there by her parents after she got eaten out a bit too hard and fell madly in love.

Wait a minute, they can't do any historical revisionism with her since it all actually happened. There goes that plan.

Oh, and I suppose the chuds might actually enjoy playing a hot tomboy who both fucks and fucks up who she wants, when she wants, how she wants.

 

[Traummaschine]

It isn't long ago companies were clearly ragebaiting to create a buzz around their media. It is interesting that now that negative buzz supposedly is bringing down whole companies.

To be honest, while putting black people in absolutely everything is getting a bit old, I think largely making the same game for 20 years is getting older. Who cares about Assassin's Creed at this point? The negative attention they are getting at least means someone is talking about their game.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

You know if they're worried about not being woke enough they can always go back to France and go with Julie d'Aubigny, bisexual tomboy opera star and master sword duelist who once infiltrated a convent and then burned part of it down just to escape with one of her girlfriends who had been sent there by her parents after she got eaten out a bit too hard and fell madly in love.

Wait a minute, they can't do any historical revisionism with her since it all actually happened. There goes that plan.

Oh, and I suppose the chuds might actually enjoy playing a hot tomboy who both fucks and fucks up who she wants, when she wants, how she wants.

Plus Chiyome Mochizuki could appear, and Nouhime and Oichi. Honnoji is for sure going to be a crucial part.

I didn't know that the naginata was considered a woman's weapon. She could use that. It could be easier to use if she is in the samurai disguise for example.

Plus the smoke bombs, grappling hook, poison darts, the usual fare could add to her movesets. What is a new item they could implement for her that was something used in the sengoku era? Besides shruiken.

 

[Duke Nukem]

You know, maybe you should stop making shitty games and forcing ideology and politics into things that have nothing to do with them.

No offense intended to homosexuals but I really don't need to hear gay pornography in the background of my racing games or whatever. I'm here to race cars and wreck them, not to jerk off to some asshole getting fucked.

 

[Baraadmirer]

You know, maybe you should stop making shitty games and forcing ideology and politics into things that have nothing to do with them.

No offense intended to homosexuals but I really don't need to hear gay pornography in the background of my racing games or whatever. I'm here to race cars and wreck them, not to jerk off to some asshole getting fucked.

As a homo I too would like to play games that I can play when I'm in a casual setting; I save the raunchiness for solitary time.

Meanwhile there seem to be a lot of AI-generated songs made by Japanese YouTubers in response to AC Shadows for your listening pleasure. Here's one that calls out the French:

 

[Tablet County]

It's interesting to watch film and game studios go from "the customer is always right (in matters of taste)" to "the customer is wrong! They need to be educated into why they should like our product".
As always, the tip to learning more about what's going on in another culture is to go on their version of Wikipedia and translate it, because foreign-language wikipedias don't tend to have the same wrongthink filters on them (or at least not as much). In this case the difference in length between the English and Japanese article on Thomas Lockley is comical
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and shows how pissed off Japan is with him.

I like the part where Google mistranslates his name as Rock Lee and now I can't get the fucking Naruto character out of my head.

 

[Pentex]

The representation of Yasuke in our game is an illustration of this. His unique and mysterious life made him an ideal candidate to tell an Assassin’s Creed story with the setting of feudal Japan as a backdrop.”

As opposed to Hanzo Hattori, the leader of the Iga Clan, the man who helped Tokugawa Ieyasu conquer Japan, and perhaps least importantly, more likely to have been a ninja/Assassin than Yasuke?

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Can you imagine if they included Hideyoshi Toyotomi's Korea Campaign? It'd be Charlie Hebdo all over again with ubisoft staff getting assassinated.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

I imagine Ubishit used that subsidy money for frivolous expenses that aren't related to development or even marketing.

These people? Waste money on non-game related things like compulsory (for White males) Tolerance In The Workplace and Safe Spaces training?

 

[AnOminous]

These people? Waste money on non-game related things like compulsory (for White males) Tolerance In The Workplace and Safe Spaces training?

Who are all these fucking mayo ghouls? Is this a Klan rally or something?

I think these fuckers need to clean house. They're like "we want diversity. . .in YOUR neighborhood."

 

[23 bold flavors]

I remember playing AC:II, I read an article about the future of AC games and one of them paragraphs was about potentially having a game in fuedal Japan, I remember thinking that was so cool.

We see how it turned out.

 

[ltlftp]

Nobody's mad about Naoe. She's the one positive from what I've seen.

There has been pushback to her as well but it's heavily overshadowed by all the Yasuke stuff. People don't have a problem with female protagonists, they have a problem with the modern girlboss shit which is all western media is capable of anymore. That is probably going to be the fate of Naoe as well.

It's insane how quickly things turned to shit too when you consider this is the same series that had AC Liberation barely 10 years ago. A game starring a female, half black protagonist, where the main gameplay gimmick was changing outfits to blend into different situations. And the outfits actually made fucking sense, like her noblewoman dress heavily limiting her combat abilities to the point where it's dangerous to get into a fight with even a single guard.

Modern Ubisoft would probably have a whole cutscene dedicated to her going 1v5 against some guards in her big poofy dress and taking them out without receiving a single scratch. I just assume something similar to that will happen with Naoe actually (assuming they even gave a budget to cutscene designers.)

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Hell, I'd even accept the cliche as fuck revenge for the death of her master/village/clan as opposed to the tired girlboss shit.

I'm pissed. Her design is literally perfection and it'll inevitably be wasted on sjw bullshit being hammered into you in the game. I just hope I can pet the Shiba Inu's.