If by "new games" you mean Star Wars Outlaws, it sold in the millions. Just not as they were projecting to their investors, which is a massive problem for studios that are traded. Their shares go through the floor for no other reason that "oh no that game really should have sold more" and no actual negative financial issue and the number of concurrent players is not an indicator of anything really, especially not one that should result in people losing their jobs.
You want to know what's childish? Youtubers and other "influencers" throwing gasoline on fires to get subscribers without realizing that people's livelihoods are on the line.
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Agree to 100%. Ubisoft isn't worth much in my book. In fact only a handful of their games are worth playing imo, tops. And only one of them, Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, is really good (of those i have played). Cannot really think of any more of their games being that good.
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TBH, those numbers are only important for multiplayer games, and should stay for them.
But I'm sick of idiots saying small indie game X is "dead" because it's been played by 30 people last month. It's a single-player game, you don't need other people to play it beside you, why are you even looking at that stat.
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Glad to know I'm not the only one absolutely tired of seeing that cat profile pic whenever I look up reviews of small indie titles, for that dude anything that won't run on HD ultra wide is unworthy of existing and RPG maker games are some sort of sin. I once read one of their reviews where they were gloating about getting to be the first one to review the game so their negative review could do the most harm.
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Probably they think they're a hero. Warning people what kind of game are they watching at. RPGMaker, Gamemaker? Rubbish. Pixel art? Caveman painting. 2D? 80's crap. Why does he keep buying the cheapest bundles so he can write a negative review? The problem is that their negative reviews are based in things most people don't agree with so well; problem is that they are actually harming the developer if they're among the first 2-3 reviews.
The only time I find something valuable is that they have become master of asset flips. And still when they're not sure, they suggest it.
Another thing is the boilerplate style. After 5 minutes watching a game, takes five pharagraphs out of a longer doc and pastes it as a "real review", in the same way they accusses devs of pasting things together to form a game. Quite hypocritical they can't write a proper review for each game, they have to get from an asset warehouse. "Review flip"? (I also remember a couple guys a few years ago who only copied the most popular/useful review and paste it as their own. Thankfully they stopped.)
Yet of course he nevers deals with a well reviewed and rated RPGmaker game, or (more thank you think) Gamemaker games. Or pixel art games which have become staples of indie gaming. Binding of Isaac should be forbidden in a modern digital store!
I could respect an opinion but they forcibly punches them as facts, just look at the user name... When someone starts confusing opinions/beliefs with facts, I usually go away from the conversation.
I could go on and on and probably you too, but let's not spend more energy on this, k?
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Oh I was visited by that fairy too, lol. Yeah it's just a template where they change name of the game and a few things and copy/paste the rest. Really sad if you realize it, not that funny for a dev if people reading don't know about it... Though, anyone with a grain of salt in their head would see from the text itself that it's a person on a crusade and not someone actually reviewing the game.
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Correct, he is a idiot and his reviews are a bad template that he often don't edit properly, so the result is crap from the review point of view, from the effort and from his "standards".
He don't split between overprices trash games with cheap assets that the dev use for many games and small devs/publishers that invest time and energy into their games and still, oh wonder, don't deliver AAA art style standard.
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I wasn't expecting so many people to be as tired of them as I am, just that not being able to talk to anyone about it made me feel like I was going crazy.
As a low-spec player who likes a good pixel art style and hardly ever plays popular games, it's going to take a lot more for them to prove that I can't, in fact, enjoy my Cute Obscure Pixel Art Game That Doesn't Launch in Fullscreen by Default (TM).
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He also reviewed Stardew Valley negatively, because it is a console port, lol. Which isn't even true. Pointed that out in his profile comments, it got deleted and he had many excuses.
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I mostly remember him from a Touhou fangame review. Admittedly the game doesn't look high quality based on the preview and does have a number of negative reviews already, but he fixated on it supposedly being copyright infringing and doubled down when told otherwise by the developer.
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I think in general the more info the consumer has, the better it is. The problem though is that too many people have a lack of functional reading skills. It's genuinely ridiculous how the majority of people citing player counts have basically zero clue how to interpret them.
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Its important for all games, every single one.
EA and Ubisoft lied about their sales with Outlaws and Veilguard.
Without this data no one would have investigated further. EA even had an internal investigation into who leaked their poor sales numbers...why? because they got called out on their lies.
Black Myth Wukong (from a small developer) would not even have gotten nominated for any award after the paid smear campaign from IGN for not bowing to Sweet baby, if no one saw how well the game actual did on Steam.
Those idiots saying games are dead because of numbers are never going away, most are paid or have an agenda.
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I do agree with that, I've just forgot about that part. I guess accepting there are people who don't understand singleplayer charts and use them for their own cray cray agenda is less of a problem in the global scheme of things, than dirty international corporations trying to pressure audience and cheat out the investors.
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Black Myth Wukong is not a small developer. They had over 140 people working on the game, had a budget of 40million and the company is owned by Tencent. They did well, because they did marketing well, and had a great looking product. None of it has anything to with IGN who gave them an 8, btw, similar to many other game journals or Sweet Baby which as far as I can tell just a consulting firm, they don't have anywhere this kind of leverage, thankfully.
Otherwise, I agree Ubisoft likely wants to hide their numbers from potential investors.
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"Sure, we could make use of these transparent metrics to improve our games and deliver complete games instead of half-assed alpha builds. But we would prefer to keep doing what we're doing and mislead investors into thinking that our games are played by millions of players instead of hundreds. So pretty please, less transparency, more of the same of us!"
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Hiding anything from shareholders is a crime. For investors only sales numbers matter anyways. No one cares if Ubi is hated, if their games are good or bad. If they sell, it's all good. Also it's only a rumor.... "According to a report ... from an "insider"..." LOL, really?
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No. Hiding pertinent and relevant financial information from shareholders is a crime.
Hiding irrelevant numbers that create dumpster fires for absolutely no reason is only common sense.
I agree that the whole report is shady though.
Especially when you consider certain potential Ubisoft buyers would benefit greatly from the share price crashing again...
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the company wants to paint a "more favorable picture to investors"
the company wants to lie to to investors, isn't this illegal?
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All (big) companes do that, in a more or less visible way .
Statistics can be interpreted 'dfiferently' if you catch my meaning :p
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Yep, its a combined effort so they can skew reviews with their paid journalists. Still salty because Wukong sold better than Outlaws and Veilguard combined.
What's next? Ban game reviews altogether? So every release can be a "return to form" and "game of the year"
What they don't understand is word of mouth is always more effective than Steam player count data. If you tell your friends a game is crap for good reason, guess what? most will believe you over some paid reviewer.
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They're going the Netflix route. Reviews are bad? Well, then we remove review system entirely. Problem fixed. 🙄
I really hope Vavle tells them to go kick rocks. Having concurrent users shown for every game is extremely friendly to consumers, and one of the reasons Steam is so much better than the competition.
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They are not meaningless at all. For multiplayer games, I would go as far as to say that they are essential. For single player games they are a good indication if something is worthwhile or not. A review can be bought or influenced. But no one is going to buy thousands of copies on thousands of Steam accounts to manipulate the concurrent users numbers. It also indicates how well a game has sold overall, which then informs the consumer if the game is likely to drop in price in the near future or not.
On the flipside, what's the argument for hiding this information? It's either to A) try to trick people into thinking something is more popular than it actually is or B) try to trick investors. Neither reason is legitimate. The argument that "someone one might misinterpret the data" which I've seen come up here is also completely invalid, as you can essentially apply that to any information.
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For single player games they are a good indication if something is worthwhile or not
To each their own when it comes to purchase decisions and enjoying games, but I'm always surprised about the percentage of people praising popularity and player numbers on one side and those who argue against that and big AAA productions on the other side. I feel that the latter group is higher regarding other media (e.g. music and movies). Hollywood action movies might be popular, but most people wouldn't relate that to good quality. I haven't met many people who reasoned their musical taste with charts either.
I'm not saying that those "anti mainstream" people are right, even more if they just act like that to be viewed as special, but to me it feels like the gaming community is focusing too much on numbers.
I'd also like to add a C): they just want to avoid bad PR (as in clickbait media/influencers telling people games would be dead when they aren't and casual followers not being able to identify that as misinformation). PR is not per se morally wrong or even evil. Ubisoft might be a big greedy corpo, yet they still provide jobs. Protecting the company's public image means protecting these jobs, too.
I don't agree with this request (if the report is real) and it appears kinda weak to reach out because of that, but I can imagine the sentiment of being treated unjust behind it. Imho it would be smarter to release positive PR material though, e.g. sale numbers.
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The numbers mean different things for different games though. For a triple AAA big budget title to have only a few hundred players, that is an indication that something went wrong. To have a small indie title with hundreds of thousands of players is indicative of something else. Popularity in of itself isn't the end-all be-all, but it's another tool the consumer can do to make their purchasing decision on.
As for protecting jobs? That's not the consumer's responsibility. And tricking the consumer to part with their hard earned cash for a product that is subpar to achieve that goal of "protecting" jobs, that's just outright wrong. In the long term it will also harm those exact jobs, as consumer trust in the industry goes down.
There's also an argument to be made the jobs actually should be in danger, if people get bailed out time and time again, nothing changes for the better. It's harsh for sure, and there's always individuals that didn't deserve it caught in the blast, but again, the product and the consumer has to come first imo. That's how the industry stays healthy and strong for everyone.
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And tricking the consumer to part with their hard earned cash for a product that is subpar to achieve that goal of "protecting" jobs, that's just outright wrong.
Agreed, but I also didn't write that. You imply that the product is subpar. I haven't played their newest releases (Motorfest was last one), so I have to rely on reviews. Apparently they aren't GOTY contenders, but also not utter trash.
You call it tricking. Valve is transparent regarding player numbers, but by choice. Contrary to Ubisoft, Valve isn't public and can act freely (within laws). Ubisoft has to share financial reports, but not sale or player numbers for specific products. However, their investors can request that information to a certain extent.
If you think about other products: does your local supermarket show how popular certain products are? No. Companies aren't obliged to provide these numbers and if they do about their own products, you should always have doubts whether these numbers are really accurate. Thus I don't view "not publishing player/sale numbers" as "tricking". If a company doesn't do that, you are free to conclude that the numbers are lower than expected, but even then it could be wrong. Maybe they just match expectations and they don't feel confident enough about it to publish that. There also might be other reasons for keeping it a secret.
Again, like you I'm against this request (if it actually exists) and I like the CCU information provided by Valve. It doesn't matter much for my purchase decisions though and I don't think that CCU for single players is really helping there. You can notice higher numbers after updates or high discounts, but not whether the game is good or not.
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That's true, but the butter at the local supermarket doesn't get post-launch support. If a game doesn't sell, it then won't get the same updates, fixes, and new content as it would otherwise. So from that perspective sales numbers absolutely does matter to consumers, even for singleplayer games.
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New content for single player games? If you think of early access titles now, okay, but then please mention that, because that's an exception. A classic single player game wouldn't even need patches or hotfixes or at least not many, because it was properly developed and tested before release. I know, nowadays those seem to be the exception, because development is rushed everywhere. But if one just accepts that and buys unfinished or unoptimised single player games early and knowingly, they're actually a part of the problem.
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Single player games often gets DLC, expansions, etc. (both paid and free), but they aren't going to spend those resources unless the game sells. Doesn't have to be Early Access titles. Considering how expensive games are these days, if it doesn't get post-launch support that changes the value proposition for the consumer.
And if you refrain from buying games that don't need patches these days, you'll basically not be buying any games at all.
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They are meaningless to the financial markets and investors.
They are not an indicator of whether a game did well or not, and they definitely aren't an indicator of whether a single player game is "worthwile" or not, just how hyped it was or not.
Investors should invest in companies they believe in, based on innovation, trends and financial information, not based on how mad reddit and youtube is at their latest game, and definitely not based on how many players are playing at the same time since hm... there are people all over the world and they're not all playing games at the same time. That's all this number means.
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Of course, but it still does at least hinder some of the lies the top of companies can spout in their reports to investors. And they do absolutely do that at times, where they hide failures in the successes of other products and things long those lines. More information is never a bad thing. You're right that concurrent player numbers only show that specific number, if you ask me, I think it would beneficial if Steam outright made sales number public. It works for the movie industry, where publishing box office ticket sales has been the standard for the longest time.
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It's one of those things where it's almost mandatory for a big company to be anti-consumer since being public requires to create maximum profits for minimum spenditure. In this set of legal systems the onus is sadly on us to defend our rights as consumers rather than the publicly traded companies to not violate them.
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So hide player numbers to try and get someone to buy them even with no player base to play online with
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Multiplayer games having numbers is an absolute must. Singleplayer i think we could go without.
Im getting worried about gaming currently- maybe its me getting older, maybe its generational, but nowdays people are giving crazy weight to popularity and some only ever dares touch something if theres what they consider enought people playing. In singleplayer?
I dont care how badly an AAA game flopped or not or whatever are the numbers from the latest favorite game to hate... what i care most is the increasing amount of good to great games there are flopping just because of how saturated the market is, visibility is hard, and then on top theres this trend of following trends- so if player count is low they snowball in a downward spiral.
And for most studios those kind of losses CLOSE studios.
Like the guys who made Shadow Tactics and the very well reiceved Shadow Gambit(their last game). They had to close doors. Doenst matter making great games and improving further each release or releasing FULL games, that work, no dlc... but nope, dont get enough traction. Not enougth
So for example right now another steam sale- all those gamers that care so much about numbers will look at 3k peak 36 concurrent and move along... meanwhile BANANA of all stupid things have higher numbers.
Im old enough people still talked about games magazines even tough youtube reviews were growing. The discourse, kinds of discourse and overall spread of peoples gaming was much muuuch more interesting and geared more towards quality then anything else. Fame even, but not from raw numbers like those(that just indicate hype) - closer to steams rating wich is amazing.
Ever since twitch exploded and became a common place its like we have a whole generation of gamers brainwashed into caring about top played, top streamed and nothing else.
Im getting increasingly doomerish about the world at large, but even gaming... this is sad. We have enougth damage being done by big publishers being scummy, trend chasing, live services, nft, abusive dlc, mtx, decreasing quality, bugs, denuvo list goes on and on... and then we have players also contributing to this very bleak scene
The indie boom showed a glimpse of what gaming and pc gaming coudlve become- but that is dead currently. Making games for MOST studios is surviving just enougth to try once more or for many(some numbers say most) just a slow way to go bankrupt. Steam isnt anymore the fertile lands it once was, besides all the litter of asset flips lying around even good games fail to grow. Its closer and closer to a wasteland
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A Ubisoft insider has shared that the people at the company have reached out to Valve, asking to limit the visibility of player count data. Concurrent player counts have become a valuable source of information in the gaming industry, especially when so many video games include online community aspects enhanced by their popularity. Despite how important these numbers can be to players, this plan could help Ubisoft in the long term.
In some cases, gamers will use Steam player count data to indicate a video game's success, and the company wants to paint a "more favorable picture to investors" who may otherwise be discouraged. According to the insider, Ubisoft is one of several other companies that have requested Valve hide this information.
Source
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