It seems that, at least as of writing this, the upcoming game by Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, is a gift that just keeps on giving.
It's actually incredible how one game is almost solely responsible for a complete meltdown and, possibly, even crash, of a giant game studio. (Ubisoft is one of the largest dedicated game studios in the world, with several tens of thousands of employees. Ie. a company that exists solely to develop video games, ie. not counting megacorporations that do tons of other things like Microsoft or Sony.)
Of course it's not just this one game that has caused a major crisis in that company, as there are several other reasons as well (the other one being their recent Star Wars game not selling even nearly as well as they hoped, and although it reportedly sold a million copies, still probably being an overall loss because of its enormous development budget.) However, it arguably is the game that started the avalanche that's now threatening even the very existence of the company (at least as an independent one, rather than it being owned by some other company.)
I'm not going to repeat here what all the controversy is with Assassin's Creed: Shadows because that information is easily found elsewhere. Instead, I'm going to here ponder a bit about whether the game is actually salvageable or not.
Notoriously Ubisoft, as of writing this, delayed the release of the game by something like four or five months. They gave some lame-ass excuses to why, but it's quite clear that it was because of the controversy. The actual reason is up to much speculation. Many people are thinking that it's just a delay tactic: In other words, wait for the storm to pass, and then quietly release it when nobody is talking about it anymore, hoping that it will go largely unnoticed by the crowd that caused all the fuss. Maybe with any luck it will then sell enough to recuperate the costs.
Some people have jumped the gun and declared their theory that they are actually going to remove or change the male main character in the game. (There's evidence by credible sources that the male character was actually originally a native Japanese character, fully modeled, before they changed it to what it's now.) However, I don't think that is physically possible: Four months is not even nearly enough to change a game of that size in such a drastic manner. It would probably take a year or something.
Others have speculated (and this is actually somewhat of the official story by Ubisoft) that they will just do some minor cosmetic changes to some models (mostly to remove "culturally insensitive" content) and perhaps some dialogue, and fix bugs and polish the game, but otherwise leave it largely unchanged.
Anyway, regardless of what they do, Ubisoft is between a rock and a hard place. No matter what they do, they will receive a huge amount of backlash.
Rather obviously, if they were to change the main character to the original native Japanese character, they would get a huge amount of negative press by the majority-leftist gaming press and the leftist twitter mob (not that this would affect their sales, but for some reason corporations are really wary of this kind of outrage.)
If they won't change the main character and leave him as it is, they likewise will receive backlash. Or, to be more precise, the current backlash will just continue.
So, no matter what they do, it will be bad.
Perhaps their only hope is that the speculated first scenario describe above works: In other words, by playing the waiting game people will have forgotten about the controversy in four months and won't bother with it anymore by the time of the actual launch of the game, and it will go largely unnoticed and without much fuss. Maybe people will have moved to be outraged about something else.
Although there's also another scenario that might come to fruition: Currently there are a lot of rumors that Ubisoft is actually in such bad shape as a company that they might be bought out by another bigger company: the rather infamous Tencent in this case. If that ends up happening, perhaps the other company (likely Tencent) won't have so many qualms in actually changing the game and replacing the main character, and completely ignore the leftist backlash. (As a Chinese company they really don't need to give a flying fuck about American far-leftists, which might be the only positive thing about the company.)
From the gamers' perspective it might be the best possible scenario: Ubisoft ends up being bought out, it becomes a subsidiary of Tencent, and the game is changed to be an actually enjoyable experience free from political messaging and virtue-signaling.
I don't find that scenario very likely, but who knows.
Comments
Post a Comment