Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonvin Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. I am on the road to recovery myself. I hope all of you are well well. Back in November of twenty twenty, I did a three part series about the history of the video game company Ubisoft or you be Soft, depending on how you want to pronounce it. They pronounce it different ways within the company itself, so there's no universal agreed upon pronunciation, so I'll probably say Ubisoft anyway. The video game company actually traces its history back to farm machinery for reels. I'm not going to go into everything that I covered in those twenty twenty episodes. You could easily go back and listen to them if you like. I do think that's a fun bit of trivia to consider. Now. The company was founded in France back in the late nineteen eighties by a group of five brothers, the Guillelmo Brothers. One of them, Eve Guillelmo, remains CEO to this day. And I'm going to go over a little bit of the stuff I talked about in those episodes just to kind of remind us. All But, like I said, if you really want to dive into the history of Ubisoft, then check out those episodes that published in November twenty twenty to get the full story. All right, let's get back to like kind of an overview. So the studio became known for several game franchises, ranging from Rayman, which was the earliest big franchise for the company, to Assassin's Creed and far Cry in more recent years. They expanded tremendously in the nineteen nineties, in part because the company made lots of acquisitions. They bought up lots of other game developer studios. Notably, they purchased a development company in North Carolina called Red Storm, and in two thousand, UBI Soft required red Storm and in the process got access to games with Tom Clancy's intellectual property. So I'm talking about stuff like Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and Rainbow six, among others. The Tom Clancy games would become kind of bedrock for Ubisoft over the years, like a very strong foundation for the company. The two thousands saw Ubisoft Dodge Duck, Dip Dive, and Dodge various attempts to acquire the company. First up was Electronic Arts or EA. They showed interest in Ubisoft for quite some time. EA purchased a fifth of Ubisoft's stock at one point, but EA never actually made an overt move to acquire the company. There was obviously some feelers out there, but nothing ever coalesced into like a hostile takeover or anything like that, and by twenty ten EA had sold off its shares of Ubisoft. But that experience had a really big effect on Ubisoft itself. The company had played things a bit more conservatively then they might have otherwise, and didn't make as many big choices while under the potential threat of an acquisition. The thing is the EA move was just the first time uvie Soft was under the potential shadow of a hostile takeover. A similar situation unfolded in twenty fifteen when another large French company called Vivendi started scooping up shares of Ubisoft, more shares than the brothers Guielmo themselves owned. Vivendi threw its weight around and demanded that Ubisoft include Vivendi executives on Ubisoft's board directors, but the brothers were able to drum up enough support among other shareholders to keep that from happening, because even though Vivindi owned more stock than the brothers dead, the brothers were able to rally other shareholders to support them. Now, the battle for control of the company lasted about three years, at which point Vivendi said, fine, keep your stupid company. We're selling our shares and we won't buy them back for at least five years. Then maybe then we will come back. We'll just have to wait and see. And at that point, Vivendi held nearly thirty percent of all the shares in the company, so it was a truly significant amount. And since then another company bought up a bunch of shares and would be soft. That would be the Chinese mega corporation Tencent. I'm sure we won't see history repeat itself again. Right, Well, we'll probably mention Tencent again before we end this episode today. There are a few other things I want to mention before we pick up where we left off in late twenty twenty at the end of the last episode of that series. First up, the video game industry is notorious for its crunch culture. Not just do be soft, I mean like the industry in general is known for this, and that is as a game is in development, particularly as you get later in its development cycle, companies have been known to pressure developers into working longer hours, sometimes giving up weekends or really in extreme cases, discouraging them from even going home. Then, as you might imagine, this becomes a stressful and unpleasant situation. In more recent years, we've seen employees and allies of employees push back against the whole crunch culture of the video game industry. And to be clear, crunch is not just something that happens in the video game industry. It happens in lots of industries, you know, like overall developers, not just in video games. It happens there, but it can happen in lots of other situations as well. Now, in some instances, staff who work at video game companies have actually unionized to create more leverage with their respective companies. There's a union among Ubisoft Paris developers, for example. But there are other Ubisoft offices all around the world, and some of them are unionized and some of them aren't. And Ubisoft was no stranger to crunch. In fact, in the early days of the company they actually located their office in a chateau in Brittany, France, and this was a sort of a ploy to lure young developers to work for Ubisoft and you know, not necessarily want to go home at the end of a long day. And it worked at least until the costs of maintaining a chateau proved to be a bit too steep and were eating into profits, and then they relocated to Paris. On a related note, Ubisoft had identified something pretty concerning so by twenty nineteen, through the various studios that the company had acquired over the years, which again are all over the world, right, Ubisoft figured that it employed around sixteen thousand developers. That's astronomical, that's such a huge number of developers, and it was spinning out triple A video game titles at a rate that left competitors in the dust. And in case you're not familiar with the term triple A video game, that's just a big budget, major release right like Assassin's Creed typically falls into Triple A video game category. Things like Halo, you know, or Grand Theft Auto. These are triple A video games. You might get spinoffs that are not triple A, but the main entries all fall in the Triple A category. Ubisoft, however, though it was releasing more Triple A games than any of its competitors were, was not releasing a linked rise in revenue and from a net revenue generated per employee perspective, as in, how much money are we making? If we say we've got X number of employees, we're making why amount of money? How much were we making per employee? They were were starting to lag behind others. In other words, other companies were making more money per employee. Maybe not more money overall, but per employee, they were making more money than Ubi Soft was. So Ubisoft started to kind of pump the brakes a little bit on Triple A video game development, because that developing a Triple A video game is uber expensive. And this was partly to give development teams more time to polish games, and it was also partly to try and focus on alternatives to these huge, flashy and expensive Triple A titles, like what other types of games could we make that would be less expensive and more profitable. Now, the second thing that I want to bring up before I move on to what's been happening at Ubisoft since November of twenty twenty is that, Ubisoft, like a lot of other companies, began exploring ways to make games an ongoing revenue generator. So in the old days, you would head off to the game store you know, or whatever, and you would buy a copy of the game you wanted, and that was it, right end of transaction. You purchased your game, and then you brought it home and played it. Maybe sometime later, the game company would release an expansion pack to the game you had purchased, and you could go out and buy that and it would add some more content to the game you loved. But that was about it. Like that was the only options open to a video game developer company, and even that meant that you still had to pour resources into developing and releasing an expansion pack. By twenty twenty, a lot of things had changed in the video game industry. The Internet was essentially the facilitator for this change, because now companies could stagger out downloadable content or DLC. Some of that DLC could be free, but a lot of it would usually require at least a small fee to purchase, and the transaction mechanism could be inside the game itself and would hit the player just they were on the verge of getting that dopamine release, but it's being denied, so like you can't beat that final stage Boss Babe, if you spent five bucks or a new mega bazooka thingy, you can manage it. And a lot of companies, including Ubisoft, experimented with free to play games or freemium games. So with these titles, you don't even have to buy the base game at all. It's free for you to download and play, but for it to be fun or to flesh it out, you might have to pay some cash to buffet up a bit. You know, the best freemium games are fun to play even if you never spend a dollar on them, but that's kind of counter productive for the companies that make these games because they need to be able to generate revenue or else they go out of business. So ideally, you create a game where, yeah, it's fun to play even if you never sink any money into it, but if you do sink money into it, it's more fun. Or in a lot of cases, it's not that it's more fun, it's just it's less frustrating, which is kind of a grim way to look at things. But that's how this free to play business model works. The base game is free, but all the cool stuff is locked behind micro transactions. Then we get to the third element, the least pleasant of the three, and that's to put it lightly. So, word got out that Ubisoft had a toxic corporate culture, absolutely rife with instances of sexual harassment and discrimination, and this was company wide. Like a lot of the discussion was focused on Ubisoft Paris, the home office for Ubisoft, the headquarters, but allegations spread throughout the company and its various offices in places like Canada and the United States and Singapore and things like that. And word was that the company these human resources department had effectively attempted to dismiss any allegations that executives in particular were guilty of either you know, doing acts of sexual harassment or ignoring acts of sexual harassment, essentially allowing it to happen. Now, possibly the reason why HR was not really paying attention to this is that those accusations went way way up the leadership chain in the company, including but not limited to the creative director for all of Ubisoft, a guy who had the ultimate yay or nay on essentially everything that was under development within the company. Eventually, news of these allegations in Ubisoft got out to the public and the French authorities launched an investigation into the company. Now the company couldn't afford to turn a blind eye to what was going on after all, these these bombshell news reports were coming out, and soon the media would start to cover a series of dismissals and resignations as various Ubisoft executives were shown the door. That's kind of where I left off in November twenty twenty, so let's pick up again to see what's been going on with Ubisoft since then. Now, I'll go ahead and mention the reason I decided to do this episode in the first place is because recently those French authorities detained a group of former Ubisoft executives based off serious accusations of illegal conduct, primarily in the form of sexual harassment or some reports reported as outright sexual violence. The investigation, which is technically ongoing, it's been a really lengthy and thorough one, as reported in the French newspaper Liberation or Liberacion I guess I should say Libee is how it's often referenced. A French union representing video game workers brought allegations against various ex ub Soft employees back in twenty twenty one. Now, this was after the scandal at Ubisoft. I know, I'm going back and forth on the pronunciation. It's driven me crazy too. Just know that as you hear me say ub Soft or ub soft and you're going crazy, I'm also going crazy. Anyway, let me get back to that. So, this was after the scandal at Ubisoft became public news. Two other individuals also approached police with accusations. They obviously were not named, because if you're naming the victims of sexual violence in papers, that's not typically a good thing to do in the middle of an investigation. So the police launched their own investigation. They interviewed more than fifty current or former Ubisoft employees, and the whole thing took a place over the course of more than a year, and the detainment happened on October third and October fourth, which of twenty twenty three, which, as I record this and publish it was last week. Now. Among the five people detained was a guy named Serge Hascut, whose name I have butchered. I'm gonna be butchering lots of names. I mean, they're all French names, and I am not a French speaker, so my apologies for that. Let's just blame my ignorant American tongue. Anyway, Serge had served as the creative director for all of Ubisoft for many years, so this was the person who had the year nay say for pretty much everything. The other person who was named was Tommy Francois, who had been vice president of editorial and Creative Services. I'll talk more about those charges, the allegations, and the ongoing investigation, and then get into what else Ubisoft has been up to over the last few years. But first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back. So before the break, I'm mentioned that the creative director for UBI Soft, Serge Pescut or Serge I'll just say, because I know I'm butchering the name, and Tommy Francois, the vice president of editorial and Creative Services, had been detained by French authorities. The French authorities did not identify the other three people they had detained as part of this investigation, so I do not know their identities. There were several high level executives who left UBI Soft, like in twenty twenty as part of the big scandal, So there are multiple options as to whom those three could be. Initial reports indicated that the police had detained, but not formally arrested these five former UBI Soft employees. From what I can tell, they have made no arrests so far. Like I tried to follow up on this and see what was going on, and I did look at some French publications, obviously translating them into English using Google Translate because my French is terrible. But the lawyer who represents the plaintiffs, you know, the people making the accusations, have made it has made it clear that the charges are really serious, and that they're not limited to just these five individuals, and that, in fact, the charges point to a systemic problem within Ubisoft itself, and the departments that, at least on the surface, were meant to provide employee protection were really nothing but a way to protect the company and to squelch any efforts by employees to speak out about the toxic culture and harassment that they faced. It's really ugly stuff and it's still ongoing, and maybe there will be arrests that follow as part of this ongoing investigation, but as it stands, right now as I record this, I am unaware of any actual arrests. But yeah, serious, serious stuff, and I'm sure I'll touch on it again because there are allegations about a different arm of Ubisoft that recently came to light. Leave that behind now and talk about other stuff in the company. So, while Ubisoft was embroiled in this scandal, it still faced the challenge of developing and publishing games right. The world did not come to a halt as it was dealing with this. They were trying to forge a new strategy and perhaps reverse a trend of diminishing returns like I had talked about before. So in February twenty twenty one, Ubisoft held an investor call to talk about the company's performance in twenty twenty and what it planned to do moving forward. The chief financial officer, Frederick Dugway, I think, emphasized that Ubisoft would not be leaning as heavily on triple A titles as the company had in the past. So to quote him, he said, quote, we said for a number of years that our normal template is to come with either three or four triple A games, So we'll stick to that plan for fiscal twenty twenty two. But we see that we are progressively continuously moving from a model that used to be only focused on Triple A releases to a model where we have a combination of strong releases from Triple A and strong back catalog dynamics, but also complementing our program of new releases with free to play and other premium experiences. End quote, so again indicating that games as a service was something that the company was really interested in. This, by the way, games as a service has kind of had a really rocky go of it as of late, Like a lot of game studios are reevaluating that approach because a lot of players have kind of rejected that version of games. They don't like the idea of being sold to again and again and again just to play a game they wanted to play. That's not to say that it can't work, but that it requires a very careful approach for it to work well and for players to feel like it's fair and not predatory. So it's a very tough line to walk, and not a lot of games are able to do it super well. Also, to touch on something else he mentioned, he said talked about the back catalog of games as it stands, Ubisoft's back catalog is an incredible contributor to their revenue, Like something like more than ninety percent of the game sold tend to be games from the back catalog. And it may not surprise you to know that Ubisoft is also looking into releasing remastered versions of some of their older games because people want to play them, and that's a way of generating more revenue by updating the games, giving people what they want, you know, making everything look pretty, maybe fixing some gameplay issues that existed in the original version of the game, and charging you know, seventy bucks a copy or whatever. The company was also starting to really eye mobile games as a possible opportunity for growth. At that time, less than ten percent of Ubisoft's business came from mobile games. But Tencent had made and a significant investment into Ubisoft, and Tencent is a company that has a deep investment in mobile games, and the fact that they were investing into Ubisoft suggested that things might change soon. There might be more of a focus on mobile games moving forward. However, it turns out that if there was going to be a dramatic shift for Ubisoft, it hasn't quite happened yet. Not that Ubisoft hasn't been developing mobile games, but they haven't really changed as far as how much they contribute toward revenue, at least not significantly. All Right, so let's talk about some of the titles that have been released since I published my episodes in November twenty twenty. Now, Remember the strategy here was to back away a little bit from Triple A games and focus more on things like freemium type stuff. But also remember video game development cycles can last years and years and years, so it can take some time before you start to see a dramatic strategy reflected in actual releases. Right, Like, a change in strategy might take a while to be evident in a company's releases because so many games were still already in the development phase while the announcement was made. So Assassin's Creed Valhalla came out right around the time I was publishing my episodes in November of twenty twenty. Now, the Assassin's Creed franchise is enormous. The major games, they're like thirteen of them, so there's more than a dozen games in the main series. Then you've got like around twenty spinoff games on top of that. The basic concept behind the Assassin's Creed games is that there's this millennia old conflict between two groups. You have the Assassins on one side and the Templars on another side, and generally speaking, the Assassins are all about free will and choice, the Templars are all about creating order, and both sides are wanting to see sort of a peaceful existence, but it's through two different directions. So the Assassins believe that only through free will can you really have true peace, and the Templars believe that only by locking folks down into a very orderly system can you actually guarantee piece. And that's where the maiden conflict comes from. There's also all this stuff about a precursor to human civilization and some science fiction elements of various items that when assembled would give incredible power. It gets pretty convoluted. Complicating this even more is that while the Assassin's Creed titles are set throughout history, there's a modern day component to the story. So typically in an Assassin's Creed game, you play as a modern day person who more often than not, is a descendant of some historical character who was involved in this ancient conflict between Templars and Assassins, and using some science fiction technology, you're able to inhabit the ancestral memories of these people from your ancient past, and in the process you uncover some of the mysteries that are at the core of the struggle between the Assassins and the Templars, mostly like trying to get an idea of where some of these sci fi artifacts from this precursor civilization could be hidden. Now, I've only played a few of the Assassin's Creed games. Personally, I find the historical segments to be far more enjoyable to the modern day ones. I find the sci fi stuff kind of silly and convoluted, and the historical components are maybe only slightly less goofy, but I just find them more enjoyable that That's just my own personal opinion of the games anyway, Valhalla, as I'm sure you can imagine, taps into Norwegian history and mythology. The historical segments are set in the late ninth centuries of the late eight hundreds of the Common Era, and if we go by historical chronology, that would mean this is the fourth game if you look at the historical segments. If that's how you order the Assassin's Creed franchise, which, by the way, there are obviously lots of different ways you could order the franchise. Most of them end up making everything make no sense. But if we were to just go by the historical segments, first up would be Assassin's Creed Odyssey, then would be Assassin's Creed Origins, so ironically that actually comes after Odyssey. Then the new game, Assassin's Creed Mirage, would be next, and then after that would be Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Although Mirage and Valhalla butt up against each other a super close because Mirage would have been taking place like a decade before Valhalla starts. Assassin's Creed Valhalla is a huge game. IGN estimated that it would take about sixty hours to complete it, so that would actually make it the longest game by playtime in the entire Assassin's Creed series so far. By contrast, the new title, the one that just came out, Assassin's Creed Mirage, is far less complex. It completely gets rid of any modern day story at all, so you're just focused on the historical element. It's really stripped down the game to its stealth and assassination components, and it debuted on October fifth, twenty twenty three, you know, just shortly after all those Zubiesoft executives had been detained by police. Anyway, it's interesting to compare and contrast Valhalla with Mirage, because one is a huge, sprawling game with tons of content that generally got positive reviews, but some critics were calling it out as being a little too long, that it had excessive length to the main storyline. According to gamer Rant, Valhalla falls pretty much in the middle of all the games by gamer By metacritics score, It's a little bit on the bottom side of the middle, so not smack dab in the middle. It's a little too early to make a call on Mirage, but as I record this, Metacritic has Mirage at a score of seventy seven, kind of averaged out among more than eighty critics. If it holds at seventy seven, that would put eleventh on the list of thirteen games, so toward the bottom end. So again, it's interesting because it depends, I guess, on whether or not you value the strip down core gameplay of Assassin's Creed, which would suggest that you would prefer a game like Mirage or if you prefer, you know, sort of the larger, more sprawling kind of gameplay of something like Valhalla. And again it's sarly maybe other reviews will change that score over time. It'll be interesting to see if we be softicides that the Valhalla approach is better than stripping things down to their roots. Also, while Ubisoft would release downloadable content or DLC for Valhalla, they've said that they're not going to do that for Mirage. Mirage does have microtransactions included in it, but it's purely for cosmetic elements. So you can pay to have different cosmetic features added into Mirage, so you can change like the appearance of your character and their costume, that kind of stuff, but you won't be getting additional content. So very interesting that they're taking that. I guess they're kind of testing the waters to see what resonates with gamers more because if it is something where it's like a stripped down version, that could potentially mean a smaller investment resource wise into game development and perhaps a better payoff down the line. But if it turns out that gamers kind of reject that, then it may mean like, well, I guess we're stuck with planning out these really huge games. Now, let's go over some of the other games that have come out since November twenty twenty. Besides Assassin's Creed, Valhalla, and Mirage, there were several you know, TV or game show or board game based games that came out, like Family Feud or Trivial Pursuit, that kind of stuff. Family Feud, by the way, in case you're not aware, is a long running TV game show, and so that was one of the titles that Ubisoft released since November twenty twenty. Then let's see there was three different Just Dance games came out, because there's one every year, So Just Dance twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, and twenty twenty three all came out since November of twenty twenty. There were several Tom Clancy titles that came Mount Sin Sin Rainbow six Siege and Rainbow six Extraction were two of those. Ubisoft also released Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, the Game Complete Edition. The game had been out before, but this was kind of a remastered full version of the game. Then there was also far Cry six in twenty twenty one. Far Cry series is one of those. That's also like a long standing franchise with Ubisoft Far Cry. Typically you take on the role of a person who is stuck in an environment where there is an oppressive leader of some sort, and you are essentially trying to either escape or overthrow that leader, depending upon which Far Cry you're looking at. And Far Cry six got some mixed reviews, which is a shame because gian Carlo Esposito, the actor who I think of as Gus Frang from the Breaking Bad series, he played the villain in Far Christ six, a character named Antom Costillo. I have not played far Crai six. I think the last Far Krai game I played was Blood Dragon, which was quite a ways back, but from what I understand, it also received mixed reviews and people were generally a little disappointed in it, which is a shame because, I mean, again, that's a series that has a lot going for it, but I think a lot of people feel that it's a little formulaic, and so a lot rests on the story of those games, because if the gameplay is pretty much the same as the previous one in the series, you got to make sure that the story really sets it apart. And I think a lot of people didn't resonate with that story based upon my impressions from reading various reviews and such. Anyway, that's just a selection of some of the games that Ubi seft released over that period. They also had lots of other games as well. Shouldn't be because again, Ubisoft has offices all over the world these days. But already we can see that the pace of releases is different from earlier years at the company. Like let's take Assassin's Creed for example. We got Mirage just last week, and before that we got Valhalla in late twenty twenty. But let's compare that to the era of twenty ten to twenty nineteen. So in that ten year period, Ubisoft released nine Assassin's Creed games. Started with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, which came out in twenty ten, and the last one in that era was Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which came out in twenty eighteen. So the pace today is absolutely glacial compared to back then. Anyway, there's a selection of games that Ubisoft has released over the last few years. But what about a game that hasn't been released yet, one that's been development for more than a decade. Has slipped launch dates half a dozen times and has experienced development hell on a level that rivals that of titles like Duke Nukem Forever. I am talking, of course, about the long awaited pirate game Skull and Bones. We're gonna go into the drama behind Skull and Bones, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, before the break, I alluded to Skull and Bones, which you could, if you wanted to keep with the Mariner theme, you could say what has been an albatross around the corporate neck of Ubisoft for a few years. The general public first got a look at Skull and Bones back in twenty seventeen during E three, which I'll remind you used to be a thing. But the game had been in development for several years already, mostly over at Ubisoft Singapore, and in part that's where a lot of Ubisoft's problem comes from. Not that the developers at Ubisoft Singapore are bad or substandard, but that the deal Ubisoft made with Singapore the country has kind of put the company in a bit of a bind. So when Ubisoft set out to establish the Singapore office, which was back in two thousand and eight, Ubisoft had to negotiate with Singapore's government, and this is to establish stuff like tax breaks and incentives and that kind of thing. And you can land those sorts of stuff, but typically you have to offer something in return. So part of those negotiations included Ubisoft guaranteeing that they would hire a certain number of people in Singapore to staff the office, so they wouldn't just be bringing people to Singapore to do it, they would be hiring from the developer community within Singapore itself. Another was a commitment that the Ubisoft Singapore office would release original IP games, so not gay that belonged to other franchises, but that this office itself would become known for creating original IP Also, the developers at Ubisoft Singapore were largely responsible for the ship gameplay mechanics of one of Ubisoft's best reviewed games, and that would play a part, in fact, a primary part in the Skull and Bones story. So, according to Kotaku, Uisaft first launch development of Skull and Bones back in twenty thirteen. Now at that time, the idea was this was just going to be an expansion, a multiplayer expansion for Assassin's Creed for Black Flag that just happens to be my favorite Assassin's Creed game that I have ever played. But keep in mind, I've only played like three or four of the titles, so I haven't played the vast majority of Assassin's Creed games. It's possible that if I played one of the other ones, more of the more recent titles, I'd say, oh, well, this one's actually my favorite. But for now, Black Flag is my favorite. And in that game, you play as a privateer slash pirate slash eventually an assassin, and it includes sections of the game in which you control a ship and you can engage in ship to ship combat and pursue you know, generally piratical pursuits. So the initial plan was to create a multiplayer feature where gamers could purchase this multiplayer expansion to Assassin's Creed four and set their own skills against other players and have ship to ship battle against people who are controlling the other ship. However, while in development, the team added more features and components, and this kind of inspired executives to expand the project and it went from being just an expansion to a full spin off of Black Flag, and it had the working title of Black Flag Infinite and that decision wasn't just because of the game getting fleshed out more or it was also an indication that the games as a service model was really appealing to Ubisoft. So why spend so many internal resources to make an expansion to an existing game that you can only really sell the one time? Instead, why not create a fully fledged game that has the ability to generate revenue repeatedly from the same player base for however long that game's life cycle lasts. You know, whether it comes in the form of subscriptions or micro transactions or whatever, it means you can keep making money off the same title year after year. I mean, like, look at Grand Theft Auto Online. That's a great example of a game that has done that incredibly effectively. Meanwhile, a problem that has hit lots of game developers was hitting this particular development project. Actually, you could argue that two very common problems within video game development hit the Black Flag Infinite Project. One was that while developers were hard at work on the project, technological innovation in the game hardware space kept on going, which meant some of the assets that the team had been using were starting to really show their age. And this leads to a pretty tough choice. Do you adopt newer technologies knowing that this means a lot of your earlier work will no longer be usable right as you adopt these new technologies, it means you got to toss a lot of stuff you've already built. Or do you stick with the stuff you've already created and you just resign yourself to the problem that folks are going to think your game looks outdated at launch. They're going to say, oh, this looks like a last generation game. So you be self decided they were going to go with the first option. They were going to adopt the new technologies, but it meant that they were going to lose a lot of that early development work. Now, the other big problem that a lot of game companies have faced is feature creep. So this is when you have a set of defined features that you want in your project and then someone typically you know, someone in charge, decides that, hey, while we're doing all this, we should also add in feature X. Except adding feature X means that you also have to do a whole lot more work not just to have feature X work, but to have it work within the context of the overall project. Right because just including feature X might break other stuff. So it's a lot of work, and it's rarely just feature X. Often it becomes feature X and Y and Z, and next thing you know, you've run out of letters and you've got to start with numbers and stuff, and your project becomes bloated and difficult to manage. That happened to Ubisoft's project of Black Flag Infinite as well. Now a little bit later, you Besoft decided to divorce the game from the Black Flag title entirely, which also meant Skull and Bones. The new title would be one of those original ips that they needed to produce out of Ubisoft Singapore, So that would solve that problem, right Like here would be a brand new intellectual property that sure was drawn from the experience of designing Assassin's Creed Black Flag, but had no other connection to it. Now the game changed scope and gameplay several times. So originally it was meant to be set in the Caribbean. It was going to be this ship to ship combat between players where you would have these specific instances of ship to ship combat. Then after a while it migrated to a fantasy setting called Hyperborea for a bit. Another variation had a floating pirate citadel called Libertalia as a focal point of the game, but then it would ultimately migrate over to the Indian Ocean. It had, actually, according to at least some histories I read, had moved to the Indian Ocean before and then got moved out. Now it's back in the Indian Ocean. That's the setting for Skull and Bones as it stands today. Meanwhile, the video game developer Rare was at work on a similar concept. This one called Sea of Thieves, would be a multiplayer game in which players would form small pirate crews. They would command ships. They would go on adventures, which could include ship to ship combat as well as adventuring on land and searching for treasure and that kind of stuff. Rare also decided that progression in the game could be marked with cosmetic items, and to not lock any weapons and tools and such behind that so that way, you know, you wouldn't just log into the game for the first time and then find yourself obliterated by a veteran player who's using I don't know, capt'n Chonky's Intercontinental Ballistic cannonball or something. So Rare began developing Sea of Thieves around twenty fourteen, so not too long after Ubisoft had started on what would become Skull and Bones. Rare first announced the game in twenty fifteen at E three, so this is before ub Soft would announce Skull and Bones and the original plan was to release Sea of Thieves in twenty seventeen, but that got delayed till twenty eighteen. Meanwhile, back at ub Soft, the project that would become Skull and Bones hit some choppy waters. To fit in with the metaphor, developer leadership was mercurial. It changed multiple times, and that also changed the direction of the development of the game, and so it meant that developers were working and working and working on this project, but they weren't any closer to getting a finished game, and that was very much demoralizing. Ubisoft announced the game in twenty seventeen. They launched their own preview video at E three. That year. Sea of Thieves was not yet out, so now we knew about two Pirate Crew games that were coming out. The twenty seventeen preview of Skull and Bones showed off what appeared to be an encounter involving four ships. First, what seems to be a navy ship succumbs to an attack led by a female pirate captain, but her victory celebration doesn't last very long because just as she's looking over the spoils of her attack, two other pirate ships come into view, and they flank either side of her ship, and then all three vessels open fire on each other, and it looks like all four of them sink, and that was the end of the preview. The graphics and Sea of Thieves tends toward the cartoony, whereas Skull and Bones looked more aligned with what you would see in an Assassin's Creed game. Again, no big surprise since it did spawn from Assassin's Creed originally, but it didn't really show any gameplay in that trailer. This was like a cinematic approach really didn't give you a sense of what you could experience while playing the game. Internally at do Besoft, there was chaos. There was concern that Skull and Bones didn't have enough sticky content to keep players interested. If the game only involved player versus player combat, how long before that gets old and people stop playing? And if it's meant to be a games as a service where you're generating revenue over time. You want people to keep playing your game for as long as possible, so they got to development on some PvE elements. PvE stands for player versus environment, so the player is pitted against stuff that's under controlled by the game itself rather than under the control of a different player. In twenty eighteen, Ubisov showed off some of that PvE stuff in a preview called Skull and Bones the Hunting Grounds, where the Hunting Grounds showed off some of the things you could do in player versus environment missions, and at the end of that trailer it proclaimed the game would launch in twenty nineteen. Obviously that did not happen. In fact, the whole Hunting Grounds version of Skull and Bones would suffer the same fate as many other decisions during the development cycle. It sank. So instead you'd be Soft was looking at a different set of games that were becoming really popular around this time, and those would be survival games that includes stuff like resource management and crafting, So games like Arc are in that category. I play a game like that called Seven Days to Die, and that's a Zombie Hordes survival game that has some of those crafting elements. And resource management included in it. So now Skull and Bones would need to adopt those kinds of features as well, and the development would drag on because it's not just as simple as saying, well, let's add an inventory, right, You had to build a whole new player economy. It would change motivation for why the player is playing the game like it has massive impact on the game's development. So the changes would mean that players would need to venture on land to find and collect resources, so there had to be new ways to manage that inventory. The game would have to have an entire crafting mechanism built into it to make it all work, and the existing foundation of the game wasn't really suitable for all this kind of gameplay, so it made it even harder to achieve the new direction of the title. So what was actually going on here? It's not like game development follows some sort of natural progression. The leadership on the project spread out across multiple managers and appears that not everyone was on the same page. According to some of the folks that Kotaku talked to, it seemed like a lot of leadership practiced a passing the buck routine when it came to making you know, critical difficult decisions, which meant those decisions just didn't get made, so things were left in limbo. Then there's the fact that Ubisoft Singapore was a young studio that never had shipped its own full Triple A title. It had participated and contributed to them, but never made its own, so that was also an issue. Is possible that, you know, the studio itself just didn't have the experience to really tackle this and it was a little too soon out of the gate for the studio to helm such a big title. The game has had three different creative directors of the course of its development. The most recent creative director, Elizabeth Pellin, left the project back in September. She still works for Ubisoft, but now she's back in the Ubisoft Paris studio, and Ubisoft announced and missed launch dates for the game six times so far. Currently, the plan is to release it in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four, and since we're coming up on the end of twenty twenty three, I think most folks now are assuming that we're looking at twenty twenty four at this point. But the game has been in beta, so it's not like it's totally behind closed doors. People have had a chance to experience the game a select number of people, some of them people who work at prominent video games websites. They've taken part and reported on it, and the reviews are mixed. Some of them are positive, some of them are more meh. I don't think I've seen anything that was outright negative. The one person said that he was bored most of the time, but not like the game was outright bad. Not everyone finds the gameplay really that engaging, But for the people with whom it clicked, it sounds like it clicked really well. So it sounds like, for at LEAs some types of players, this is going to be a pretty fun game. The Kotaku report on the development of Skull and Bones, which came out in twenty twenty one, I might add, and you know, the game still doesn't come out two years later, say that Skull and Bones at that point was well over its initial budget, having hit more than one hundred and twenty million dollars. This actually has a really big impact, not just on the company, but also the developers themselves, because you see at Ubisoft, developers are eligible for a bonus depending upon how well their game does when it hits release compared to how much it cost to make the game. But because Skull and Bones was so grossly over budget and not at the full of the developers necessarily, it meant that there would be no way for the game to do well enough to trigger those bonuses. So, according to Kotaku's sources, Ubisoft had to do an internal write off on the game in order for there to even be a chance for developers to get a bonus at all. And again, the game hasn't come out yet, so we don't know if there will be a bonus. In twenty twenty one, Libbey, that French newspaper, reported that Ubisoft Singapore had shared some of the toxic traits of the overall ub Soft company, and then an investigation was launched into the charges of sexual harassment and racial discrimination at that office. That probably had a huge impact on the development of Skull and Bones as well. More recently, there's been reports that the Singapore Creative Media and Publishing Union or CMPU, has been campaigning within Singapore's office to try and get workers there to unionize and to organize. That has not yet happened, but apparently that's been going on for about a month now. Ubisoft has also faced other instances of labor resistance. Earlier this year, there were members of the Paris office who did a walkout around forty of them in protest of how Guielmo had released a man stating that the problems that the company had faced with were largely due to developer issues. And they were saying, Hey, it's not us, it's the people you put in charge who created this terrible toxic environment. How dare you say it's because of us and other demanding things like an increase in pay and a four day work week and some other considerations. And yeah, then there's Tencent, right. Tencent got a forty nine point nine percent economic stake in a company called the Guielmo Brothers Limited. This company actually holds the stock that belongs to those five brothers who founded Ubisoft. So this one entity actually holds the stock that belongs to the brothers, and now Tencent owns almost half of that company. In addition, it has about ten percent ownership of Ubisoft stock overall. Ironically, this is kind of old worries that ten Cent could take over ub Soft entirely because ub Soft shareholders have indicated they would not consider a buyout unless the Ubisoft stock was trading for around sixty to seventy euro per share. And when Tencent made this this acquisition deal for like fifty percent or forty nine point nine percent of the holding company, the stock price for Ubisoft fell fifteen percent to thirty six point six euros, So it's far below the threshold that shareholders would consider for a buyout. And as I record this episode, Ubi saft stock price is just below twenty nine euro per share, so yeah, it's not on track for that buyout option, at least according to shareholders. I should also mention Ubisoft's hope that mobile gaming would make up a larger percentage of revenue has not really panned out that way, at least not yet. It's still hovering around the ten percent mark, which is what it was at back in twenty twenty, so that might change in the next year or two, but so far it just hasn't really skyrocketed the way the company had hoped. So that kind of gets us up to speed as to what Ubisoft has been up to since twenty twenty. Felt good to get through all of that. I should probably also do this for Blizzard because I did one a series on Blizzard not too long ago, and I should do an update on that, especially with all the Activision Blizzard acquisition shenanigans that have happened over the past year and a half or so. But that's enough for today. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.