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Ubisoft Insider Alleges That Company Wants Steam To Remove Concurrent Player Counts To Hide Its Failures
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Ubisoft isn't a coherent entity. It doesn't want anything.
I don't say this to be glib, or to "well acshually" anything. I say it because it's core to their issues. The place is a snake pit, where anyone with any kind of sway is trying to Game-of-Thrones themselves into higher positions of power and prestige. The people who are supposed to be helping you make better games are actually just focused on getting some kind of win over Jean-Michelle over on that other project, so that when the time comes to jump to a different position, you have the social capital.
This involves focusing on increasingly niche performance KPIs that change at the drop of a hat. I'm talking really boutique vanity metrics that have nothing to do with enjoyment or sales.
On the business end of things, it also means real geniuses saying things like "streamers should have to get licensing agreements before using out games", and saying so publicly enough that everybody in the company hears that you've said it.
And this is without even touching on the sexual assault and harassment allegations, or the abuses of power.
Thr company cannot want anything because its constituent parts are too distracted by and busy with self-interested civil war, rather than working together to establish any kind of coherence.
Ubisoft isn't a video game publisher. They're an office politics survival game. I'm very glad I got out of there when I did.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs - I know you know what they are, but for anyone reading who doesn't) are such a terrible metric for performance. Like, yes, well performing teams generate good KPIs because they're performing well. The minute a suit tries to actually tie a KPI to performance, people start gaming them and the product suffers.
A little bit of a segue here, but Factorio recently released some tidbits about their performance when they wrapped up development. They said they have 0.24 sales per line of code. Now they're a very different team making a very different kind of game for a very different kind of market, so I take this as the amusing corelation it is without putting any stock into why that is.
Some project manager from Ubisoft is going to read that and think, "Well we can do better," and start mandating more sales for less code. Next thing you know, devs are being punished for verbosity (an ironic twist on the classic and often abused KPI of how many lines of code are written) and before you know it you've got compound statements, nested ternaries, and inscrutable lambdas out the wazoo that make maintaining the code base impossible.
I wonder if I minified all my source code into a single line before compiling if I could game the system ๐ค
Yeah, product managers and executives will never find a performance metric they won't immediately pollute. They seem totally immune to the idea that once you start trying to directly impact them, they lose all meaning.
When I was interviewing for my first job in the video games industry, I came across an anecdote that spelled the whole thing out to me. Some game team discovered that players who completed their tutorial in under X amount of minutes (let's say 10, to have a concrete number to play with) where significantly more likely to make an in-game purchase (I worked in mobile gaming). So, the team was instructed to reduce the length of the tutorial so that almost anyone could complete it in 10 minutes or less.
Weirdly enough, this did not work.
Decision makers who "use data" to "drive decisions" seem to totally lack the ability to consider what the data means, who their customers are, or why people behave in the ways that they do. It's exhausting.