• @[email protected]
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    119 hours ago

    I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.

    I totally agree that there has been a hate campaign about DEI right-wing complains, but there’s two subjects that came to head at the same time here because it was on the same big title:

    Star Wars Outlaw and AC Shadows had the same business model, Star Wars showed that it failed, and Ubisoft got spooked and said they’d have another look at the monetization model for AC. People did get pissed at both games when their business models with passes and editions everywhere were revealed.

    It’s just that AC also had at the same time the matter of racist and misogynist hate because of the protagonists. I don’t think this happened on Star Wars, and the fact that it failed too shows that it isn’t the only complain people are having against Ubisoft.

    Apparently the monetization guy is stepping on the minority hate campaign subject, he’s the one conflating the two problems here just because his job title. We shouldn’t forget that Ubisoft did pull an infuriating and deplorable stunt with that monetization model.

    • MudMan
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      016 hours ago

      No, he’s not conflating the thing he’s talking about with the thing he isn’t talking about because of his job title. That’s absurd.

      Never mind that I’m increasingly realizing people don’t understand what his job title actually means, you’re arguing that he shouldn’t talk about an unrelated subject because you’re pissed off at something else you understood to be related to an attribute he has, not to a thing he said. That’s a bonkers argument.

      I genuinely hate this train of thought, where people pick sides on anything and everything and get tribal about it regardless of how trivial it may be. The fact that it’s about something relatively mundane makes it more depressing, actually. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have issues with monetization or with AAA games or whatever, but it’s not sports or even politics, those issues are unrelated to the specific people working on it and they aren’t an existential struggle. Having those issues doesn’t mean you should join whoever is being hostile or insulting to people related to Ubisoft online.

      Oh, and for the record, it totally happened on Star Wars. Even if the game didn’t exist it was in the process of happening on Star Wars as a thing everywhere. But also, it happened on Star Wars Outlaws specifically.

      I’d also make a case that Outlaws didn’t do worse than expected because it had battle passes or MTX. Lots of moving parts on that one, but that’s a bigger conversation meant for a place where people aren’t having a hostility catharsis thing. We’re probably not in the collective mood for a nuanced analysis of the commercial performance of franchise creative products here.