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Ubisoft director blames gamers, says they've been exposed as 'non-decent humans'
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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I would be a lot more willing to agree with you if "nobody" hadn't been driving a massive harassment and hate campagin complaining about "DEI". I mean, it pops up explicitly right in the comments of the piece linked here. "Nobody" has been busy.
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.
FWIW, I don't know this guy, but I don't believe for a second that he would love it if his competitors failed. People have a wild, distorted idea of how AAA game development works and how people making it (leadership included) look at these things. The guy went online to say he's frustrated at seeing industry insiders siding with an online hatred campaign and people are all dogpiling because hey, his title sounds like the thing I don't like, so the assholes being assholes online must be justified this time.
Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences. Corporate dynamics are more than capable of producing dysfunctional results without an evil mastermind pulling the strings.
Also FWIW, I mostly agree with him. If you're in the games industry get the hell off of LinkedIn comments at all (as Chassard just learned the hard way), but especially don't be on LinkedIn cheering for colleagues doing badly. That's just rude and unprofessional. You are allowed to keep your opinions offline and should exercise that right when it comes to commenting on your colleagues' livelihoods.
Sure, most people involved in these projects do. But for any given team, if you told me you knew for a fact that exactly one person in that team wasn't, and asked me who I thought that person was, I'd guess "the money guy" every single time.
Right.
Except "the money guy" isn't the monetization designer, which is what it seems this one guy has been his entire career. "The money guy" has some nondescript title, like "head of sales", or is just the CFO of the company. Or isn't even part of the company and just sits in a board with a bunch of other people and periodically shouts at the CEO to make more money.
Bet Chassard was super glad when he got promoted from being a game economy designer in a bunch of mobile games and got a fancy "monetization director" title instead. Irony is a bitch, because you KNOW he wouldn't be getting half the crap he's getting if he still had a job with "designer" in the name.
For the record, economy designers, monetization designers and, presumably, monetization directors, whatever the difference may be, have as much of a chance at being nice guys who care about their jobs and are attuned to their audiences as anybody else. I don't know this guy, and I don't know if he's any of those things, but what he wrote doesn't suggest that he's not. If people dogpiling think they're delivering karmic justice or disproving his point, they're almost certainly doing neither.
Well, surely we can agree that it's an unfortunate job title at least - it's easy to see why the people are dogpiling on him. If it actually were the money guy saying this, I assume you'd have no objection to the public reaction?
It depends on what the money guy is saying and doing. I have no need to rag on people because of their job title if they're not messing it up. Valve has had economists working on monetization for them, you don't see audiences publicly stating that they're sure that guy is an asshole because they work on monetization.
And no, it's not an unfortunate job title. This may come as a shock to people, but you DO need money to make videogames. And however you're going to monetize yoru game, you need someone looking at that. You may not like how they've monetized AssCreed or Outlaws or The Crew or whatever, but they also have The Division and XDefiant and Rainbow Six Siege and Brawlhalla. I would be shocked if they didn't have a monetization design department.
Look, Ubisoft is struggling, particularly on the expensive AAA stuff that is their traditional bread and butter. I would say they are very late to the party at breaking free from their framework mindset where games are largely built on a bit of a template. They need a new approach to coming up with game concepts, if only for PR's sake. But please, please, stop feeding the anti-woke mob's bad faith nonsense and stop trying to find indivduals to try to pin structural anger about certain corners of game development. We can -should- be better than that as a community.
Also, good for them for reversing course on the The Crew server stuff and for doing PoP The Lost Crown, that game is awesome and underrated. Would love to see them diversify into more mid-size stuff like that, because they nail it suprisingly often when they do.
I'm not one of the people flinging insults at this guy. I just understand why others are doing it. They see that it was a monetization guy from Ubisoft and they flip out. Is it a rational and objective reaction? No, but people are neither rational nor objective most of the time.
Okay, but the reaction to that can't be "boys will be boys". "People aren't rational or objective" isn't what you say to excuse a collective behavior, it's what you say to explain why it's wrong.
What's even worse is if that's used that as a justification for people being hostile on issues that you agree with or support but not on issues where you don't. Which I suppose in itself is part of the "not being rational and objective" thing.
Yes, I'm just explaining it, not justifying it. What I means is "don't get worked up or upset about it because this is just human nature and while you may be able to change this particular manifestation of it, you will never fix the underlying problem", not "don't try to change people's minds when they're wrong". You're right to be teaching people some discernment. Just don't suffer when they refuse to listen.