MudMan

I don't and have never worked at Ubisoft, Mr McCarthy.

Multiple people have explained a hypothesis that doesn't fit the information we have. Them being multiple people doesn't make it true.

Not to my knowledge, but I bet not being on Steam had more to do with it than Denuvo, by far. There is no indication that DRM software discourages sales, to my knowledge. If it does, at worst it breaks even.

I will buy the DRM-free option every time, but every piece of data out there suggests that "I will never play a game with Denuvo" people vastly overestimate how much of a practical impact that stance has.

Me, I'm just weirded out that people are so mad about some solutions they know but not about Steam DRM or any other solution that isn't known widely by name. You know, since I'm sharing all my unpopular gaming hot takes here.

Yeah, so I just checked, it brings up a Ubisoft Connect windows and then boots. It has less of a launcher than, say, Baldur's Gate 3.

I don't know if it makes you log in the first time or it creates a new thing for you by default, but I can tell you I had more account and launcher trouble running Warframe on a new PC this week than I did playing any recent Ubisoft game.

BTW, you can link up your Steam account to Warframe now and not have to log in each time and man, that only took a decade. Still didn't piss people off as much as Ubisoft being on Epic, though.

Yeah, I fully agree that they've stuck to a template far too closely for far too long. That's part of why I'm frustrated that this one went as poorly as it did, since it very much isn't that.

I think the hostility to any non-Steam platform is unwarranted, although annoyance is annoyance. That said, the Ubi launcher on Steam right now is just a pop-up, I don't think it makes you log in each time if you have everything linked.

This doesn't have anticheat, it has DRM software, though.

But hey, if there is no overlap, then how come this did so much worse than other similarly well liked metroidvanias, right? That's been my point here. People keep pointing out that it's not comparable to other Ubi titles. I disagree, because PoP is PoP, but let's roll with that. It also underperformed compared to other games in the same genre with similar review scores.

So what happened there? Either the Ubi woes are behind this, and then it doesn't make sense because this did worse than other more Ubisofty Ubisoft games, or they are not because different demos, and that doesn't make sense because this did much worse than similar games not from Ubisoft.

I think as far as this tells us anything is that the stink of negativity is not very fact-based when it comes to the core gaming community. That and Ubisoft may not have more money to make by going to middle sized, pure and simple high quality experiences like Rayman or this. Which sucks. Those are the best games they've made in recent years, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I don't know how long this has been a thing or how prominent it is. I haven't seen it in the more mainstream news channels, this thread was my first notice. I expect if people start to freak out in larger, more mainstream circles they may want to address it. Right now it's only reached a few people, I think.

Well, they're back on Steam, this game included, so there's that shift. Does that count or nah?

No, you're not following me.

The point here isn't whether this game did poorly. It did. Cool.

The point here is that it did WORSE than other Ubisoft games.

Specifically, worse than Ubisoft games that include all the shitty behavior. More of the shitty behavior, in fact.

So the performance of the game is not correlated to the shitty behavior. Well, maybe more shitty behavior gets you better sales, that would fit, but I'm not going to jump to that.

You'd think if Ubisoft's shitty behavior is scaring people off this game would have done better than Mirage and Mirage better than Outcasts, but that's the opposite of what happened.

I get that you want that to be true, but there is really no indication that this is the case. There are a lot of elements in Ubisoft's recent issues, but there is no good suggestion that any of that train of thought lines up with what we're seeing here.

More to the point, even if it was, all that suggests for Ubi as a course of action is to keep doing what they're doing. I mean, maybe launch on Steam day one, but... yeah, if you monetize the big games better and the fans of the small games won't cut you a break for making them... just don't make them.

My point stands either way.

Okay, but there was none of that here (except perhaps the launcher), and there was no suggestion in the results that anybody wants to encourage that. So that's definitely not the lesson being learned here.

Also, and I will keep repeating this forever, companies don't make games, people make games.

Also, also, good luck with that. Don't look now, but that's not how major companies going out of business and fire-selling their IPs tends to go.

Look, I'm not sure why it's Ubisoft's turn in the hot seat after EA and Activision, but none of that is a productive outlook or leads to a better outcome, as this one really good, really wholesome game bombing hard goes to show.

I mean, it's not like accidentally running Recall once is going to automatically compromise all your data to Microsoft in perpetuity. I don't even know what the final implementation is supposed to be, I'll make up my mind when I can review it, not before. Ditto for Apple's version on the new iPhones and all the other stuff being promoted right now.

But in this case I'm just puzzled. At this point it sure looks like they installed some package or service that is probably the ground layer for the actual feature at some point, but that doesn't mean it's doing anything at the moment. Maybe logging the same metadata as the Win8 feature, but it's not clear (there is a "activity history" setting in the privacy settings now, perhaps it's part of that?).

If anything the panic shows how tainted the Recall name has become, but that's not new for Microsoft. That original logging feature was also widely hated, as was a lot of their search or their current, mandatory "widget" news feed that nobody has ever found useful. The question is how widely tainted it is, and whether normies will want to burn it with fire as much as the Linux-facing techies.