https://www.tweaktown.com/news/102055/ubisoft-headed-towards-privatization-and-dismantling-in-2025-industry-expert-predicts/index.html

Not sure if anyone posted this yet but keep in mind that it's just a rumour

I don't know. Going private is obviously the option they're going for, but I don't see how selling any of their IPs may help them do that .

Also, this quote from the analyst:

"Ubisoft's development approach remains stubbornly outdated in an era demanding player engagement and community building."

Excuse me? Are we going back to the "single player games are dead" speech?Because there's been a ton of games the last two years that have proven how that is not true.

The thing is, the market is absolutely lopsided nowadays. Free-to-play and multiplayer stuff are probably nearing 10-to-1 in terms of revenue vs. single-player 'premium' experiences. I don't know if the remaining 10% is shrinking in absolute terms but in this post-pandemic era, it might as well be.

That being said, companies rarely consent to surgically selling IPs, even when they haven't been using them for a long time, so that rumor is probably bull.

And the mobile market is bigger than both the console and PC market, maybe even combined. But no one says that publishers should put all their games on mobile or that they should stop releasing games on PC/Console. It doesn't make sense.

There's a market for everything, and what publishers should learn to do is manage their budgets and don't f*ck things up with their marketing campaigns which, in my opinion, are what have hurt Ubisoft the most, and not the kind of game they make.

Honestly there's so many things wrong with the ways the "AAA" companies approach single player games these days that it's no wonder so many are failing. Like right from the start, they announce a $70 price tag which okay, prices are going up but then they are like, if you want everything, gotta pay like $120 or some bs. On top there's battlepass and microtransactions and all this other nonsense in the game itself.

Then the game budgets are so high and the results are so mid that it makes little to no sense. Especially on the optimization front where even on a ps5, many games have an internal resolution of 720-900p. Yet many SP games look meh. On PC, shader comp stutter and 60 series/600 series doing sub 1080p 50fps no RT without upscaling is nuts. And I feel like with many big budget games, there seems to be this "uglyfication" nonsense going on where the main character has to not look too beautiful or hot or interesting or unique anything of that nature.

And of course, because the budgets are so big, they gotta appeal to the mass market crowd so gotta check off every box to ensure the narrative isn't offending anyone. And when people criticize the games on social media, the developers or publishers "fight back" in a way that makes the game get negative media.

And the list goes on. But then you have games like Baldurs Gate 3 with none of the bs selling more copies than these so called "AAA" single player games with a fraction of the budget. In the end, companies that are receiving flop after flop need to rethink their strategy and go back to what makes Single Player games fun. Otherwise they will continue to dig themselves into the grave.

I agree, but think about it from the point of view of an investor who does not have a deep knowledge or attachment to the market. All they see is a company making less money by the quarter in a stagnant or very slowly growing market.

If nothing were to change, would you put your money on that company hoping for a miracle turnaround or would you invest your money elsewhere? There are a lot of other businesses and bonds that will make you way more profit.

I wholeheartedly agree that something has to change in Ubisoft. With almost 19,000 employees (from Wikipedia), they should be more efficient and productive, but they can't seem to catch when things go out of control and act more quickly to fix that. Or to cancel the development of games that have gone for too long and everybody knows they won't be able to profit from them (Skull & Bones, Beyond Good & Evil 2 come to mind).

So yeah, things need to change at Ubisoft, not for investors, but to guarantee the survival of the company.

Now, the investors... I don't knwo what to say, to be honest. To me it's unthinkable to buy something I haven't done some research for, if only to see what I'm really buying. So, to know that there are "investors" that buy stocks from companies without knowing sh*t about them or the business segment they belong to, and then complain, is difficult to understand, much less have sympathy for them.

Quick troubleshoot questionfor my web browser (Edege) if that's ok.
Didn't want to make a separate thread.

Edge some times freezes for a few seconds, and I can hear that it is booting up my harddrive (which I guess is in idle/sleep mode).
Once the HDD sound is done, my browser is responsive again.

I'm wondering what may be causing this, because as far as I know I have nothing installed on my HDD.
Edge is installed on my NVMe C: drive.
And Downloads from Edge go into my D: drive, which is an SSD.

I thought maybe it migth be that my cache or cookies are for some reason stored on the HDD, but I can't seem to find out.
I only see an option to clear them. Doesn't say where they are stored. (You'd think they'd be on the NVMe though)

I'm not really sure I can help you.

It also happens to me when I use Edge. I think in my case it's because Windows/Edge decides to put the tabs I'm not currently using into a sleep mode and, if they stay that way for long, once you go back to them Windows/Edge has to wake them up, taking a couple seconds while checking all the drives for caches or other info it may need.

I haven't tried it as it doesn't bother me enough for the hassle but, if my situation is similar to yours and you want to do something about it, there's a way to stop Edge from putting tabs to sleep (Settings => System and performance => Optimize performance section => turn sleeping tabs off). You can also create a whitelist in the "Never put these sites to sleep" option and adding the URLs of those sites, so they never go to sleep while the rest do, freeing resources in case you need them.

I think that might be it.
I tend to have one or two tabs pinned for stuff I want to get to later.

I'll test to whitelist Youtube since that tends to be what I pin.
Thanks.