The more I see and hear from the executives in charge of major AAA gaming companies, the more convinced I become that they truly neither care about their product, nor do they want to. While they still make stupid amounts of money thanks to the casual audience, AAA is nonetheless becoming less and less relevant to the medium. It’s just decades of momentum carrying them alogn at this point, and recent comments made by Ubisoft’s CEO further demonstrate this.

As reported by Tech4Gamers.com, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot is once again in hot water for comments made during a recent investor meeting. Guillemot has been getting grilled for the past couple of days for his claim that microtransactions make games more fun, which at best reveals him as horribly out of touch and at worst shows him to be thinking that even his investors are complete idiots. Now, though, he’s also seemingly refusing to accept any responsibility for the increasingly negative receptions Ubisoft games have been getting.

Rather than acknowledge that, perhaps, Ubisoft isn’t making top shelf games anymore, Guillemot put the blame for poor reception squarely upon “organized campaigns of criticism” against Ubisoft’s games. Nevermind that the company’s main audience, casual players, doesn’t really pay attention to things like video game news sites, blogs, or YouTube channels. The most they’ll do is check out one of the big three sites like IGN or GameSpot or perhaps ask a friend before deciding to buy. And, as everyone knows, it’s in the interest of such media outlets to stay on the good side of companies like Ubisoft (and their coverage has shown that).

No, it’s not “organized criticsm” that’s got everybody hating your games, Ubisoft; it’s the games themselves. Not only has Ubisofts entire range of IPs become so similar to one another that they’ve effectively ceased to have any sort of gameplay identity, but they’ve also spent over a decade stagnating under the exact same open-world formula from 2010. Oh, and Ubisoft has gone out of its way to increase the so-called fun by making them more and more grindy and boring for anyone who doesn’t buy the “fun” microtransactions that speed everything up. Seriously, playing “the Ubisoft game” is little more than an exercise in tedium and has been for years now.

As I write this, I’m pretty sure that the one and only Ubisoft game that anyone has any interest in is the rumored remake/remaster for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, a game from twelve years ago! What’s more, most fans are probably looking forward to it because of its ship gameplay (which Ubisoft never did anything to capitalize on afterward) and the older Assassin’s Creed gameplay that isn’t based around arbitrary levels and grind. Other than that, all they’ve got is Rainbow Six: Siege’s puzzlingly dedicated playerbase, which is still somehow hanging on despite Ubisoft’s attempts to absolutely ruin that game too.

The gaming market is in dire need of correction, one big enough to finally knock out all of these giant corpos whose business plan revolves around squeezing as many pennies as possible out of players while providing as cruddy a product as they can possibly get away with. Perhaps then, people like Mr. Guillemot will finally be forced to take responsibility for their policies and the garbage they produce.

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Got a little ranty there, but what can I say, I don’t like being blamed for other’s bad decisions. What’s your take on Mr. Guillemot’s comments?

Image from the Ubisoft press site.