The Monetization Director at Ubisoft has said industry figures vocalizing their disagreements with Ubisoft revealed themselves as 'clearly non-decent'.
He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.
Full quote
I rarely post on social media, but today I am sad. Ashamed and sad.
The gaming industry is rough at the moment, we all know it.
But seeing how “gamers” react on social medias, wishing ill-fate to companies and people alike is sad. (And not only towards Ubisoft)
Even though it is always the vocal minority that express themselves on social media, I was hurt, hurt and ashamed to be a part of this community.
What is even more revolting, is coming on Linkedin and seeing the same comments from people within the industry.
On top of exposing yourself as a clearly non-decent human being, you are affecting thousands of employees that are already impacted by all the hate despite doing their best to deliver incredible experiences.
How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the product does not please you is beyond me.
We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.
People don’t hate these companies because they “don’t cater to them”. They love or loved the games, but these companies then turn around and try to screw their own fans out of every cent, nugget of personal data, and free time, that they have. There is no anger like the anger of a true fan.
To get that pissed, you had to have cared quite a lot to begin with.
The rest, are simply indifferent.
That, is why people are upset enough to experience schadenfreude when their stocks and releases fail. Because that is an event that SHOULD be proving to these companies that if they keep pushing the bullshit, they soon won’t be catering to anyone anymore. Hence it’s something that gives fans hope that they will pull their shit together and get back to doing right by their own franchises and talent.
And we are not all in the same boat. Some of us just want good games.
Even when companies like Ubi make good games, they come with a shitload of strings like “but the monetisation is unethical” or “the devs were forced to crunch” or “the company leadership did nothing about a festering company culture of criminal mysogyny”.
Simply by operating as ruthlessly as they do, these companies are slowly convincing the world they are “non-decent” institutions. Such institutions need massive restructuring, when the don’t deserve complete disassembly.
And angering your fans is a process that only goes one way. Every fan you piss off enough to make them swear to never again give you a chance, is one you probably wont ever have as a customer again.
Yeah, some will be malicious enough to cheer at the individuals getting screwed over when megacorps eat shit. But every sane person is cheering because there is now a large pool of talent looking to do something good with their skill, out from under the thumb of managers demanding every mechanic be optimized for monetization, rather than gameplay.
This person isn’t wrong to be disgusted with people who cheer at jobs being lost, but he is also MASSIVELY out of touch with how his own company is operating, and how it is coming to be viewed by the world as a result.
Ubisoft as a company deserved to fail though. It sure sucks for the poor bastards working there but something tells me the tune would be a lot different if this was just another round of layoffs.
I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.
I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.
He literally says “How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the product does not please you is beyond me.” I’m not saying he never mentioned employees or hate towards them, but his statement definitely comes off as purposefully misleading. Is there hate on the internet? Yes. People are sometimes hateful, but he even mentioned it being a vocal minority. To post something like this while there’s active backlash against the company and their games when he admitted to not posting much makes his intentions pretty clear. The majority of the “hate” is towards the company not the employees, but by being a concern troll he gets to lump in valid criticism of the company with a minority of people being hateful to the employees (some of which are directly responsible for the bad decisions of the company btw).
Maybe you disagree, but bad companies deserve to fail, and people responsible for harmful decisions the company makes should be held accountable. I think it’s ok for people to say that. I don’t want anyone anywhere to be treated poorly, but he seems to care more about the hate hurting their bottom line than actually hurting the people there. His statement would have read very differently otherwise.
“I understand if you are upset with decisions made by companies, including ours, but please do not direct hate towards individuals trying to do their jobs. If you take issue with the behavior of an individual, you should be able to express that while still respecting the person.” Or something like that.
The man is mad that people don’t like how he monetizes Ubisoft games and game mechanics. He is upset at the messages he gets when he upsets a game to inject a micro transaction. He is part of the wave of business professionals that don’t see game players as people - we are just cash waiting to be harvested from idle wallets. This is what quid-pro-quo looks like; he is seeing what we look like to him and he doesn’t like it. He wants to be a person with a name and friends and credibility that allows mistakes to be made in good faith. We want to have fun, sometimes with friends and other times alone, in a game world where we can be a person with a name, friends, and have the ability to explore. We both want the same thing.
So why is he treating people like cattle instead of people who are trying to have fun with the system they have been given? Fuck this narcissistic piece of executive hypocrisy. He doesn’t deserve peace until he exits the industry or finds a way to be actually useful.
Coming from their director of monetization, all I hear is “waaah waaah booo waaah”
All this nickel and diming is super profitable and it shows. Just because it makes them fuckloads of money doesn’t mean we should applaud it, because it awful for the customers.
No matter what he meant, he sounds like he’s trying to paint the people with legitimate gripes about the way he handles the company as the harrassers when he is a huge driver of the problem.
It’s like Republicans complaining about the quality of current public schooling and blaming ‘woke’ policies when they’ve been the ones cutting school funding for decades, and they know it. It’s feigned concern.
So what you’re saying is you’re victim blaming the people the director here is expressing sympathy for?
There is a huge harassment campaign based around flagrant racism, and there are probably some racists who are more excited to attack ubisoft because it’s a shitty company in general, but that’s just icing on the cake when the main content is racism and someone who doesn’t have a horse in that race isn’t going to be involved in the same way.
It sure seems to me like you’re trying to find a way of talking around the racist harassment campaign like the author in the OOP does. Really makes you think.
I couldn’t possibly know your motivations, nor the author’s, I just find your choice to whitewash racism disreputable. Maybe you just have such a burning hatred for EA that you think that it’s expedient to run cover for racists – I think you wouldn’t be alone in that mindset, though not in good company either – but I think it’s silly to waste time on such speculation into the internal state of some random account. All I am concerned with is the result.
He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.
Full quote
People don’t hate these companies because they “don’t cater to them”. They love or loved the games, but these companies then turn around and try to screw their own fans out of every cent, nugget of personal data, and free time, that they have. There is no anger like the anger of a true fan.
To get that pissed, you had to have cared quite a lot to begin with.
The rest, are simply indifferent.
That, is why people are upset enough to experience schadenfreude when their stocks and releases fail. Because that is an event that SHOULD be proving to these companies that if they keep pushing the bullshit, they soon won’t be catering to anyone anymore. Hence it’s something that gives fans hope that they will pull their shit together and get back to doing right by their own franchises and talent.
And we are not all in the same boat. Some of us just want good games.
Even when companies like Ubi make good games, they come with a shitload of strings like “but the monetisation is unethical” or “the devs were forced to crunch” or “the company leadership did nothing about a festering company culture of criminal mysogyny”.
Simply by operating as ruthlessly as they do, these companies are slowly convincing the world they are “non-decent” institutions. Such institutions need massive restructuring, when the don’t deserve complete disassembly.
And angering your fans is a process that only goes one way. Every fan you piss off enough to make them swear to never again give you a chance, is one you probably wont ever have as a customer again.
Yeah, some will be malicious enough to cheer at the individuals getting screwed over when megacorps eat shit. But every sane person is cheering because there is now a large pool of talent looking to do something good with their skill, out from under the thumb of managers demanding every mechanic be optimized for monetization, rather than gameplay.
This person isn’t wrong to be disgusted with people who cheer at jobs being lost, but he is also MASSIVELY out of touch with how his own company is operating, and how it is coming to be viewed by the world as a result.
Ubisoft as a company deserved to fail though. It sure sucks for the poor bastards working there but something tells me the tune would be a lot different if this was just another round of layoffs.
I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.
I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.
People hate Ubisoft so much that they’re just not reading the article or your full comments and are downvoting you anyway. What a time to be alive
lol the inflammatory bullshit title already decided it.
My habit of collapsing long sections so it’s less annoying to scroll probably doesn’t help either, but whatever.
He literally says “How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the product does not please you is beyond me.” I’m not saying he never mentioned employees or hate towards them, but his statement definitely comes off as purposefully misleading. Is there hate on the internet? Yes. People are sometimes hateful, but he even mentioned it being a vocal minority. To post something like this while there’s active backlash against the company and their games when he admitted to not posting much makes his intentions pretty clear. The majority of the “hate” is towards the company not the employees, but by being a concern troll he gets to lump in valid criticism of the company with a minority of people being hateful to the employees (some of which are directly responsible for the bad decisions of the company btw).
Maybe you disagree, but bad companies deserve to fail, and people responsible for harmful decisions the company makes should be held accountable. I think it’s ok for people to say that. I don’t want anyone anywhere to be treated poorly, but he seems to care more about the hate hurting their bottom line than actually hurting the people there. His statement would have read very differently otherwise.
“I understand if you are upset with decisions made by companies, including ours, but please do not direct hate towards individuals trying to do their jobs. If you take issue with the behavior of an individual, you should be able to express that while still respecting the person.” Or something like that.
The man is mad that people don’t like how he monetizes Ubisoft games and game mechanics. He is upset at the messages he gets when he upsets a game to inject a micro transaction. He is part of the wave of business professionals that don’t see game players as people - we are just cash waiting to be harvested from idle wallets. This is what quid-pro-quo looks like; he is seeing what we look like to him and he doesn’t like it. He wants to be a person with a name and friends and credibility that allows mistakes to be made in good faith. We want to have fun, sometimes with friends and other times alone, in a game world where we can be a person with a name, friends, and have the ability to explore. We both want the same thing.
So why is he treating people like cattle instead of people who are trying to have fun with the system they have been given? Fuck this narcissistic piece of executive hypocrisy. He doesn’t deserve peace until he exits the industry or finds a way to be actually useful.
Coming from their director of monetization, all I hear is “waaah waaah booo waaah”
All this nickel and diming is super profitable and it shows. Just because it makes them fuckloads of money doesn’t mean we should applaud it, because it awful for the customers.
Sounds sorta like victim-shaming…
What does this even mean? What victims? Clearly you don’t mean the victims of harassment campaigns.
No matter what he meant, he sounds like he’s trying to paint the people with legitimate gripes about the way he handles the company as the harrassers when he is a huge driver of the problem.
It’s like Republicans complaining about the quality of current public schooling and blaming ‘woke’ policies when they’ve been the ones cutting school funding for decades, and they know it. It’s feigned concern.
So what you’re saying is you’re victim blaming the people the director here is expressing sympathy for?
There is a huge harassment campaign based around flagrant racism, and there are probably some racists who are more excited to attack ubisoft because it’s a shitty company in general, but that’s just icing on the cake when the main content is racism and someone who doesn’t have a horse in that race isn’t going to be involved in the same way.
Nope. You aren’t getting my point and I don’t feel like explaining it any further.
It sure seems to me like you’re trying to find a way of talking around the racist harassment campaign like the author in the OOP does. Really makes you think.
It sure seems to me like you’re trying really hard to paint me as a racist. You can fuck right off with that bullshit.
I couldn’t possibly know your motivations, nor the author’s, I just find your choice to whitewash racism disreputable. Maybe you just have such a burning hatred for EA that you think that it’s expedient to run cover for racists – I think you wouldn’t be alone in that mindset, though not in good company either – but I think it’s silly to waste time on such speculation into the internal state of some random account. All I am concerned with is the result.