Ubisoft Apologizes Again for Ignoring Female Assassins

You'd think, after being caught systemically empowering sexual abusers for years, and then carelessly promoting a conspiracy theory that suggested that the Black Lives Matter movement is linked to a worldwide terrorist organization, Ubisoft would be hypersensitive to any kind of message or communication that could make them look bad. And yet, in spite of all the recent crap they've been caught doing, Ubisoft couldn't help but screw up yet again.

Granted, this most recent example isn't terribly bad on paper: Basically, to promote Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and the return of the insta-kill wrist-knife, Ubisoft UK posted a video of other Assassin's Creed protagonists using the now-iconic weapon. The problem, such as it was, is that in the entire video that chronicled the use of the weapon... they completely omitted the female assassins who have used it in their own games.

Now, this might normally be a gaff that could be written off as a simple careless mistake, if this were any other company but Ubisoft. But one of the major accusations levied against the higher-ups at Ubisoft was an ongoing campaign to repress female representation in Assassins Creed games, to the point where entire plots were rewritten to either force female assassins to share more screen time with men or to keep the men the focus of the story.

So this omission wasn't just a gaff, it felt like a return to form for the company, which left a bad taste in people's mouths.

Ubisoft quickly rectified the mistake, tweeting a new video that included female assassins in the franchise's long and storied history, and they apologized for their mistake. Which is all well and good, but they've been making a lot of sloppy mistakes like this as of late: how much of this is human error, and how much is actually maliciousness?

Knowing Ubisoft, the ratio isn't going to look good for them.