Ubisoft CEO Explains Why Ghost Recon Breakpoint is Doing Badly

Ubisoft has never exactly been anyone’s favorite company, largely because they’ve never given anyone reason to love them that much, what with the unchecked greed and cookie-cutter games. But one game recently – Ghost Recon Breakpoint – was so unchecked in its greed and so blatant with it’s cookie-cutter design, it even made Ubisoft’s investors nervous.

Which was why Ubisoft CEO Yves Guilemont had to lay down some hard truths about it – and to a lesser extent, The Division 2 -- in a recent notification for their investment. You can read the whole prepared statement here, if you want, but he breaks it down to three major problems:

• Not putting enough time between each of their “live service games”, which were able to enjoy “years of optimization” before being pushed to the public.
• Gameplay innovations that were “strongly rejected by a significant portion of the community”. He doesn’t specifically say if these ‘innovations’ were the front-loaded, bloated marketplace full of crap, but I, at least, can assume as much.
• Finally, for not coming out “with enough differentiation factors”.

It was this financial failing that evidently lead to Ubisoft making the call to delay Watch_Dogs: Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Gods and Monsters to a later date.

Of course, none of this addresses the real elephant in the room, which I alluded to in the second bullet point above: for as boring and uninspired as Breakpoint actually was, what made people hate it was the fact that it nickle-and-dimed you at every possible opportunity, and even had a “time savers” category for people who hate themselves and the games they play. Hopefully, this will be the same kind of high-profile failure that causes Ubisoft to realize they’ve hit their limit (like EA did with Star Wars Battlefront 2), but if Ubisoft was good at learning lessons this wouldn’t be the darkest timeline.