Kulturkampf

[benji]

the biggest story from this video would be that skull and bones cost 800 million, it's estimated to be 200 million and while a disaster was not quite as big a disaster as concord

if it was 800 million it would probably be the biggest flop in the history of the industry in terms of money spent to money earned

I don't think it could have cost that much because it was Ubisoft Singapore's flagship and even when it was failing Ubisoft didn't call in any of their Western studios to bail it out and ship it. They let Singapore and China continue to handle it and just delayed it.

It definitely didn't make what Ubisoft thought it was going to, but it also came out years after it was supposed to so they should have adjusted expectations. I doubt it soured them on Singapore/China except that they'll probably fly in a Western management layer for the next one. Those guys had already made tons of games in Splinter Cell/Ass Creed franchises and this was letting them take the one aspect from IV and blow it up into a full game and new franchise. I think this was the wrong way to do it, they should have let them do something sorta new in an existing franchise that had France overseeing it from afar. I wouldn't be surprised if this was Ubisoft's conclusion because this is what they've already done with every other development studio over the last couple decades. Like don't be surprised if they're the main studios on Far Cry 7 or something under a French team. Ubisoft has two decades of investment in these studios and they're still so cheap, spinning up yet another Canadian studio would be a waste when they've got thousands of developers in these who have worked on major titles.

Probably the weirder thing is that these haven't been the studios Ubisoft put on their F2P flops. How do you not decide "oh yeah we should let Ubisoft Singapore, Ubisoft Shanghai and Ubisoft Naboo do the grunt work on these" and let your Western teams try to birth more big franchises? They did it the other way around. The Division Heartland feels like something that should have been developed in Asia instead of with the main Tom Clancy people in North Carolina. It's not like those guys couldn't have done the design, Ubisoft is already integrated globally. They're not EA.