Ubisoft is indefinitely postponing multiplayer Watch Dogs: Legion on PC – Gaming – News

But…. In my opinion, you turn things around. Call me old-fashioned, but when I bought a game ‘back in the day’, it was complete from the start.

Everything used to be better. This had a very simple reason. In the days of Apogee, Epic Megagames, and even iD, you got the first part of the game for free as well as shareware. After all, distribution of those games was mainly via BBS systems at a speed of 2400 baud (bps) and to get a game to the man you wanted to reach as many people as possible and you were encouraged as a user to share the game. These free parts were supposed to impress. Was it not fun or not finished then there was no soul that bought the following parts and well then you could forget about it. However, if you were so impressed as a gamer, you would go to a PC store hoping to get the game there or order the diskettes by faxing the publisher.

Only when games appeared in generic stores did you notice that there was less and less shareware. You now had to buy games completely before you could evaluate them and that went wrong for many people when it turned out that some games were disappointing. These were the heyday of illegal tapes and Twilight CDs, but if a game really pleased, they were often still bought.

The Internet was introduced and distribution became a lot easier. It had a lot of advantages, but also a big disadvantage. Players could follow closely what the production of a game was. This used to be different because then suddenly there was a game that you had never heard of which was super cool and you saw it for the first time on an HCC. So people became impatient and the pressure on the developers (also by the publishers) got bigger and bigger. There was too little time to complete a game and concessions had to be made. To finish the game, the DLCs came and from that moment on the whole derailed.

After all, the publishers smoke money and if they could generate more income through DLC, the publishers would be crazy to release a game in one go. It was also noticed that people became very brand-oriented. Campaigns arose between people who swore by Blizzard (the “It’s done when it’s done policy” and, for example, detested everything from EA (think Westwood Studios). People became brand loyalty and that was again considerably milked by the publishers and the pre- orders.

Pre-orders work exactly like recent Q&A scams. A salesperson adheres to the agreements and receives a few good reviews. Once these are in, the seller engages in scams and is judged by the good reviews, which has instilled confidence. Even the once acclaimed Blizzard has gone wildly wrong in a similar way when you consider the Warcraft III remake debacle.

Ubisoft, which is traditionally not known as a publisher with bugless games (PoP: SoT for example), seems like the rest of the game industry to be very shocked by the Blizzard debacle and not to mention the Cyberpunk happening and has recently one after another game release or feature without even mentioning a date. Not only is Watch Dog Legion’s PC MP feature covered, but The Settlers and PoP – SoT remake have all been postponed as well. So the market (not just Blizzard) is on the lookout right now.

Why, however, do we get to hear about a game 2 to 3 years in advance. We as players think this is because we are made tasty, have something to live out, but this is far from the truth. As I stated earlier, this only creates pressure and stress for the developers, so they should not be in favor of this. No, it’s about money and shareholders in particular. A shareholder of a publisher who does not hear anything for 3 years will really not invest anymore, but a shareholder who is told that there is a new blockbuster is going to invest more .. and that is precisely the problem with games nowadays. It’s no longer about the gamers, it’s no longer about the developers, it’s just about raking in as much money as possible … and if it goes wrong, the gamer is the victim, the developer is the sin bin, the publisher buys quickly another developer and the investor / shareholder has long since cashed in his money and dumped his shares when the game flopped …

It’s not nice that Ubisoft is currently postponing everything, but this may be a sign that changes are on the way and that publishers are finally starting to think in the longer term. Hopefully they have learned their lesson

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