Fandom Pulse is reporting (paywall), according to a “Ubisoft insider”, that the beleaguered video game company is pushing back on Steam to try and get certain data points removed from public view. This would include data points like peak and concurrent users. The insider continues by saying that Star Wars Outlaws has still failed to surpass the 2 million units sold point having been released for almost 3 months. That’s a far cry (get it?) from the 5 million in the first month some investors were hoping for at launch.
The report also alleges that Ubisoft isn’t alone. Other companies would also like Valve to stop reporting numbers that they’d rather paint their own way on investor calls, or just dodge entirely like Ubisoft has done on recent calls where the lackluster performance of Star Wars Outlaws has come up.
Isn’t the reason they gave up on that because they lost all their customers?
I actually sympathize with their desire to resist silly reporting over player counts, because it can snowball and generally it’s silly not-news. But you do have to actually sell games at some point.
If they focused more on actually making good games, instead of monetizing the shit out of mid ones, their player count problems would solve themselves.
Oh, I’m not saying that the reporting is why they don’t sell games. I just think it’s mostly nonsense.
I’m saying that they have a big enough sample to recognize that pulling off of Steam isn’t a reasonable path forward, because people aren’t willing to deal with their launcher or epic. They know that they can’t push Valve around.
Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t interpreting it that way, it seems clear that they want to eliminate Steam’s reporting just because it makes them look bad, not because the numbers themselves are influencing sales