Kinda Funny Games Daily: Video Games News Podcast
Ubisoft Shuts Down XDefiant, Closes Multiple Studios - Kinda Funny Games Daily 12.04.24
Wed, 04 Dec 2024
Ubisoft is pulling the plug on XDefiant, An Avatar: The Last Airbender game has been canceled, and the Game Awards Players Voice Award Nominees have been revealed. Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping We're reviewing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Thursday at 4 pm PT as a YouTube Premiere! That's right, no Twitch! It's on YouTube.com/kindafunnygames at 4 pm PT Thursday, and podcast services after! Today after, KFGD, you’ll get: GAMESCAST - GTA 6, one year later The STREAM is Warzone If you’re a Kinda Funny Member: You can get today’s Gregway The Roper Report - - Cloak and Dagger Marvel Rivals Trailer - Ubisoft is pulling the plug on XDefiant and shutting down studios - Ad - New Avatar: The Last Airbender Game Reportedly Canceled - The Game Awards Players Voice Award Nominees have been Revealed - Wee News! - SuperChats - You‘re Wrong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the major news stories discussed?
Today's stories include Ubisoft is pulling the plug on X-Defiant, and Avatar The Last Airbender Game has been cancelled, and the Game Awards Players Voice Award nominees have been revealed. We'll have all this and more because this is Kinda Funny Games Daily. Yo, what's up? Welcome to Kind of Funny Games Daily for Wednesday, November 4th, 2024. No, December 4th, 2024. God, we're in December.
I'm one of your hosts, Blessing. Addy Oye Jr. Joining me is the Nitro Rifle, Andy Cortez.
Good morning, BlessingJr.bisky.social. .bisky?
What's a bit? Blue Sky. Oh, Blue Sky.
B-S-K-Y.
I see, I see, yeah. .bisky.app. Did you wake up and post your rap today on Blue Sky? Yeah. No. Like the streets are doing?
No.
You're Spotify-wrapped?
No. Oh, shoot. Yeah, I should check that. Yeah. I should check that. What are your predictions? Who would be your top artist? It's always Levitar. Oh, music-wise, I don't listen to music. I don't do music that way anymore. You don't listen to music? No, you do. When there's a new album, I will.
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Chapter 2: Why did Ubisoft shut down XDefiant?
Oh, so they said his name isn't Logan. It just showed, it just said Logan.
Now, okay.
Well, his real name is James.
James Hallett. Let's go on a journey here. We need a 23 and meet this guy.
Let's go on a journey here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I always get this confused. Him and Sabretooth, are they actual brothers, or is it like the Brothers of Destruction in the WWE, where Kane and Undertaker aren't actually brothers, but they have the spirit of brothers? You know what I mean? Well, in the lore, they were brothers. So is Sabretooth's last name Howlett maybe? And maybe it's like a, oh, Sabretooth Tigers, they might howl?
They're brothers. Depends on the storyline. Okay. Comics, not brothers. Not brothers. Movies, not brothers for sure.
Well. Okay, so it's like the brothers of destruction. You're watching. Because Origins Wolverine, they were brothers.
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Chapter 3: What impact do studio closures have on the gaming industry?
We don't count that one.
Now, Chad, what is Sabretooth's actual name? I guess I could Google this. Is his last name Hallet? Because then I could see the connection there.
Sabretooth. Victor Creed?
No way.
That's a sick-ass name.
I think I did know that, actually. I did know that.
Victor Creed, yeah. Victor Creed is a sick name.
Brothers from another mother.
They're half-brothers. We're learning a lot of stuff right now about Wolverine.
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Chapter 4: How does the gaming community react to game cancellations?
It reminds me of Multiverses a little bit in the fact that Multiverses first dropped in that early access thing and felt so strong at launch, but then they just didn't follow up in ways that were worthwhile to people. That would be my bet on what happened here. You dropped, had a good drop, and then a drop off from the audience that was playing it.
Yeah, a thousand percent. And I know some people will point to some issues within the community regarding anti-cheat and balancing. Any good game can, you know, live long and sort of fight against balancing issues. I don't think balancing is a reason why this game didn't succeed. I think a lot of it is just people go back to the thing they know and love. Yes.
And people may have been playing this game, and then guess what? Call of Duty drops a new thing, and it's a new Battle Pass, a new season, and a new map or whatever, and then people will flock back over there. And that's just kind of the way things go, and that's the way things have been going for the last several years. And I think more than anything...
Obviously, extremely sad that that many people had to get laid off in addition to this whole production suite in San Francisco and in Osaka, I believe. I think more than anything, they need to look at what they have with Rainbow Six Siege and just triple, quadruple, quintuple down on it and go, hey, we still have a game here that people are playing and we have a dedicated fan base here with Siege
It's somehow still very, very alive. It's been alive for a very long time and more and more people are playing it. And, you know, there's even a lot of very popular streamers still into the Siege ecosystem. We need to understand that we kind of have a miracle little baby right here and we need to just really feed it as much as possible for the foreseeable future.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can Ubisoft learn from Rainbow Six Siege?
Do you do a Rainbow Six Siege 2? Or do you continue to try and support Rainbow Six Siege as a live thing?
I don't think so. I think the messaging from here on out should be, hey, you all love Rainbow Six Siege. We love making it. We are going to make it the most... I think what they have to do with it is without maybe adding the 2 on it, is doing what Counter-Strike did, even though Counter-Strike did add the number two to it as well. Almost like a 2.0, like, hey, we're back.
It's still a bit of a dated-looking game now, right? I would say maybe updated visually and say, hey, it's a brand new refresh or whatever, but it's the same maps, it's the same characters. We are really, really going to double and triple down on new agents, new whatever the hell, new gadgets and gizmos, because they still have a product there that is still... like thriving, I would say.
And it's, that's so hard to come by nowadays to, to have a multiplayer game that people are still flocking towards.
Well, I mean, I think that's another thing that surprises me a little bit about how this has gone because X defiant is one that it's a weird one because part of me is like, Yeah, this is one that's worth abandoning because it didn't interest me as much as I would have liked it to. I think there's an idea there, but to your point, there are so many other games right now.
There's a good handful of games that people spend all their time playing and that people spend all their time in. There was that, I think it was gamesindustry.biz article that was talking about how it was, like, a high percentage of people that were playing games that had come out before, like, the last few years, right?
It was, like, people were playing Fortnite, people were playing, like, Call of Duty, Apex, like, they were the games that people keep going back to that aren't part of, like, the new yearly releases, so I think That's a big part of it.
But, yeah, like, X-Defined is one that, part of me is like, maybe worth abandoning, but another part of me is like, well, Siege came out in, what, 2015, 2016-ish, somewhere, 2015, and it's not like it came out the hottest game of all time, but they were able to build it into something that became way bigger than what it was at launch, right?
Like it had like a decent launch, came out, you know, built, built, built. Now Siege is like a contender. Siege is something that matters. I would have thought that if you're trying to recreate that magic, if you're trying to make something into a live service that's going to be lucrative for you, you look at Siege as the example of, hey, we did it here. Let's give X-Defiant more time.
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Chapter 6: Could XDefiant have succeeded with more time?
Yeah, and like an all-time peak being 200,000 and stuff. And yeah, just kind of backing up Andy's point here of like, why are they...
They had this weird couple years where they were refusing to launch on Steam and trying to make everybody use their launcher and all this stuff, and then also trying to chase this free-to-play trend and all of this stuff that I think a lot of people are looking back at Siege, and I think it's also...
We have to remember that it was such a different time, even when seeds started to rise up in 2018 than it is now and all this stuff. And it's not the same type of soil that companies can plant the same type of seeds with. And yeah, it's a weird time all around.
Yeah. We got to move on from this conversation. But one thing is I do, I want to do the, you know, where did Ubisoft go wrong conversation. As part of that, I do want to like put on our CEO caps and like do the scenario of, you know, Yves Gamal, he put us in his will. He didn't pass away in this case. Can you activate a will before you die? Because I don't want to put death on Ysgamal.
Try it out. We're going to say in this scenario where Ysgamal puts it in his will.
It's his career will where he retires.
There you go.
He puts in his career will.
We are the children in succession. Exactly. We're the succession children. I'm not saying succession. We're the succession children. He's retired. He has handed you over Ubisoft. How do we restructure? How, like, what is the CEO cap version of you doing? But I want you to think about that. Cause like, I want to do that.
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Chapter 7: What are the future prospects for Ubisoft games?
The company never disclosed a developer for the title, so it's unclear how far along the project was in development cycle before its cancellation.
How sad is it that you talk about this game and you say that it's a multiplayer fighting game? And my immediate thought is that would never survive. Oh, I mean, yeah. It would be, you would have to, I don't know what you could do. I'm so just distraught. Nothing will last. Everything's going to end.
It would have to be what the Hunter x Hunter game is about to be. And even the Hunter x Hunter game, I don't know. Or DBZ. Well, that's the thing. It wouldn't get the budget of DBZ. Like, you tell me that Saber Interactive is working on, like, an Avatar fighting game. No, that's not... Like, it's not going to be a good game. Saber's been... Saber? A fighting game? What was Saber's thing?
Were they... Warhammer? Warhammer 40? Yeah. Space Marine?
But, like, how many, like, Warhammers are there under Saber versus how many, you know... Tomb Raider 1 through 3 remastered and A Quiet Place The Road Ahead and SnowRunner and Evil Dead The Game.
Oh, Fran Mirabella has a word to say about SnowRunner. He loves SnowRunner.
Don't throw shit at SnowRunner. My thing is more so just that it's a fighting game. Like it is, Saber Interactive, I don't know if they would be able to pull off a fighting game, especially on the level of like a DB, like the Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, right? Like that is a, B-9 Namco has to do that.
If you're going to make an Avatar game, Arc System Works would have to be the ones to make it, right? Or if you're going to make an arena thing, you would have to give it a Bandai. I feel like a Saber Interactive Avatar fighting game is not the one. It's not going to be it.
Wait, hold on. Is Maximum Entertainment under Saber Interactive? Do we know?
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