Ubisoft stock drops after poor Assassin’s Creed Unity launch
Ubisoft is suffering the effects of releasing a seemingly unfinished game yesterday with their stock dropping a significant 9%. The stock value, which is listed in Europe, fell dramatically as poor reviews ushered in the latest release of one of the publisher’s biggest franchises, Assassin’s Creed. Following the launch of Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ubisoft has been subjected to harsh criticism from the press and fans who claim that the game is clearly in an unfinished state due to the huge number of bugs and glitches.
The vast majority of the complaints that have flooded sites like YouTube and messaging boards such as NeoGAF are aimed at the stuttering frame rate. Various videos show the frame rate in Assassin’s Creed Unity dropping below 20 fps even when the player is carrying out actions that shouldn’t be very taxing. Other problems include textures not popping in, lighting glitches and a huge number of bugs that are making the game unplayable for many players. These issues are affecting all platforms, including the PC port, which has been described as poorly optimized. Many have voiced their feelings that Ubisoft should have delayed the game rather than push it out in this state.
Assassin’s Creed Unity is not the first game to launch to a myriad of problems. Last year, Battlefield 4 released and was for many people completely unplayable. Server problems and in-game issues meant that the developers had to delay work on future titles and DLC to dedicate their resources into fixing the problems. The launch was so bad that EA and DICE have publically acknowledged the harm it did to the trust players had in them. While it is expected that all software will have some bugs, developers and publishers should be working harder to ensure that these large scale issues don’t affect players on day one.