Haven Studio acquired Legion Labs?
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Why bcuz its run by a wommin?
Moves are being made.... your Ubisoft is now our Ubisoft!
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They have 18k employees, they won’t miss them. I assumed this was sonys plan from the start, open up the Montreal studio and siphon off ubi’ s talent little by little
I'm real curious to see what their game is going to end up as.
They even announced that Mark Cerny was helping them with the technical side of things.
Knowing that Sony is real stingy with dev studio acquisitions, and that they purchased them without having a title out, makes me think they really saw something promising.
I feel like it's going to be a kid friendly title, like a Minecraft or some sort of non violent Fortnite.
They even announced that Mark Cerny was helping them with the technical side of things.
Knowing that Sony is real stingy with dev studio acquisitions, and that they purchased them without having a title out, makes me think they really saw something promising.
I feel like it's going to be a kid friendly title, like a Minecraft or some sort of non violent Fortnite.
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I wonder what engine they’re working on. Probably UE5 as theres gonna be a lot of online persistent world stuff.
I think it will be something similar to animal crossing/sims with lite combat, maybe even pokemon-ish.
They may have just poached much of / all the talent.
The Eidos Montreal engine guy also worked in Ubisoft way before. Seems that like Jade and a huge chunk of previous Haven employees all of them previously worked on Ubisoft Canadian studios (plus some other AAA studios).
Legion Labs are basically former Ubisoft, Stadia and EA (I assume Motive) folks who started that studio last year to make a next gen game engine that would increase the productivity of the devs by using a could native approach (for development, this doesn't mean cloud native games) to reduce certain time consuming parts of the game development.
Legion Labs CEO is François Pelland, who did work for Jade at Google and before was executive producer, senior producer or development director or stuff like that in South Park: Fractured but whole, AC Syndicate, AC 3, Army of Two, Golden Eye 2, Rainbow Six 3 in addition to lead level designer and lead artist in the original Splinter Cell.
Jade seems to be pouching talent from defunct Ubisoft as there's a lot of rumblings within the company. I know a lot of them were not happy with announcement of direction for Ubisoft in focusing on NFT'S. That and the way they have a lot of things budget wise. Seems she;s getting veterans. Which this is how you build a studio team. The Initiative sounded cool on paper, but mish-mashing people who have never worked together from different studios that are around the world was asking for failure or for something to go wrong.
I have high hope that Jade wants to create another big dream team for their big project. And to the reports out there they have more than one project.
Excellent strategy by PlayStation.
Get the talent without the baggage. Organic growth, baby!
Get the talent without the baggage. Organic growth, baby!
Jade has a long story on building and leading very successful new teams and IPs. When building teams, it's normal/smart to hire talented and experienced former coworkers that you know that in addition to do their job well tecnically they also work well in terms of teamwork and personal relationships with the current and existing team.
That "defunct Ubisoft" and "direction for Ubisoft in focusing on NFT'S" is 100% fake news conspacy theory material that is very far from reality. Ubisoft is performing great as seen in the following chart even if they had a relatively slow year or so due to almost no big releases due some of them getting delayed due to mostly covid. Later this year they'll release many shot guns.
Regarding NFTs, it's only one of many things they tested. They did use it in a single game, noticed it wasn't well received and that the market isn't ready so won't use it in more, at least for many years. They aren't focused on NFTs at all.
Regarding the Haven projects, when Jade and the others left Google they had 3 projects and pitched them to Sony. Sony wanted them to do all 3 games for them, but in Haven they decided to -at least for now- to develop and focus in only one. A year later Hermen said to be very happy with them, that the project looks very promising and it's progressing faster than planned. And bought them.
They will continue growing because they'll need it for later production stages. Other than the big main team I assume that as usual they'll have small team creating, iterating, polishing and prototyping ideas for this or the other projects, but I think that before scaling up to go full production in the other projects they'll focus on making sure this first one goes well and ends being very successful.
The Leigon Labs team and staff they have been hiring aren't a game development team who can be put to develop a new game. They are a game engine team, they make tools that improve the productivity of the game devs or allow them to do new things or in a better way. This tech will later be used by -very likely- multiple teams and games.
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Jade has a long story on building and leading very successful new teams and IPs. When building teams, it's normal/smart to hire talented and experienced former coworkers that you know that in addition to do their job well tecnically they also work well in terms of teamwork and personal relationships with the current and existing team.
That "defunct Ubisoft" and "direction for Ubisoft in focusing on NFT'S" is 100% fake news conspacy theory material that is very far from reality. Ubisoft is performing great as seen in the following chart even if they had a relatively slow year or so due to almost no big releases due some of them getting delayed due to mostly covid. Later this year they'll release many shot guns.
Regarding NFTs, it's only one of many things they tested. They did use it in a single game, noticed it wasn't well received and that the market isn't ready so won't use it in more, at least for many years. They aren't focused on NFTs at all.
Regarding the Haven projects, when Jade and the others left Google they had 3 projects and pitched them to Sony. Sony wanted them to do all 3 games for them, but in Haven they decided to -at least for now- to develop and focus in only one. A year later Hermen said to be very happy with them, that the project looks very promising and it's progressing faster than planned. And bought them.
Well what that chart doesnt show is what their spending has been, and operating costs. Because I have heard they are very high. Lots of projects that have restarted, been put on ice, then picked back up, projects that started out as something years ago and just now is going to show gameplay this week after being hiatus for years. I mean look at the decline in 2021-2022.
I would say that there is showing the dip im talking about.
The chart shows which is by far the most important metric to analyze the performance of a company. It shows it's one of the 3rd parties that makes more money in the industry and that is on a clear long term growth pattern, so it's very healthy.
Regarding costs, they are a huge publiser who work on a shit ton of huge games so obviously have huge costs. But having huge and growing revenue they can afford them. If they would want to have more or less operative profit they could invest a bit more or less here or there or to recude this or that cost. In the recent years they didn't cancel a single game and didn't have massive layoffs, meaning they are ok, that their projects are ok and that don't need to make big cuts.
The decline in 2021-2022 is the same all publishers had: delays due to covid. Ubisoft has a ton of games under development to be published later this year, next year and beyond. Many of them very big.
In all big publishers and AAA teams the games get a lot of changes during development and sometimes get restarted or delayed, it's normal part of game development and specially in big new IPs, innovative or different games that aren't the typical one. Like in this case.
So yes, it happens in Ubisoft from time to time, as it happens in any single game development studio. There is nothing rare or wrong in Ubisoft compared to the other publishers, other than it's one of these companies that -even if being super successful when you look at their sales or revenue- a few people in forums or gaming news sites like to throw shit at them or made up stuff for no reason just because they think doing that it's cool or something like that.
Yeah going for top talent and not the numbers. Very hopeful for what this game is gonna be.
Jade Raymond is basically a "suit"; someone with a CS degree who very quickly got into management when she got into gaming.
Her career isn't all roses to me, so I don't quite get why everyone is so excited. She was closest to the dev of AC1 which was super mediocre in the end. Then of course she executive produced AC2.... which came out the next year.
She appears to be responsible for the "release every year assembly line" style development practice, which obviously became successful, but is also part of the infamous Ubisoft "formula" talk.
She also produced SW Battlefront 2 the king of loot box controversy.
Then she went big on Cloud with Google and produced some total turds we've never heard of. Most of us think anyone big on cloud are idiots don't we?
Is she good at being an executive? I don't know.. she's obviously been VERY money focused... churning out games every year... being big on loot box mechanics.
Is that exciting as a gamer? Not really... it's probably what attracted Sony to her, aside from having worked with her in the past.
Her career isn't all roses to me, so I don't quite get why everyone is so excited. She was closest to the dev of AC1 which was super mediocre in the end. Then of course she executive produced AC2.... which came out the next year.
She appears to be responsible for the "release every year assembly line" style development practice, which obviously became successful, but is also part of the infamous Ubisoft "formula" talk.
She also produced SW Battlefront 2 the king of loot box controversy.
Then she went big on Cloud with Google and produced some total turds we've never heard of. Most of us think anyone big on cloud are idiots don't we?
Is she good at being an executive? I don't know.. she's obviously been VERY money focused... churning out games every year... being big on loot box mechanics.
Is that exciting as a gamer? Not really... it's probably what attracted Sony to her, aside from having worked with her in the past.
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OP
the people that work for her love working for her, thats about all i need to know as far as her managing a studio. What creatives she gets to make the game is another story.
she's great at managing and bringing it talent.
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