The advantage of these large corporations is good stuff like this that a smaller company couldn’t afford. Like how Disney World is in bending over backward to be accessible for my daughter in a wheelchair. This sort of thing is an objective good.
The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun.
It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
Ubisoft is a huge corporation(I used to work there) - there are projects which are money makers and which have to be smoothed out and appeal to the largest possible group of people, but there is still a crazy amount of creativity happening in various corners of the company. For every Assassin's Creed there are 10 projects being worked on out of which maybe 1 will actually come out - generally if you can pitch an idea within your studio there is a good chance you will get internal funding for 6-12 months to work on it with a small group of other people. Passing other milestones on the way to release is much harder, but this kind of "work on anything and see if it works" approach is very much encouraged. OddBallers and RollerChampions being probably some of the better examples lately, and Grow Home much earlier.
Accessibility typically doesn't cost much. With many modern OS UI frameworks, you get it for free as long as you don't go out of your way to customize shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing in the first place. If you stick to standard controls and not try to use crazy ways to override user preferences, your application should be accessible to things like screen readers mostly out of the box.
As with most things, this is an issue of education and awareness. It's not that most developers intentionally break accessibility, but rather that a very large number of developers simply don't even know it's an issue, let alone something that they should keep in mind.
"customizing shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing" is kind of a standard in video games.
Video games are not meant do be productive, they are meant to be fun, and standardization is boring. It means that they can't completely rely on OS frameworks to make an appealing game, it means that accessibility needs first hand consideration.
With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.
Publishers that want to work with indie studios are already accepting 100s of pitches and choose 0.1% they like. If a big publisher will buy a lot of small indie studios you'll soon see titles in a press like "{PUBLISHERNAME} force developers to live on ramen and work 12 / 6".
Simply because working on very tight budget likely 12/6 is how indie games are made. And to be honest in modern economy having any budget at all is kind a success already. So I'd belive most of small games are built on enthusiasm and founders own money.
Vast majority of "indie" games budgets are in range of $100,000 and $300,000 total. Over that amount there is gap where no one invest except few rich, successful and picky publishers. Getting more funding for a small-scale project is extremely hard so if your game needs more then it's must be AA project for at least $2,000,000+ budget. But AA+ means $40+ price tag, completely different production quality and large team so very few kind of games fit the math.
PS: I co-founder of a small gamedev studio and I know quite a few other people in this industry.
PSS: I'm happy to be wrong though. So if you know how to get game funded I have 4 cool playable prototypes to build into a game, team of 10+ devs and we track record for 3 released titles including one for consoles.
The short answer is that for a company like Ubisoft or EA, big blockbusters are much more reliable and more profitable than indie games. Not that smaller games can’t do amazingly well, but most don’t make a profit, and the risk doesn’t justify the expenditure for that kind of company.
Also, like another poster mentioned, there already exists a host of creativity in these AAA companies, that’s not the problem. The problem is making something that will reliably keep the company in the black.
> With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop.
Because they don't have to. In most cases, to have a large successful game, developers need publishers. Publishers are who negotiate with Steam or Gog or EA. Publishers are who figure out in the in-game microtransaction economy. Publishers are who do all the promotional activities like getting famous streamers to play the game.
The gaming community never seems to understand this. Who they think of as "the devs" are often actually the publisher.
Its basically akin to the book industry then. Which again makes my question still stand. In books you have huge publishers yes but also some specifically catered to smaller market stuff like what an indie game dev shop might be like. They go on making their money without having to pull JK Rowling just having a smattering of these smaller authors and selling.
"I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
AAA is going to regress toward slop as the number of cooks in the kitchen increases, not just counting people who work directly on the game but investors, members of the ESG committee from the bank issuing loans to the studio, etc.
The next bellwether: Bungie's Marathon (2025). Marathon (1994) was a neat game that expanded upon "Doom-likes" as they were called with new engine features, multiplayer modes, and (gasp!) lore that you could unlock. It was specific. It had a vision. Marathon (2025) is a multiplayer-only, generic characters, generic settings, generic objectives. Basically Sony is turning Bungie into a dumping ground for devs on the failed Concord.
Glad they're open-sourcing it, since "Accessibility" falls under the umbrella of the dreaded "DEI", which means we can expect to see any government-funding for it dry up.
Luckily Ubisoft is (mostly) European so it should avoid the events in the US. I'm sure the the anti-progressives will eventually start making headway in Europe but so far the Continent at least seems to have stayed sane. I could be wrong about this but i don't think I've seen the slept agenda being pushed anywhere other than the U.K.
The Hungarian government is insane. The Polish ones used to be as well but after the elections it is normal again.
There is also Ireland with their abortion laws that are backwards.
Other than that we are sane, Hungary+Ireland is not that much
Ireland had abortion referendum 8 years ago. If you're going to call rant and call entire countries insane and backwards then at least get your basic facts straight.
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(continental) Europe never really had much of a push in that direction, though.
The whole concept of DEI / woke is not much of a thing outside the English-speaking world. Very small parts of it (gender parities, a bit more transgender awareness, the "transgender athletes in sports" kerfuffle) have leaked through, but that's it. Where I live (Poland), most people, even well-educated people, haven't ever heard of the concept of specifying your pronouns.
The Trump admin is literally withdrawing ADA guidance without replacement. And as part of his executive orders they consider accessibility as part of the whole phrase (DEIA) [1] and are working to gut any DEIA programs. So you're factually wrong.
Is that really the best argument you've got when faced with the government telling you exactly what they're doing? Like if you're trying to troll you're doing an extremely poor job at it and just making yourself look bad.
The quotes are right there, in the executive order I linked you. You chose not to read it. It's in the plainest language possible. Again, not doing yourself any favors here.
I think you are correct that GP is evading your reference, and further I think they are over the line of trolling, but I do think you are mistaken in your reading (or at least, you are reading more into the document than it reads itself). For example:
> shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.
Their premise seems to be that programs (including performance reviews mentioned later in the document) which provide preferential or beneficial treatment to people based on DEIA characteristics are discriminatory and illegal under current laws, which prohibit discrimination on protected classes. I.e. you can't promote someone for being a man, or for being a woman, because sex is a protected class. If you create a program to help train/network people of a specific sex to the exclusion of the other sex, that violates the law (according to the argument being put forth here. IANAL so am not providing legal analysis, just doing my best to steel man their side here). The order you linked seems to be trying to stop this "illegal" practice in the US federal government. Note that the ADA is not illegal, in fact it is the law. Nothing in there is repealing the ADA or paring it back, at least that I read. I wouldn't be shocked if they are doing so through a different channel, but at a minimum the source you posted does not seem to validate your claims.
The claim I was refuting was that the government does not consider Accessibility under DEIA. That's it. And in the plain text of the executive order, they include it.
And please, reread the executive order. I can't believe I need to explain to two separate people what is said in the plainest, clearest language possible:
> (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear
It says the termination of ALL discriminatory programs, including but not limited to 'illegal DEIA'. This is clear that they, by definition, consider DEIA as a whole discriminatory. And it takes all of five seconds to check how the admin has been behaving over the past few months to see that this is what they are doing.
I'm pro-accessibility and have contributed privately to blind developer initiatives. Unfortunately Ubisoft insists on implement user-hostile accessibility that screams at the user using voice-to-text when they open their games and is quite difficult to get through even as an abled user.
How about Ubisoft work with Sony/Microsoft/Valve and get vision and hearing disability implemented at the device level rather than harassing abled users every new game which I'm sure through this frustration is contributing in some small way to these anti-intellectual movements against accessibility.
The advantage of these large corporations is good stuff like this that a smaller company couldn’t afford. Like how Disney World is in bending over backward to be accessible for my daughter in a wheelchair. This sort of thing is an objective good.
The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun.
It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
Ubisoft is a huge corporation(I used to work there) - there are projects which are money makers and which have to be smoothed out and appeal to the largest possible group of people, but there is still a crazy amount of creativity happening in various corners of the company. For every Assassin's Creed there are 10 projects being worked on out of which maybe 1 will actually come out - generally if you can pitch an idea within your studio there is a good chance you will get internal funding for 6-12 months to work on it with a small group of other people. Passing other milestones on the way to release is much harder, but this kind of "work on anything and see if it works" approach is very much encouraged. OddBallers and RollerChampions being probably some of the better examples lately, and Grow Home much earlier.
Accessibility typically doesn't cost much. With many modern OS UI frameworks, you get it for free as long as you don't go out of your way to customize shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing in the first place. If you stick to standard controls and not try to use crazy ways to override user preferences, your application should be accessible to things like screen readers mostly out of the box.
As with most things, this is an issue of education and awareness. It's not that most developers intentionally break accessibility, but rather that a very large number of developers simply don't even know it's an issue, let alone something that they should keep in mind.
"customizing shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing" is kind of a standard in video games.
Video games are not meant do be productive, they are meant to be fun, and standardization is boring. It means that they can't completely rely on OS frameworks to make an appealing game, it means that accessibility needs first hand consideration.
With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.
Publishers that want to work with indie studios are already accepting 100s of pitches and choose 0.1% they like. If a big publisher will buy a lot of small indie studios you'll soon see titles in a press like "{PUBLISHERNAME} force developers to live on ramen and work 12 / 6".
Simply because working on very tight budget likely 12/6 is how indie games are made. And to be honest in modern economy having any budget at all is kind a success already. So I'd belive most of small games are built on enthusiasm and founders own money.
Vast majority of "indie" games budgets are in range of $100,000 and $300,000 total. Over that amount there is gap where no one invest except few rich, successful and picky publishers. Getting more funding for a small-scale project is extremely hard so if your game needs more then it's must be AA project for at least $2,000,000+ budget. But AA+ means $40+ price tag, completely different production quality and large team so very few kind of games fit the math.
PS: I co-founder of a small gamedev studio and I know quite a few other people in this industry.
PSS: I'm happy to be wrong though. So if you know how to get game funded I have 4 cool playable prototypes to build into a game, team of 10+ devs and we track record for 3 released titles including one for consoles.
The short answer is that for a company like Ubisoft or EA, big blockbusters are much more reliable and more profitable than indie games. Not that smaller games can’t do amazingly well, but most don’t make a profit, and the risk doesn’t justify the expenditure for that kind of company.
Also, like another poster mentioned, there already exists a host of creativity in these AAA companies, that’s not the problem. The problem is making something that will reliably keep the company in the black.
> With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop.
Because they don't have to. In most cases, to have a large successful game, developers need publishers. Publishers are who negotiate with Steam or Gog or EA. Publishers are who figure out in the in-game microtransaction economy. Publishers are who do all the promotional activities like getting famous streamers to play the game.
The gaming community never seems to understand this. Who they think of as "the devs" are often actually the publisher.
Its basically akin to the book industry then. Which again makes my question still stand. In books you have huge publishers yes but also some specifically catered to smaller market stuff like what an indie game dev shop might be like. They go on making their money without having to pull JK Rowling just having a smattering of these smaller authors and selling.
"I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
AAA is going to regress toward slop as the number of cooks in the kitchen increases, not just counting people who work directly on the game but investors, members of the ESG committee from the bank issuing loans to the studio, etc.
The next bellwether: Bungie's Marathon (2025). Marathon (1994) was a neat game that expanded upon "Doom-likes" as they were called with new engine features, multiplayer modes, and (gasp!) lore that you could unlock. It was specific. It had a vision. Marathon (2025) is a multiplayer-only, generic characters, generic settings, generic objectives. Basically Sony is turning Bungie into a dumping ground for devs on the failed Concord.
Glad they're open-sourcing it, since "Accessibility" falls under the umbrella of the dreaded "DEI", which means we can expect to see any government-funding for it dry up.
Luckily Ubisoft is (mostly) European so it should avoid the events in the US. I'm sure the the anti-progressives will eventually start making headway in Europe but so far the Continent at least seems to have stayed sane. I could be wrong about this but i don't think I've seen the slept agenda being pushed anywhere other than the U.K.
>Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ gatherings
Just the first one that comes to mind.
The Hungarian government is insane. The Polish ones used to be as well but after the elections it is normal again. There is also Ireland with their abortion laws that are backwards.
Other than that we are sane, Hungary+Ireland is not that much
Ireland had abortion referendum 8 years ago. If you're going to call rant and call entire countries insane and backwards then at least get your basic facts straight.
I stand corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_Republic_of_Ir...
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(unfortunately I cannot update my comment)
Ireland legalised abortion by referendum a while back, FWIW.
I stand corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_Republic_of_Ir...
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(unfortunately I cannot update my comment)
(continental) Europe never really had much of a push in that direction, though.
The whole concept of DEI / woke is not much of a thing outside the English-speaking world. Very small parts of it (gender parities, a bit more transgender awareness, the "transgender athletes in sports" kerfuffle) have leaked through, but that's it. Where I live (Poland), most people, even well-educated people, haven't ever heard of the concept of specifying your pronouns.
> I've seen the slept agenda
"Slept" as the opposite of "woke", right? This is genius! Is something actually used by more people?
Well, one more as of now
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The Trump admin is literally withdrawing ADA guidance without replacement. And as part of his executive orders they consider accessibility as part of the whole phrase (DEIA) [1] and are working to gut any DEIA programs. So you're factually wrong.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-01...
So, point out or quote the portion here that says wheelchair ramps and alt tags are no longer required.
Oh, that's right, you made that up.
Is that really the best argument you've got when faced with the government telling you exactly what they're doing? Like if you're trying to troll you're doing an extremely poor job at it and just making yourself look bad.
I asked you for a single quote. You can't produce one because you made this hysteria up.
Nobody is banning wheel chair ramps, and nobody is banning alt tags, color contrast and the like. You are literally just making this up.
Quite the fearmonger, you are.
The quotes are right there, in the executive order I linked you. You chose not to read it. It's in the plainest language possible. Again, not doing yourself any favors here.
I think you are correct that GP is evading your reference, and further I think they are over the line of trolling, but I do think you are mistaken in your reading (or at least, you are reading more into the document than it reads itself). For example:
> shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.
Their premise seems to be that programs (including performance reviews mentioned later in the document) which provide preferential or beneficial treatment to people based on DEIA characteristics are discriminatory and illegal under current laws, which prohibit discrimination on protected classes. I.e. you can't promote someone for being a man, or for being a woman, because sex is a protected class. If you create a program to help train/network people of a specific sex to the exclusion of the other sex, that violates the law (according to the argument being put forth here. IANAL so am not providing legal analysis, just doing my best to steel man their side here). The order you linked seems to be trying to stop this "illegal" practice in the US federal government. Note that the ADA is not illegal, in fact it is the law. Nothing in there is repealing the ADA or paring it back, at least that I read. I wouldn't be shocked if they are doing so through a different channel, but at a minimum the source you posted does not seem to validate your claims.
The claim I was refuting was that the government does not consider Accessibility under DEIA. That's it. And in the plain text of the executive order, they include it.
And please, reread the executive order. I can't believe I need to explain to two separate people what is said in the plainest, clearest language possible:
> (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear
It says the termination of ALL discriminatory programs, including but not limited to 'illegal DEIA'. This is clear that they, by definition, consider DEIA as a whole discriminatory. And it takes all of five seconds to check how the admin has been behaving over the past few months to see that this is what they are doing.
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Microsoft is well up there too.
That's good, but it's sad that it's the only good thing that can be said about them...
I'm pro-accessibility and have contributed privately to blind developer initiatives. Unfortunately Ubisoft insists on implement user-hostile accessibility that screams at the user using voice-to-text when they open their games and is quite difficult to get through even as an abled user.
How about Ubisoft work with Sony/Microsoft/Valve and get vision and hearing disability implemented at the device level rather than harassing abled users every new game which I'm sure through this frustration is contributing in some small way to these anti-intellectual movements against accessibility.