It's big brain moves like this that'll surely return the like ... 20x? ... value they've lost over the last few years.

I get the impression Ubisoft wants to lay off as many people as possible anyway. They don‘t care who so as long as they can meet some quota. I’m guessing they‘re trying to push operating costs down while they‘re looking for buyers of their IPs.

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

• Cassette Beasts

• Pseudoregalia

• Return of the Obra Dinn

• Chants of Sennar

• Gloomwood

Pulled from my Top Playtime on Steam (so you know you'll get your money's worth if you like them!)

• Factorio (Even though the DLC is pricey, it at least doubles the playtime. Though, like RW below, it takes a lot of content/concepts from fan-made mods.)
• RimWorld (Though I dislike how many DLCs they're pumping out and how much is basically taken from mods.)
• Terraria
• Mount & Blade (Warband 1 & 2 are prime)
• Kerbal Space Program (NOT the sequel)
• TerraTech (The original is a better experience)
• Both the Pathfinder games
• Grim Dawn
• The Riftbreaker
• UnderRail
• Mindustry (Open source/free, but deserves the support from buying it on Steam.)
• No Man's Sky (They've gone above and beyond in shaping up since the clusterf release.)
• The Long Dark
• Rise to Ruins
• Space Pirates and Zombies (1 and 2 are both great, in their own ways.)
• Caves of Qud
• Tales of Maj'Eyal
• STALKER (I've heard bad things about #2, but the rest are great, high replayability with Anomaly.)
• Astroneer
• War for the Overworld
• Autonauts (and Autonauts vs Piratebots!)

Monster Train 2 if you like card games. It's got a load of content and replay and they recently released a patch today to add more!

Sayonara Wild Hearts if you want a short but very cool musical game

The Last Caretaker and StarRupture are pretty fun if you like the factory survival type game. TLC is something really special IMO. The boat aspect is just so much fun.

Here are my recommendations then:

CrossCode is a personal favorite of mine. An action RPG heavily inspired by retro games.

Library of Ruina is a great non-roguelike deckbuilder. Technically it's a sequel, but it's not necessary to know anything about Lobotomy Corporation to get the full enjoyment of its story. At most you can just look up LC's true ending if you aren't interested in brutally hard management sims.

Tactical Breach Wizards is a really intertesting mix between a turn-based tactical game and a puzzle game.

signalis if you haven't got it

Little Rocket Lab is like Stardew + Factorio. It's chill and fun.

Brotato

Terra Invicta is amazing. It’s as if Paradox made an X-Com grand strategy game. The developers were clearly passionate about their game.

Zero Sievert - single player extraction shooter and you can customize the difficulty with granular controls

Bloodthief is great, fast paced with an extremely high skill ceiling. Unlockables give you something to strive for and the level based structure makes it easy to quickly pick up and put down. Some other games I see people recommended here that I love are Signalis, Pseudoregalia, and Sayonara Wild Hearts.

Signalis is the best modern take on the old Resident Evil formula I've ever played, hands down. Pseudoregalia is a blast to play, the movement and tech in that game are unrivaled. I thought about comparing it to some Mario games, but that wouldn't do it justice. Sayonara Wild Hearts is short but beautiful, there is nothing out there like it and it probably has some deeper meaning to read into.

Lethal Company is a fantastic game imo.

Senua's Sacrifice

Derail Valley Simulator and Vintage Story have gotten me through the last year or so.

It may not be the best of all time, but I remember Celeste has been a blast to play, and it's really well polished

Monster Train 2

Management have over inflated egos. They think, oh, fuck John, John’s division only did $25m. They only see bottom lines. But they fail to realize they killed off John’s ideas that would have brought in $500m. So John leaves, gets to develop his own ideas, then shocked peakachu face.

The goal of companies mandating RTO is attrition. They want people to quit without firing or laying them off.

Their goal is to hire younger, hungrier (both literally and figuratively) coders who are cheaper and less experienced and will use "AI" to clean up their code.

I believe they want to divert all their resources into one huge Fortnite like success story. Something that can bring them a reliable recurring revenue stream.

The strategy is to milk the zombie brand until there's not a drop left.

Last Ubisoft game I purchased was Rainbow Six Vegas. Great game, but nothing else after that has interested me.

I've been waiting for Ubisoft's collapse for years now. Unfortunately, the consumer has proved me wrong time and time again.

They released one game last year that I'd expect to make money (Assassin's Creed 14).

Not sure how they're actually in business right now. Surely they need more than that to stay afloat. None of their microtransaction games are whale milking machines like EA's FIFA/Madden or Activision's COD series.

I'll kind of miss them when they're gone. They've always been the least evil of the big publishers.

And yet there are still a lot of players who buy their games lol.

For things before 2023, there was sexual harassment (multiple) bullying and hostile workplace and their excitement over NFT. They had a boys club and made it a really toxic atmosphere, where the CCO literally said "Women don't sell".

I feel like this file would be valuable for every company we might purchase from, and also nearly impossible to maintain.

Sadly not everywhere.

With what money? If you haven’t been paying any attention, there’s almost zero investor interest post-COVID contraction in gaming unless its massive controlling buyouts. The little there is requires sacrificing yourself on the altar of gen AI. No one working in games has enough money to self-fund the initial funds for a studio unless they have rich parents (Sandfall) or are one of the problem executives.

The company I worked for (late stage startup) was bought by a giant mega corp, which has an office nearby. Literally my first month there and they announced a return to office policy.