A fairly throwaway quote from Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has somehow gotten stuck in my head. At a recent investor presentation, Guillemot pointed to "a highly competitive environment where players are very sensitive to the quality and content of games," with "bashing" singled out as a risk factor for games. It's a very corporate quote, seemingly deflecting some of the middling to poor reception of some of Ubisoft's recent releases. Players having standards and a voice is not at all a new phenomenon, and it's very much a good thing. But there is something to be said for how games are criticized on the internet today, and how that can affect a game's sales or reputation.
Monster Hunter Wilds comes to mind. Research firm Circana's latest games report notes that Wilds is still the top-selling game in the US for the year, and Capcom previously said it's the fastest-selling game it has ever released. Yet Capcom's latest financial report showed Monster Hunter Wilds sales have gone "soft," plummeting to 500k in three months after shifting 10 million in its launch month, sending stock prices tumbling.
In a recent interview with Circana games executive director Mat Piscatella, I mentioned Monster Hunter Wilds as one topical example of how a game's optics and criticism can have a real, material impact. Piscatella regularly stresses the power of the "Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox" live service giants of the world, and how all other games have to find a way to live in their shadow, and I asked if he feels that this sort of audience black hole is also part of the response in situations like this.
Piscatella says "Wilds is a very interesting case" here. He reckons that in today's market, where so much time and money goes to the same few big games, we can see heightened criticism elsewhere because people have so many other good ways they can spend their time and money. The broader culture around games can also make real or perceived problems (and Wilds' PC problems are extremely real) especially visible.
"It's like the substitution effect, right?" Piscatella begins. "You can go play game A and pay X dollars to get in the door, or you can just fire up the game you're already playing, your forever game that you've been playing for, in some cases, 7 to 10 years, right? That's the choice people are making now.
"Wilds is a very interesting case, because the fan base was so enthusiastic, so dedicated, so loyal, that they really showed up day one. And some of the issues that have been pointed out are kind of seen after the fact, but that was after everyone bought in. And the paths of communication are just so big now. A prominent streamer or YouTuber can single-handedly, by showing one screenshot, really impact what the perception of a game is, right?
A screenshot can do a lot. Monster Hunter Wilds made headlines before and immediately after release for broken textures that could result in horrifying, Nintendo 64-era textures and character models. This was pretty funny in the beta, but it was markedly less funny after the full release, and what was once a fun, origami monster trend began to warp into the face of PC problems as sentiment around the game's performance soured.
"There's all of this communication, there's all of these different ways of getting messages out – a lot of them in good faith, and some of them maybe not in the best of faith – that can influence what a game's perception is," Piscatella says. "And if you have an upfront price on a game to get in it, and you hear streamer X show one screenshot and it's, 'Oh, this game.' It's unfortunate, but yeah, folks are very sensitive to that stuff because they hear it.
"And because the price of entry is what it is, and the substitute options are free, yeah, the stakes are incredibly high."
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