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Ubisoft’s stock took a hit today in the wake of the firm’s rocky launch of Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
Yahoo reports company shares are down to $3.29 compared to Tuesday’s closing price of $3.62 – a dip of 9.12 per cent, effectively restoring shares to the levels they were at prior to recent gains made before the game’s launch.
The report attributes the decline to middling reviews, adding that the market has noticed the poor response” and is punishing the company for it.”
The game’s bugs and poor performance is becoming a laughing-stock right now on the Internet,” Yahoo Finance editor Tae Kim states. There are thousands of posts flooding message boards and Youtube showing graphical glitches, crashes, and frame-rate problems.”
Assassin’s Creed Unity is reminding gamers of EA’s Battlefield 4 launch problems last year. Ubisoft would have been better off to delay Unity like Take-Two does frequently with their Grand Theft Auto games than to release it in this state.”
All of which seems somewhat dramatic for a game that has scored generally between seven and eight out of ten. Indeed, Yahoo’s description of Destiny as "critically panned" seems somewhat farcical – the game has Metacritic scores of 75 per cent and 76 per cent.
Ubisoft was also derided by consumer press for Assassin’s Creed Unity’s shady review embargo, which didn’t allow reviewers to post their critiques until 12 hours after the game hit shelves.
