Ubisoft’s Stock Drops as Games Journalists Defend Assassins Creed Shadows

Video Games

The video game industry is taking hit after hit lately. On May 15, 2024, Ubisoft released a trailer for Assassins Creed Shadows, the next in the long-running franchise centered on Japanese history and culture that will be released in November. The trailer was met with controversy and frustration over its leads, one of whom is a black man being presented as a samurai when he never was, and the other is the daughter of a famous historical ninja. That same day, Ubisoft released a report of its earnings figures for 2023-2024, in which it adjusted its expectations for 2024-2025 to $299 million, which is lower than the $408.7 million Bloomberg analysts had previously predicted. The result, as reported by That Park Place, is that on May 16, Ubisoft’s stock dropped from $23.35 to $20.02, at one point getting as low as $19.74, which is more than 15%. It is now up to $21.28.

Is there any doubt that the response to the Assassins Creed Shadows trailer is a factor in the price drop? Certainly, the lowered projections are the main reason, but after seeing how angry people were over the woke nonsense injected into the game, investors had to wonder whether even those adjusted predictions were too high. In the earnings report, Ubisoft calls Assassins Creed Shadows and Star Wars Outlaws “two of the industry’s most anticipated games for the year.” The trailer for Star Wars Outlaws was greeted with mostly shrugs, while the one for Assassins Creed Shadows made gamers wonder why Ubisoft thinks Japanese culture is best represented by a misrepresented black man. And based on internet reactions, a lot of Japanese gamers seem highly insulted that their culture and heritage are being used to further Western DEI propaganda, for which it’s difficult to blame them. Look at the dislike ratio on the Japanese version of the trailer:

https://twitter.com/BluntHonesty4/status/1791587979649261649

I wonder if this is partly why IGN released an article today admonishing Asian gamers for wanting a samurai to be Japanese. See, the problem isn’t Ubisoft co-opting another culture and changing history (which it totally isn’t doing, according to the piece), but that Japanese video game characters are only samurai or ninjas. It’s kind of strange that he isn’t arguing for Assassins Creed not to make a game based on samurai rather than making one about a black samurai and saying it represents Japanese culture, but that isn’t really the point; running interference for a gaming company whose stock just dropped is. And the author, Matt Kim, got into an argument with a Japanese artist who didn’t like his article on X:

Matt Kim, @LawofTD goes off on popular asian artist, @Drewbiepie (who criticized his article) in an unhinged rant that is still going.

Kim wrote the @IGN article defending Ubisoft DEI race insert in Assassin's Creed Shadows. pic.twitter.com/QPogXw4CCz

— Grummz (@Grummz) May 17, 2024

This, to me, highlights the insincerity of the woke, diversity, DEI, and whatever else you want to call it philosophy. A Japanese man (who is far from alone) is saying that he doesn’t like the way his culture is being represented in a video game, and someone who is not Japanese is insulting him and telling him how to view the representation of his culture, even claiming an equal stake in that representation despite not being Japanese. (Kim is a Korean-American.) This is why people call it the Oppression Olympics; apparently, Japanese people aren’t high enough on the grievance scale to complain when their culture is mocked by the true arbiters of DEI: Western leftists.

Meanwhile, The Gamer took another approach, admitting that Yasuke, the black lead of Assassins Creed Shadows, was probably not a samurai, but declaring that this doesn’t matter because, to quote Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper’s summation of the piece, “Assassins Creed was never historically accurate & you’re a racist if you want it to be.” This article’s author is particularly angry, and while she admits that she’s not Japanese, she doesn’t seem all that interested in looking at the Japanese response to the game, instead just assuming that they’ll like it. (She also bizarrely brings up Japanese gamers’ appreciation for Ghost of Tsushima, which… had a Japanese samurai as the hero.) Games journalists calling gamers racists is as expected as the sun rising in the morning, but as Grummz, the X account for Mark Kern, points out, this is an instance of moving the goalposts on the Yasuke argument:

Moving the goalposts. https://t.co/J2GrYwpGJk

— Grummz (@Grummz) May 17, 2024

I don’t know if Ubisoft or their games journalist cavalry think this will help the game or Ubisoft’s stock price, but they’re mistaken if they do. People don’t like being talked to this way, and all this will do is make them even angrier and more resolute in not bothering with Assassins Creed Shadows. If Sony is smart, they’ll re-release Ghost of Tsushima in some kind of special edition around the time Shadows hits. Then, we’ll see a really interesting duel.