Daily Briefing: Monday 2nd August

Ubisoft employees feel "sidelined" by CEO's response to open letter

Last week over one thousand current and ex-Ubisoft employees signed an open letter to the company's management calling for significant change in the wake of widespread misconduct allegations. While the letter was written in solidarity with staff at Activision Blizzard, it was also immediately relevant for Ubisoft as the company is currently facing a hefty sexual harassment lawsuit of its own. The letter elicited a response from CEO Yves Guillemot, but many staff feel that response didn't really say much of anything.

• Instead of paying much mind to the actual contents of the open letter, Guillemot's email to staff instead fell back on the increasingly flimsy notion that Ubisoft has "made important progress over the year," despite several other external reports calling that idea into question. In response, Ubisoft employees said that Guillemot only addressed a "few" of the points in the open letter and many of their demands were "sidelined." They recognise that the company has made "some improvements" but say that it isn't enough, and demand a "collective seat at the table."

Ex-Assassin's Creed Valhalla director is leading the Dead Space remake

Eric Baptizat spent 16 years at Ubisoft serving most recently as the creative director on Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and previously as lead designer or earlier titles like Origins and Black Flag. He left Ubisoft earlier this year to join EA Motive on a then-unannounced project and, considering his wealth of experience, there was a bit of speculation as to what he'd be doing there. Well, over the weekend Baptizat confirmed that he's directing the upcoming Dead Space remake.

• There's some amount of talent working on the remake, it must be said. Apart from Baptizat, the most senior member of the development team is another Ubisoft alum in creative director Roman Campos-Oriola. He joined Motive from Ubisoft Montreal just last year off the back of work on games like For Honor and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Mike Yazijian is serving as art director for the remake - he worked on Dead Space 2's art back in the day.

Horizon Forbidden West could slip to 2022

That's according to a new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier who, corroborating an earlier report by GamesBeat's Jeff Grubb, suggested that Sony's upcoming flagship sequel will be delayed into Q1 2021. Schreier wrote that "it's decided and delayed," which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for speculation.

• From reading these various reports, it looks like Sony were in two minds as to whether or not to delay the game. Schreier says that his understanding is that the game was officially delayed "a little while ago" while Jeff Grubb, speaking on a recent episode of his Giant Bomb show, claimed that Sony will announce the delay in a September livestream. Sony have previously stated that Forbidden West could be delayed out of this calendar year in order to protect the quality of the game and the health of its developers, so keep an eye out for the official announcement.

Marvel's Avengers actually gets some players on PC thanks to free weekend

Square Enix's beleaguered superhero beat 'em up recently got a much-needed injection of engagement thanks to a free weekend running on PC, PlayStation, and Google Stadia. This is good news for the PC version in particular which famously only maintains a couple of hundred concurrent users at any one time. The free event, however, pushed the game's 24-hour peak to a perfectly acceptable 10,161 players. Granted, that number is nowhere near the 32,000 player-strong Steam launch in September, but it's certainly an improvement.

• The free weekend is part of a wider marketing push for the game as it heads into its War for Wakanda expansion later this month. The largest content update ever for the game launches on August 16th and the hope is that the free weekend will work hand in hand with a steep 40% price discount across all platforms - as well as various in-game experience bonuses and marketplace reductions. Marvel's Avengers definitely needs a foothold to stay relevant,  could this be it?