Fandom Pulse is reporting (paywall), according to a “Ubisoft insider”, that the beleaguered video game company is pushing back on Steam to try and get certain data points removed from public view. This would include data points like peak and concurrent users. The insider continues by saying that Star Wars Outlaws has still failed to surpass the 2 million units sold point having been released for almost 3 months. That’s a far cry (get it?) from the 5 million in the first month some investors were hoping for at launch.
The report also alleges that Ubisoft isn’t alone. Other companies would also like Valve to stop reporting numbers that they’d rather paint their own way on investor calls, or just dodge entirely like Ubisoft has done on recent calls where the lackluster performance of Star Wars Outlaws has come up.
You have evidently not had the misfortune of listening to shareholder meetings of anything involving Elon Musk.
Oh sure, there are numbers. They’re almost all aspirational, or outright lies/misdirects to focus on some other metric that looks better…
But, somewhat more seriously, it is pretty common in shareholder meetings for many different publicly owned companies to only report non-specifically-legally-required concrete numbers if:
A) The board/CEO thinks they are really good.
B) Someone specifically asks for an exact, precise number, which is not as common as you might expect…
… and even then, the easiest thing to do is just say ‘I don’t have that in front of me right now, I’ll get back to you on that’ when its almost always the job of this person to know that number and have it ready for that meeting.
These higher ups are convinced that is just too much detail. Same with conversations on… ok… but how… yeah that’s implementation details… that’s for other people to worry about. Line goes up?