Although it’s not exactly a game, the idea for the original PlayStation was born out of Sony’s partnership with Nintendo back in 1991. It is public knowledge that Sony was working with Nintendo on a SNES console with a built-in CD drive. However, Nintendo would back out of the partnership at the last minute. Thus, the original PlayStation was born. Other games like Doom and Warcraft had similar but less embarrassing origin stories. Both titles were supposed to be based on Aliens and Warhammer, respectively, only for creative differences to result in each game’s respective developers creating the aforementioned iconic games. While the verdict is still out for the newly-announced XDefiant game by Ubisoft, it does at least have a failed template to learn from.
Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad comes to an end
In August last year Ubisoft released a free-to-play mobile role-playing game via one of its studios, Owlient. Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, not unlike XDefiant, was a mash-up game that let players choose characters from existing Ubisoft franchises like The Division, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell (sound familiar?). The gameplay revolved around pitting one team of the best operatives from Ubisoft’s universe against other. In a way, you could consider it as the Heroes of the Storm of Ubisoft albeit in shooter form. Elite Squad was first announced at E3 2019 and was released a little over a year later. Fast forward to today and the developers just dropped the final piece of content for the game, announcing in a blog post that the game’s servers will shut down for good on October 4. Perhaps the writing for the demise of Elite Squad was already on the wall, even before the formal announcement. The free-to-play game was controversial right from the get-go and not just because it was being made by a studio headed by Charlie Guillemot, the son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. Elite Squad received heavy criticism for using a symbol tied to the Black Power movement as an enemy faction logo and it seemed like the game just never recovered from this. According to the official blog post, Elite Squad “isn’t a sustainable project at this point in its lifespan.” With the younger Guillemot already having departed Owlient earlier this year and XDefiant coming soon, dropping the game made a lot of sense for Ubisoft. We can only hope that XDefiant learns from the mistakes that Elite Squad made.
