yazzy

Hi everyone. Today we’re breaking down the success of the new Assassin’s Creed game, but first...

This week’s top gaming news:

Last fall, Ubisoft Entertainment SA delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows from November to February. It was an unprecedented move. For nearly two decades, major new Assassin’s Creed games always came out in the fall, and fans were surprised to see it.

Ubisoft said the delay was due to the underperformance of Star Wars Outlaws, its August 2024 action game, which was criticized for feeling buggy and undercooked. In a press release, the company said that “the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title.”

Then, earlier this year, Ubisoft pushed the title back again, this time to March 20, to continue polishing the game “as part of the renewed focus on gameplay quality and engaging Day-1 experiences.”

The two delays paid off. Assassin’s Creed Shadows arrived last week and has received a solid reception from players and strong reviews. The company has not offered sales numbers yet but said the game reached 3 million players in seven days.

In an email to staff sent earlier this week, series executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté wrote that it “delivered the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in the franchise’s history.” (First place belongs to 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which was a bit of an anomaly, releasing smack in the middle of the pandemic and alongside a new generation of consoles.)

“It’s a clear example of what’s possible when we align creativity, craft, and strategy across Ubisoft,” Côté wrote in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. He went on to praise the testing, technology and bug-fixing groups, among others.

The successful game comes at a pivotal time for Ubisoft, which announced on Thursday that it is starting a new entity to license its biggest franchises, including Assassin’s Creed. Lots of questions remain surrounding the new set-up and how it will function, but it certainly helps to have a hit on their hands.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, set in feudal Japan, checks all of the boxes that make Ubisoft games popular: impressive graphics, a massive open world full of things to do and plenty of enemies to stab from behind.

It stars two protagonists: a female shinobi named Naoe and an African samurai named Yasuke — a set-up that made the game a cultural flashpoint for some internet pundits, who loudly rooted for the title to fail. (Elon Musk got involved — writing on X that “DEI kills art” — leading to him getting viciously dunked on via his own website.)

There are some big takeaways here. One is that a video game featuring a Black protagonist can still sell many, many copies — which probably shouldn’t be news to people but apparently has become a controversial stance to take.

More importantly, the latest Assassin’s Creed is yet another entry into a growing body of evidence that when developers get extra time to polish their games, everyone wins. It’s a lesson that many companies have had to learn the hard way — Cyberpunk 2077 became an infamous example of a game that was released too early and suffered as a result. And it’s a lesson that still bears repeating.

Managers at some of these companies might argue that productions are taking too long and growing too expensive as a result, and that hitting deadlines shouldn’t be as difficult as it is. (Nevermind that the endless delays are usually the result of poor communication and shifting visions from those same managers.)

But players will always react poorly to a game that feels unfinished — a lesson that Ubisoft would do well to heed moving forward as it enters its new era after the restructuring. Teams on games such as the next Assassin’s Creed, code-named Hexe, and the next Far Cry will hopefully get a chance to point to Shadows as a positive example of what happens when a game gets the time it needs.

I’ve spent a few hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and I agree with the positive reviews — it’s a beautiful, well polished game that carries on the Ubisoft formula in some cool ways. I’m playing in “immersive” mode, which gives you Japanese (and Portuguese) voices with subtitles, and “canon” mode, which removes narrative choices and instead allows the story to unfold the way that its writers think it should. Both strike me as bold, strong options. I’m a little cool on Yasuke’s bull-rushing combat style but have really enjoyed sneaking around outposts and taking out guards as the stealthy, kunai-throwing Naoe.

You can reach Jason at jschreier10@bloomberg.net or confidentially at jasonschreier@protonmail.com.

Get Tech In Depth and more Bloomberg Tech newsletters in your inbox:

Up Next

They Bought Dream Homes in Tulum. Then Came the Nightmare.

Never miss an episode. Follow The Big Take daily podcast today.

Tulum, Mexico has exploded in popularity since the early years of the pandemic. The area’s few Covid restrictions, picturesque beaches and laidback vibes attracted lockdown-weary travelers and helped trigger a real estate boom.

On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg reporters Andrea Navarro and Tanaz Meghjani join host Sarah Holder to discuss the dark side of a pandemic-era development spree in Tulum that has left a trail of ripped off investors, millions of dollars in missing cash and even two bodies in its wake.

Read more: ‘Where’s My Money?’: House-Hunting in Paradise Turns Nightmare

Listen and follow The Big Take on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Terminal clients: click here to subscribe.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Sarah Holder: This winter, Bloomberg's Andrea Navarro took a trip to Tulum, a popular tourist destination on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

Andrea Navarro: On a regular day, the water is an incredible color of turquoise, and weather is nice almost all year round.

Holder: But what had brought Andrea to Tulum wasn't the beach or the weather or the turquoise ocean. She was there to get an up-close look at what was supposed to be a luxury condo complex.

Navarro: It's just a very thick piece of jungle where you, there's no development, there's nothing happening there and that's where Akela meant to develop Solemn Skyview.

Holder: There were meant to be about 30 units on this lot. But when Andrea visited, there wasn’t much progress to show.

Navarro:  So it's just jungle. They were never able to even start clearing the land.

Holder: Wow. So they didn't break ground. They didn’t even, like, bring a piece of wood to the scene?

Navarro: Nothing.

Holder: This development was one of a handful of projects all from the same company that promised investors a slice of paradise. Andrea went to see a few of those sites while she was in Tulum. There was Solemn Ocean.

Navarro: This was supposed to be a 30-unit building, which, of course, never got built.

Holder: And there was Solemn Downtown.

Navarro: Right now, we could guess that about 60% of the building was done.

Holder: There was also a Solemn Lagoon and a Solemn Londra. But only one Solemn was actually completed: Solemn Peaceful. The Solemns were part of a pandemic real estate boom in Tulum, driven by remote workers who were looking to relocate. But now, five years after the start of the pandemic, for some buyers, that Caribbean dream has become a nightmare.

Navarro:  From the lawyers, we know that there's hundreds more, and it's not all that they didn't receive their apartments, but some aren't able to get the titles to the apartments or they can't sell the apartments, so it's a lot of different problems that are starting to spring up right now.
Holder: I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show: the dark side of a development spree in Tulum that left a trail of ripped off investors, millions of dollars in missing cash and even two bodies in its wake.

Holder: Bloomberg's Andrea Navarro says that one of the first things that put Tulum on the radar of international tourists and investors was its proximity to Cancun and Mayan ruins.

Navarro: Cancun got so crowded over the past few years that people started branching out and looking for other resorts.

Holder: In the early 2010s, Tulum’s appeal was more boutique hotels and yoga retreats, while Cancun was more big resorts and a party vibe — Señor Frog’s, if you’re familiar. It wasn't until the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 that development in Tulum really started to take off.

Tanaz Meghjani: It was one of the places in the world that had very few restrictions during the pandemic. So it was kind of a siren call to all of these digital nomads, all of these people who wanted to be in that environment and continue to work.

Holder: That's Bloomberg's Tanaz Meghjani. She and Andrea worked together on this story.

Meghjani: And I think that attracted a lot of attention from buyers and from developers. And we were initially looking at how during the early pandemic days, there was so much demand for luxury apartments that all of these developers came in and started building.

Holder: Andrea says some of those developers had established track records working in and around Cancun. But the surge in demand for property in Tulum was so intense that it also attracted newer, less-experienced companies, looking to take advantage of the moment. One of those companies was Akela Development Group, the developer behind the “Solemn” properties.

Navarro: So Akela was a company that we found out was established in 2018 by three partners, all Mexican. And they started marketing these developments around 2019 or 2020, we're not exactly sure of the date. But we do know that they had six developments in progress at some point.

Holder: Their marketing renderings, which Andrea and Tanaz saw, shared a luxury, high-gloss feel.

Navarro: They really played up the amenities. So they had infinity pools and yoga classes and fire pits and places where people could just read in the jungle or take a class in the outdoor gym.

Meghjani: Oh, they were stunning. Some of them would have private pools that were connected to each unit. So yeah, they looked idyllic. Who wouldn't want to live there after seeing that?

Erin Norris: Everything about it was a dream. It was perfect.

Holder: Erin Norris still remembers the plan for the unit she tried to buy in Solemn Skyview.

Norris: The development was going to be about 30 townhomes situated around a man-made lagoon that was also doubling as a swimming pool. It was just meant to look like a lagoon. It was really beautiful and peaceful looking — these large arched windows that looked out over the jungle and it just had a really peaceful and serene feel about it.

Holder: Norris had been vacationing in Mexico since she was a child and had spent 15 years visiting Tulum before she decided she was ready to buy.

Norris: Initially, I had wanted to buy something that was already built, but in working with my realtor, she told me, you know, you've got a better opportunity to get something that's brand new. It's less expensive when you buy something that's prebuilt or through a presale, I guess, you can pay over time rather than doing one large lump sum payment. And as a single income, that was really attractive. Being able to space out my payments over time rather than just throw everything down all at once.

Holder: Norris was sold. She agreed to buy a unit for just under $200,000, which she negotiated to pay over seven installments. And as she started sending money, she started seeing progress.

Norris: The developer sent me videos on a pretty regular basis, showing, hey, look, we started clearing the land. And then a little — a little later, oh, here's an update. All of these materials have been ordered. They're starting to get delivered.

Holder: But then, the updates started to slow.

Norris: Eventually, an email came that there was a land dispute and that I should stop making payments but that they felt they were fully within their rights and that, you know, the land dispute would be resolved soon. This would probably impact the completion date, but that they would expedite things once everything was resumed.

Holder: Norris says that was the last time she heard from Akela.

Norris: They would not respond to any phone calls or emails, just became impossible to get ahold of at that point.

Holder: Norris eventually found out there was a reason all her outreach was getting ignored: The real estate group was starting to unravel.

Meghjani:  She found out that one of the developers in the group had died. His body had been found on a beach. Another one allegedly committed suicide and a third has allegedly left the country.

Holder: Norris is one of many people the Akela Development Group left in the lurch. Andrea and Tanaz interviewed dozens of buyers and their attorneys. They reviewed sales pitches and lawsuits. And they estimate the developer sold at least another 70 presale units that they never delivered. It was part of a pattern of alleged fraud that was far bigger than the aspiring home buyers — and the reporters — initially thought. What we know about the downfall of Akela, and the recourse for its victims, after the break.

Holder: Bloomberg's Andrea Navarro and Tanaz Meghjani have been digging into the dark side of a pandemic-era real estate boom in the coastal Mexican town of Tulum. They say that one factor that’s made the boom there more complicated is that the town’s bureaucracy can be tricky to navigate.

Navarro: The government is sort of archaic in some ways. Files are not digitized. The court system is not digitized 100%, so a lot of processes have to be done in person. So it's not easy.

Holder: That can make it hard to know who owns what — or when land was bought and sold. There’s also been a long history of land theft in Quintana Roo, the Mexican state where Tulum is located. The problem has become so prevalent in recent years that a reporter asked Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum about the issue in early December. She acknowledged there has been a pattern of illegal development in the state and said that she had asked one of her ministers and the state’s governor to look into it. A land dispute was also one of the problems at Solemn Skyview, the development where Erin Norris had purchased her unit. Partway through development, allegations surfaced that Akela had stolen the land from its rightful owner.

Navarro: She was an older woman who had bought the land in the early two thousands with a long-term plan of building a retirement home there. She had never gotten around to actually developing the land, but she — as a person does — she went and paid her taxes regularly. So yeah, she did not sign away her rights and she was very shocked, she told me, when we first interviewed her, to learn that the land was not officially hers anymore.

Holder: The land dispute was one red flag about Akela. But Andrea says it's possible the company was already in other trouble. After one of its partners died in a suspected suicide, his son spoke to the police.

Navarro: The police report does say that his son found him and that when the son was talking to the police, he told them that his father had become very depressed because he had lost a lot of money. So there's no way for us to know for sure if that, if one thing led to another.

Holder: Bloomberg reached out to the partner’s son through his relatives and a phone number that recently belonged to him. He could not be reached for comment. Andrea says it’s hard to know whether Akela’s developments were scams from the start or if the company just got in over its head. After all, they did deliver one building. But if the allegations of land theft are true, that points to shadier origins.

Holder: What did the disappearance and the deaths of these developers mean for the people who had bought homes from them?

Meghjani: For a lot of them, it meant that there was nowhere they could turn to find answers. We talked to a lot of people who went through lawyer after lawyer after lawyer to try to get some clarity and some understanding of what had happened. And I think many of them are still kind of mired in the legal process of trying to figure out what comes next and how much money they can recover.

Holder: What kind of legal recourse do they have?

Navarro: It seems like they don't have much, I mean, from what we've heard, they've been chasing. These lawsuits for years now, and it's also been a very slow game for them because they didn't really find out about the deaths until much later from — than when they happened. The office stopped responding to text and messages over the course of several months. And so I think that that's what's been the worst thing for them is just trying to figure out what happened. But after they did, it's been unclear for them what even to do because there's no company to sue anymore. So it's weird. They don't really know what to do. They've gone to several agencies in Mexico and some of them have even gone to the FBI, but they haven't had any help. It doesn't seem like there's much hope to be honest.

Meghjani: Another piece of this that I think is really interesting is all of this is kind of coming to the surface now. and one lawyer that Andrea spoke to mentioned her hypothesis that all of these units were purchased around the pandemic and the delivery dates were around now in the last year or so. So now, this lawyer is hearing from a lot of people who went through these experiences. And yeah, it's all coming to light now because now is when they were expecting to receive their homes. So I think, you know, we've uncovered some of this. It's really difficult to say how many people were impacted by this. It seems like this is going to continue to be uncovered as time goes on.

Holder: In the meantime, other projects have raised concerns. Some developers didn’t have soil mechanics studies, which are crucial for building around Tulum. Others didn’t have adequate planning or construction permits. Tanaz and Andrea spoke with one lawyer who estimates that over the past four to five years, he’s seen more than a hundred clients in the area who have had problems with developers delivering on their promised units.

Holder: Is there any indication that buyers are now staying away from Tulum because of stories like this?

Navarro: I don’t think so. I visited in February and the same as when Tanaz visited. Construction is just insane. It's still going on from what we know, people are still buying and the problem is, yeah, that they won't find out what happens until the delivery date comes by, whether they're getting their apartment or not. So, maybe a few years down the road, or even a few months down the road, people start hearing about these scams more often and start being more cautious. But I don't think that we're there yet.

This episode was produced by: David Fox; Editors: Tracey Samuelson and Danielle Balbi; Fact-checker: Adriana Tapia; Sound Design/Engineer: Alex Sugiura; Senior Producer: Naomi Shavin; Senior Editor: Elisabeth Ponsot; Executive Producer: Nicole Beemsterboer.

Up Next

They Bought Dream Homes in Tulum. Then Came the Nightmare.

The European Union is identifying concessions it’s willing to make to Donald Trump’s administration to secure the partial removal of the US tariffs that have already started hitting the bloc’s exports and that are set to increase after April 2.

EU officials were told at meetings this week in Washington that there was no way to avoid new auto and so-called reciprocal tariffs that Trump is launching next week, according to people familiar with the talks. Discussions also began on what the contours of a potential deal to reduce them should eventually look like.

Read More: Trump’s Trade War and the Economic Impact: Tariff Tracker

That has prompted the European Commission, which handles trade matters for the EU, to start working on a “term sheet” for a potential agreement, which would set out areas for negotiations on the punitive trade measures, including lowering its own duties, mutual investments with the US as well as easing certain regulations and standards, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The reciprocal tariffs are meant to strike out against what Trump considers to be unfair levies on US goods as well as non-tariff barriers, such as domestic regulations and how countries collect taxes, including the bloc’s value-added tax, digital taxes and regulations. The EU says its VAT is a fair, non-discriminatory tax that applies equally to domestic and imported goods.

A spokesperson from the commission declined to comment.

The euro briefly erased losses after the report, trading little changed on the day at around $1.0794. European bonds slightly pared gains, with the yield on 10-year German notes down three basis points to 2.74%.

Any deal negotiated by his lieutenants would still have to be approved by Trump. This term sheet would form the basis for the commission to hold talks with the US after the reciprocal duties come into effect, said the people. Those tariffs will likely hit all or most of the goods from the EU being exported into the US.

The US hasn’t indicated the tariff level it will apply on the EU but officials in the bloc expect the rate to fall between 10% and 25%, the people said. They added that any future deal would be difficult and wouldn’t restore the status quo, but would leave EU-US trade relations in a worse place than they currently are.

The bloc’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s head of cabinet met with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett earlier this week to discuss the situation.

The bloc’s ambassadors were briefed on the discussions this week. The talks with the US made scant headway and there’s little the EU can do to keep next week’s levies from being imposed, Bloomberg previously reported.

Non-tariff issues such as the VAT, digital taxes and several EU regulations and food standards featured prominently during the talks in Washington, as the Trump administration has focused its attacks on what it considers to be unfair barriers to American products that the US believes contribute to a transatlantic imbalance favoring Europe. The EU also raised the possibility of additional liquefied natural gas and defense-related purchases.

European officials have tried stressing that even though the EU has a goods trade surplus with the US, the 27-nation bloc imports a lot of American services ranging from ecommerce and social media sites to Internet search engines — all part of the US’s Big Tech industry that has recently cozied up to Trump and his circle of advisers. EU and US firms have more than €5 trillion ($5.4 trillion) worth of investment in each other’s markets, according to the commission.

In addition to the reciprocal levies, the US is planning further tariffs on a number of sectors including metals, cars, pharmaceuticals, lumber and semiconductors. Trump announced a 25% levy on cars and some auto parts this week.

Tariffs on the remaining sectors are expected in the future, the people said. Negotiations on those sectoral duties may be even more complicated as the US goal is to boost American industry and to return production in the US.

Earlier this month, the US imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports, which led the EU to propose its own retaliatory duties on up to €26 billion of politically sensitive American goods. The EU has been consulting with governments and industry on the target list and its response is expected to be rolled out by mid-April, following a member state vote around April 9, one of the people said.

Trump has threatened to impose a 200% tariff on European wine, champagne and other alcoholic beverages if the EU moves forward with a levy on American whiskey exports currently due on April 14.

The EU’s toolbox of possible responses also allows for restrictions that go beyond tariffs, including quotas on imports, the suspension of concessions as well as actions on public procurement contracts, services and intellectual property aspects of trade, Bloomberg reported earlier.

The bloc is unlikely to respond immediately to the reciprocal tariffs as it will need time to assess exactly what Trump introduces, the people said. The EU’s trade ministers are due to meet on April 7 to discuss the US measures and the EU’s potential response.

Up Next

They Bought Dream Homes in Tulum. Then Came the Nightmare.