The way that the video game industry userbase is revolting against DEI and programming of the masses via putting all sorts of inclusivity into video games one would think that a major company like Ubisoft, that already has a rather shakey relationship with gamers due to some decisions they have made in the past, would know better.
But with their recent release of the Assassin's Creed games, they decided to make the main character a black guy, in Japan.
src
There are a lot of things going back and forth on Twitter and what not about how the character, Yasuke is a genuine historical figure in feudal Japan and I'm not even going to get into it because I don't really care enough to bother getting to the bottom of it. I do know that there have been a ton of recent ninja edits to the wiki regarding Yasuke and many are claiming that Ubisoft is scrambling to try to legitimize the inclusion of the main character of a game that takes place in Japan being a black man. The edits go back and forth and you can scroll to the bottom of the page to see how most of the edits have been made very recently.
src
I've not ever played any Assassin's Creed games and I am very unlikely to start with this one because I never buy games when they are first released thanks to Square-Enix royally screwing me over (IMO) with their last two Final Fantasy releases that I thought were very sub-par.
Whether or not Ubisoft did this intentionally in order to check off a bunch of DEI boxes is a matter of speculation. That was all the rage years ago when they likely started development but the way that the gaming community is joining forces to revolt against gaming companies that puts this sort of things in games is extremely unfortunate timing for Ubi, that's for sure.
So far, the reaction from Japan hasn't been the greatest.
Personally, I don't really care because I wasn't going to play this game anyway but for a large company like this to engage in this right now just seems counter-productive to their ultimate objective, which is to make money. Ubisoft's stock value has already taken a hit because of the amount of negative press that this is getting and there are a ton of people, die-hard gamers, that will boycott the game because of this.
Whether or not you believe "the message" is real or not doesn't really matter, the fact is that there are a lot of people in the world that really don't like DEI becoming a part of everything that goes on in the world and they will vote with their wallets. Ubi could seriously end up regretting this and while I realize that they likely had already invested tons of money and resources into this game before they could have even known there would be a backlash, it does seem to be a very bizarre business decision on their part to go forward with this. I do know that a majority of Japanese fans are already very displeased with this decision and as the 2nd largest video game market in the world, that could spell disaster for Ubisoft on its own.
For me I think people should be more concerned about Ubisoft charging for DLC, more DLC, season passes, and loads of microtransactions, rather than the color of the skin of someone in a clearly fictional environment. But maybe that is just me.
The game will be released in November of this year.