Broken Games and the Perpetual Update Culture: Revising Failure With Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity

Abstract

This article explores tensions between producers and audiences over the growing trend of broken games as developers rush error-ridden titles to market and update them after their release. Through the lens of software studies, it examines development norms among major game companies, noting important connections with contingent commodities and perpetual beta development. Focusing on the discourse surrounding Ubisoft’s notoriously broken Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), it highlights how digital producers and audiences negotiate failure in a digital environment that increasingly relies on updates, revisions, and patches. It argues that digital industry producers foster an indefinite beta atmosphere within the context of a purchase and recontextualizes audience outrage as free labor by encouraging customers to report on faulty code. Ultimately, industry producers then engender a perpetual update culture in which digital commodities mediate failure through the rhetoric of constant improvement, and producers leverage the instability of digital distribution against its audience.