Why are Ubisoft too commercial? I mean, it's THQ's business failure which led to the current hiatus.
But THQ's failures were not necessarily because they were/weren't commercial. THQ is VERY commercial, but they took unecessary risks where they shouldn't (uDraw? wtf!) and they played safe when they should have risked more (too much reliance on licensed content, such as Movie branded games, etc).
This translates into easy sales, but lacking original IP for the most part pretty much killed them. A kid will want the spongebob game, but it doesn't create a loyal customer. EA knows this, Ubisoft knows this, Activision knows this. You'll noticed that, while they rehash a lot of sequels, they are sequels for original IP a lot of the times, or very loved IP that has a recurrent or known fanbase (FIFA, Farcry, Syndicate, Splinter Cell, etc).
Look at THQ's lineup for the past years, they have absolutely nothing, bar a few exceptions (Saints Row, Darksiders, perhaps Metro and Red Faction), that makes a customer choose it over the competition. CoH was such an exception in the RTS genre, but that was six years ago.
Ubisoft IS a great company, no doubt about it. They have taken flak from the public, but every big company does at one point or another. Yet people still buy Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed, regardless of how much they rehash or distort them as the years go by.
The publisher is ALWAYS responsible, in some part, for the finished product. The reaosn depends: sometimes they are not supervising production and the developer doesn't deliver, sometimes they demand stupid things, or too much from the developer (2K Games required on a very short notice, that Spec ops: The Line included a multiplayer feature, just so the box and marketing could say so. The result was disastrous for the reviews, while the single player was generally considered positive).
Another example is Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2. Anyone who has played those series thoroughly will notice how much the design and style changed over the years, EXACTLY when EA bought Bioware's parent company. The result? While not official, rumors state that both of the remaining co-founders resigned form the videogames industry altogether, a massive blow sinc ethey were some of the industry's creative leaders.
Change is good, but only if properly managed.
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