Talk:Just Dance 2017/@comment-29512888-20160921181800/@comment-1465604-20160922133832

Uh, they spent literally no money on covering "Scream & Shout", "Hips Don't Lie" and "Single Ladies" because those aren't covers. Or did you mean that they spent extra money to license the songs since those artists usually ask for more money?

It's not really a question of Ubisoft running out of money due to licensing expensive songs. The series makes oodles of money, they could afford to throw more money at covers. I think they just don't care about getting good covers done. They likely have very little money set aside for covers, despite the fact that they could afford more, so they commission only the cheapest artists for covers.

The thing about "Ghost in the Keys" is that it's not even a cover. It's a Ubisoft original. They paid someone specifically to make that song for them. Being a Ubisoft original does not automatically mean the song has to be bad. "Chiwawa" and "Oishii Oishii" are perfect examples of this. Despite being Ubisoft originals, no matter what you think about them, you must admit that they sound like just about any cutesy J-Pop songs made in the past 15 years.

"Kaboom Pow" was very well done, as were most of Anja's songs. Ubisoft simply did not try very hard with "Ghost in the Keys". Its biggest problem is being almost criminally underproduced.Good production can hide a lot of mistakes. Just listen to any live performance by Taylor Swift from the early 2010's and which does not obviously use real-time pitch correction. She sounds horrible, but you'd never know that by listening to the studio version. Meanwhile, they barely did any production work on the vocals of the main rapper, nor much work with the instrumentation, which gives the entire song a very cheap feeling. It sounds like a 90's sitcom theme song, does it not?

Again, Ubisoft can crank out good in-house productions (I'm pretty sure Wanko Ni Mero Mero" is an in-house artist using a pseudonym) or commissions artists to create good songs (Anja, Nikki Yanofsky). They just sometimes choose not to.