It has to be said that Ubisoft ushered in a difficult start in 2023, on January 11, the company announced the cancellation of three undisclosed game projects, while the still under development "Blue Sea Black Sails" announced the ticket bounce again, once the news was announced, Ubisoft ushered in a crisis that affected the entire company.
The cutting of three unannounced projects is indeed bad news, and the real controversy is the game "Blue Sea Black Sails", you know, "Blue Sea Black Sails" was announced as early as 2017, and the game project development time can even be traced back to 2013, this game that has been prepared for 10 years has now bounced 6 times, although Ubisoft said that the new version of the game has made great progress, but players' confidence in it is inevitable to continue to decline.
The bounce ticket of "Blue Sea Black Sails" became the fuse of the next series of turmoil, and many people have noticed that Ubisoft's production capacity has a big problem, which is not the only game that is difficult for Ubisoft to produce, and "Beyond Good and Evil 2" announced in 2017 is even more bumpy than "Blue Sea Black Sails", and until today there has been no release time.
As for the projects that have been cut, there are countless more, as early as July last year, Ubisoft announced the cancellation of a number of projects under development, including even new works of popular IPs such as "Ghost Recon" and "Cell Splinter" in Ubisoft's hands.
After the game was difficult to produce and the project was cut off, after the frequent news of Ubisoft, a large number of players naturally began to be optimistic about the development prospects of this big factory, and this quickly caused a market reaction, Ubisoft's stock price fell rapidly, the price of the stock fell by 10% in the Dawn Jones index, and fell nearly 14% a few hours later, and by January 13, Ubisoft's stock price had fallen to a seven-year low.
In the face of such a tragic situation, Ubisoft also reacted, CEO Yves Guillemot sent an internal email to all employees, he asked employees to dedicate themselves to work and bring Ubisoft back to success. However, the email was seen by many employees as shirking responsibility, many saying that it was paving the way for large-scale layoffs and increased work burdens, and the reaction of employees became more and more fierce, even triggering a strike in the Paris studio.
At this time, Ubisoft, which is worried about internal and external troubles, has fallen into a dilemma, which also makes people speculate about the possibility of the company seeking acquisitions, and according to industry insiders, Ubisoft has indeed discussed acquisitions with a number of companies, but its offers have basically been rejected because the company's size has been too bloated.
With 20,000 employees around the world, only 4 games a year, Ubisoft's production capacity has declined, and in 2020, the pace of Ubisoft's release of games has slowed down. In 2019, Ubisoft launched about 10 new games, 7 in 2020, and then decreased year by year, and by 2022, the number of games released by Ubisoft throughout the year has dropped to 4, namely Just Dance 2023, Rainbow Six: Xenomorph, Mario + Crazy Rabbit: Star Wish, and Champion Rush.
Among these games, except for "Rainbow Six: Xeno", the size of other games is relatively small, and even "Rainbow Six: Xenomorph", its gameplay design is also adapted from the old product "Rainbow Six: Siege", the game has also undergone years of development and many bounces.
In this way, Ubisoft's efficiency in developing games has indeed decreased a lot, but the size of the entire company continues to expand. According to statistics, Ubisoft now has 45 studios in nearly 30 countries and regions around the world, with a total number of more than 20,000 employees, which is a behemoth in terms of the size of the company.
With a number of studios around the world, Ubisoft has also formed a special "sub-processing" model when developing games, the same game project is often developed by multiple studios, art, programming and motion capture and other work are subdivided and distributed to each studio, if the finished product of the project is compared to a car, then the studio is the sub-factory for which parts are produced.
However, despite the meticulous division of labor, there is still someone to guide the development of the game, so Ubisoft has set up a department that makes key decisions for game development - the editorial office, which was previously headed by Ubisoft veteran Sergei Hascot, and under his management, this department led the development of a large number of Ubisoft games, including "Assassin's Creed", "Watch Dogs", "Far Cry" and other classic game series.
Under the conditions of editorial decision-making and studio division of labor, Ubisoft has good development efficiency, but this also means that the power of life and death of each game is in the hands of a few people, and the creativity and inspiration of individuals are always limited, which may be one of the reasons why the homogenization of later Ubisoft games is gradually serious, a large number of repetitive monotonous gameplay content frequently appears in different games launched by Ubisoft, eventually boring players, and "Ubisoft-style open world" has also become a symbol of boredom.
In addition, the excessive intervention of the high-level in the project is also an important reason for the difficult production of some game projects, taking the "Blue Sea Black Sails" that has bounced tickets many times as an example, some insiders broke the news that the game could not be released, which is related to the frequent modification opinions of the high-level.
However, this situation also changed later, with the revelation of a series of scandals such as "brotherhood culture" and "workplace discrimination", Ubisoft's top cadres experienced a major change in 2020, and Harscot, who had been leading development decisions, was also fired, and employees finally began to get rid of the arbitrary suppression of the editorial department.
But this does not mean that Ubisoft will be back on track immediately, in fact, the loss of high-level dominance of Ubisoft ushered in not a rapid improvement in game quality, but a decline in production capacity. Due to the lack of a leader who can coordinate the studios in the short term, Ubisoft has released fewer and fewer games every year since the change of senior management in 2020, and it has not improved until the end of 2022.
Ubisoft's self-help action may have begun long agoIn summary, the problems encountered by Ubisoft in game development mainly involve two aspects, one is that many new projects cannot be shipped, either hastily canceled or indefinitely postponed, wasting production capacity and resources; The other is that the quality of games that can be successfully released is also gradually declining, and players have become tired of Ubisoft's usual formulaic open-world gameplay, which is also reflected in the word of mouth and sales of many new products.
The cancellation of several unannounced projects also proves that Ubisoft is abandoning games with uncertain prospects in time, and as for the resources saved, Ubisoft said it will invest in "more promising" games, including some online games that Ubisoft is currently operating.
At present, Ubisoft still has several long-running multiplayer online games, including products such as "Rainbow Six: Siege", "For Honor" and "The Division 2", which have been launched for several years, but now there is still a sizeable player base, such as "Rainbow Six: Siege", which has been on sale for 7 years and is still online on the Steam platform today.
In order to keep these online games alive, Ubisoft has been actively updating various microtransactions such as season pass passes, appearance sets, etc., and the continued revenue generation of old products not only extends its own life, but also provides more resources for the development of new products.
At the same time, with the reorganization of the editorial office, Ubisoft's game development may also be more free, allowing more possibilities for games currently in development, taking the yet-to-unreleased Assassin's Creed: Mirage as an example, this canonical sequel to the series has been confirmed to be very different from the first three titles in terms of gameplay design, and it is likely that there will be large-scale innovation and improvement.
In addition, although Ubisoft has been sluggish in terms of game publishing in the past two years, CEO Yves Guillemot said that they will launch a large number of games in fiscal 2024, and recently Ubisoft officially confirmed that if this year's E3 game show is held normally, the company will have a lot of content to release at the show.
Combined with the game news released in the past two years, Ubisoft is indeed true, although it has recently cut a lot of projects, but there is no doubt that they still have a lot of big tricks in their hands, "Assassin's Creed" and "Cool Car God" these classic IP new works have been confirmed to be under development, in addition, Ubisoft is still developing adapted games for popular film and television IPs such as "Avatar" and "Star Wars", considering Ubisoft's relatively stable development level, if these games can be released smoothly, they will surely achieve better results.
At the same time, Ubisoft, which was originally estranged from the Steam platform, finally woke up in 2022 and finally brought new works such as "Far Cry 6" and "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" back to the Steam platform, greatly increasing the sales of these games. It is reported that Ubisoft is also very interested in the current very hot Steam Deck, and hopes to make its products as suitable as possible for this handheld device.
Of course, in addition to the host and terminal game platform, like all major manufacturers, Ubisoft has also set its sights on the mobile game market, and in order to successfully gain a foothold in this field, Ubisoft chose to cooperate with Tencent.
At present, Ubisoft and Tencent are working together to create "Rainbow Six" and "Assassin's Creed" mobile games, while Ubisoft is also independently developing mobile games of "The Division Blockade" IP, these are Ubisoft's very popular IP among players, I believe that after the official launch can also achieve a good response, although there is no product online, but we can already glimpse Ubisoft's layout in the mobile game market.
It is worth mentioning that the cooperation between Ubisoft and Tencent may not only be out of the need to layout the mobile game market, Ubisoft may also want to take this opportunity to further enter the Chinese market, with the ancient Chinese Qin Dynasty as the background of the "Assassin's Creed" mobile game, Tencent agent "The Division 2" national service, the emergence of these projects let us see the importance of Ubisoft to the Chinese market.
As early as last year, Ubisoft has been adjusting its development strategy, whether it is structural optimization of development projects or accelerating the layout of multiple platforms, which currently seems to be a favorable choice for Ubisoft's future, and we have reason to believe that before the current situation of internal and external troubles, Ubisoft has a complete set of self-help plans in mind.
Epilogue The project was cut, the game was difficult to produce, the staff went on strike, and no one took over, Ubisoft's situation at the beginning of 2023 did make people sweat for it at first glance, in the face of falling stock prices, excited employees and investors, presumably the situation facing Ubisoft is still grim, and the road forward is also full of difficulties and obstacles, and whether it will go downhill or eventually bottom out, everything is still unknown. When we review Ubisoft's experience in the past two years and understand the company's plans for the future, we can find that it is not sitting still, with the existing IP in hand and the layout of all platforms, Ubisoft has begun a tense self-help action, as for whether it can successfully pull itself out of the quagmire, I believe that time will give us the answer.