Ubisoft

• 1. Introduction

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  Ubisoft, the French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé, exists because a mother set two conditions for her sons. Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel and Yves Guillemot grew up in a family business that supported farmers in Brittany and other regions. Before university, the five brothers helped their parents with sales, distribution, accounting and management. When they asked to start a business of their own, their mother agreed on one deal. They had to run it themselves, and they had to split its shares equally among the five of them.

  Yves Guillemot is now the chairman and chief executive of a company with development studios across the world. Its franchises include Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Rayman, Just Dance and Prince of Persia. Yet Ubisoft has also struggled financially in recent years. This documentary asks how a family of farm suppliers became a major force in gaming. It asks why the brothers fought so hard to stay independent. And it asks what happens when a publisher built on large, ambitious releases starts cancelling games and closing studios.

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• 2. Mail Order and a Chateau

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  Claude Guillemot started the family's diversification by selling CD audio media, and computers and software soon followed, including video games. The brothers noticed that buying computers and software in the United Kingdom and shipping them to France cost less than buying from a French supplier. That price gap inspired a mail-order business. Guillemot Informatique was founded in 1984 and first sold only by post. French retailers soon began ordering too, because the firm could undercut other suppliers by up to 50%. By 1986 it was earning about 40 million French francs. In 1985 the brothers had also set up Guillemot Corporation to distribute computer hardware. Already familiar with publishing and distribution, they decided that video game software was lucrative enough to justify making games.

  Ubi Soft Entertainment S.A. was founded on the 28th of March 1986. The brothers chose the name to suggest "ubiquitous" software. The company began in Paris and had moved to Créteil by June 1986. It hired Nathalie Saloud as manager, but marketing director Sylvie Hugonnier had left for Elite Software by May. Its 1986 releases included Zombi, Ciné Clap, Fer et Flamme, Masque and Graphic City, a sprite editing program. Zombi had sold 5,000 copies by January 1987, and partnerships carried it to Spain and West Germany. Imports from abroad also sold well, and Elite Software's Commando reached 15,000 copies by that same month. Ikari Warriors was another 1987 import. In 1988, Yves Guillemot was appointed chief executive.

  Yves also managed Guillemot Informatique, which made distribution deals with Electronic Arts, Sierra On-Line and MicroProse for the French market. The distributor expanded into the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. It moved into wholesale as well, and by 1993 it was the largest video game distributor in France.

  By 1988, about six developers were working out of a chateau in Brittany. The brothers had picked it as their main development space, hoping the setting would draw developers and help them manage the developers' expectations. Two of the people there would matter enormously. Michel Ancel was a teenager noted for his animation skills. Serge Hascoët had applied to be a game tester. The chateau grew costly to maintain, and the developers were offered a move to Paris. Ancel's family had come to Brittany for his job and could not afford Paris, so they went back to Montpellier in southern France. The Guillemots asked him to keep them posted on anything he came up with.

  Ancel came back with Frédéric Houde and a prototype of a game with animated features. It caught the brothers' attention. Michel Guillemot made it a key project and opened a studio in Montreuil in 1994, built to house over 100 developers. The target was fifth-generation consoles such as the Atari Jaguar and the PlayStation. The game was Rayman, released in 1995, and it became the company's first commercial and critical success.

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• 3. Going Global

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  In 1996, Ubi Soft listed its shares on the stock market in an initial public offering and used the funds to expand. Within two years it had opened studios in Annecy and Shanghai in 1996, Montreal in 1997 and Milan in 1998.

  The brothers still lacked a property that could gain a foothold in the United States. Around 1999, the Internet was growing widely, and they saw an opening. They founded studios aimed at online free-to-play games, Gameloft among them. Ubi Soft licensed its properties to these companies, and the arrangement raised its share value five-fold.

  With that extra money, Ubi Soft bought Red Storm Entertainment in 2000. The purchase brought the Tom Clancy's stealth and spy games into the family. Working with Red Storm, the company expanded the series with Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. The American foothold arrived in 2002 with Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, made with Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. It was meant to challenge the PlayStation-exclusive Metal Gear Solid. The team combined elements of the Clancy series with an in-house game called The Drift.

  In March 2001, Gores Technology Group sold The Learning Company's entertainment division to Ubi Soft. That division covered games first published by Broderbund, Mattel Interactive, Mindscape and Strategic Simulations. The deal included the rights to Myst and Prince of Persia. Ubisoft Montreal developed Prince of Persia into Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, released in 2003. That year Ubi Soft also released Beyond Good & Evil, Ancel's project after Rayman. It was one of the company's first commercial flops, though it has since gained a cult following.

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• 4. Franchises and Engines

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  On the 9th of September 2003, Ubi Soft announced it would become Ubisoft, and it introduced a logo known as "the swirl". A buying spree followed. In February 2005 it took over the NHL Rivals, NFL Fever, NBA Inside Drive and MLB Inside Pitch franchises from Microsoft Game Studios. In July 2006 it paid €19 million in cash to Atari for the Driver franchise, its technology rights and most of its assets. During 2008 it struck a deal with Tom Clancy himself for perpetual use of his name and intellectual property in games and related media. That July it acquired Hybride Technologies, a studio in Piedmont, and in November it bought Massive Entertainment from Activision. In January 2013 it purchased South Park: The Stick of Truth from THQ for $3.265 million.

  Assassin's Creed launched in 2007 as a new property. Ubisoft Montreal first developed it as a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but it turned into a story about Assassins and Templar Knights. The studio built a proprietary engine for it, first called Scimitar and later Anvil and AnvilNext. Anvil went on to power most Assassin's Creed titles, along with Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ghost Recon Breakpoint and For Honor.

  The engine behind Far Cry has a stranger origin. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 1999, Crytek showed a CryEngine demo called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island. Ubisoft saw it and had Crytek expand it into the first Far Cry, released in 2004. Then Electronic Arts signed Crytek to build a different game on an improved CryEngine, so Crytek could not continue Far Cry. Ubisoft Montreal took over the console versions. Ubisoft also secured every right to the Far Cry series and a perpetual licence to CryEngine.

  For Far Cry 2 in 2008, Ubisoft Montreal added destructible environments and more realistic physics. That modified fork became the Dunia engine. Dunia 2 debuted with Far Cry 3 in 2012, aimed at better console performance and richer rendering such as global illumination. By Far Cry 6 it supported ray tracing on PC and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution. Remi Quenin, one of its architects, listed what the engine handled by 2017, including vegetation, fire simulation, destruction, vehicles, wildlife and weather.

  The Disrupt engine took Ubisoft Montreal four years to create for the Watch Dogs games. Most of it was built from scratch, though city management came from AnvilNext and vegetation and AI came from Dunia. Parts of it were originally meant for another Driver game. Meanwhile, Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft co-developed the Snowdrop engine for Tom Clancy's The Division. Its core is a "node-based system" that links rendering, AI, mission scripting and the user interface. Snowdrop also drives Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws.

  In 2013, Ubisoft announced plans to invest $373 million in its Quebec operations over seven years. The money went toward motion capture and consolidating online operations in Montreal. The company expected more than 3,500 staff in Montreal and Quebec City by 2020.

  In 1999, Ubisoft produced Rayman: The Animated Series in-house to promote Rayman 2: The Great Escape. Twelve years later, in 2011, it started Ubisoft Film & Television, then called Ubisoft Motion Pictures. Its productions include the 2016 live-action Assassin's Creed film, the series Rabbids Invasion from 2013-2022 and Mythic Quest from 2020-2025. Ubisoft has also partnered with museums to turn research done for Assassin's Creed and Far Cry into exhibits. That work grew out of the Discovery Tours added to Assassin's Creed, which let players explore the game worlds without the usual gameplay.

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• 5. Always Online

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  Uplay first appeared alongside Assassin's Creed II as a rewards program. Players earned points toward in-game items by completing achievements. It grew into a desktop client and storefront for Windows, and Ubisoft split the rewards into a separate program called Ubisoft Club. Ubisoft Connect was announced in October 2020 and launched on the 29th of October 2020, alongside Watch Dogs: Legion. It replaced both Uplay and the Club, and it added cross-platform play and save progression for some games. Some older games would not be updated for the rewards system, so Ubisoft gave all players every reward in those titles.

  Uplay also managed digital rights for Ubisoft games on Windows, and this drew sharp criticism at launch. Some games required a constant connection, so a dropped Internet signal could cost players their saved progress. Denial of service attacks on Ubisoft's servers made matters worse, leaving games unplayable under that scheme. Ubisoft eventually dropped the always-connected requirement. Every Ubisoft game still performs a start-up check against its servers when launched.

  In July 2013, Ubisoft disclosed a network breach that could have exposed up to 58 million accounts. The data included usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords. Ubisoft denied that any credit or debit card information was at risk. It emailed registered users, told them to change their passwords, and advised updating any other site that used a similar password.

  Anne Blondel-Jouin, executive producer of The Crew and later vice-president of live operations, told The Verge that it was one of Ubisoft's early games to demand a persistent Internet connection. That worried players and people inside the company. The Division then pushed the idea further. Yves Guillemot said Ubisoft concluded that connected sandbox games, with seamless switches between single and multiplayer modes, gave players more fun. Inside the company, Ubisoft now describes itself as divided into "before The Division" and "after The Division."

  The consequences of always-online design reached the courts. In December 2014, Ubisoft offered a free game to Assassin's Creed Unity season pass owners after a buggy launch, but the terms revoked their right to sue over it. In November 2024, Matthew Cassell and Alan Liu filed a class action in the Eastern District of California after The Crew's servers were announced to shut down. They accused Ubisoft of misleading players into believing their purchases were permanent. In April 2026, the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, backed by Stop Killing Games, sued over the same shutdown.

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• 6. Guarding Independence

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  In December 2004, Electronic Arts bought a 19.9% stake in Ubisoft, and Ubisoft described the purchase as "hostile." The brothers later admitted they had never thought of themselves as part of a competitive market, and employees feared that a takeover would change the company's atmosphere. EA's chief executive at the time, John Riccitiello, said the purchase was not a hostile move. EA sold the shares in 2010.

  A far longer fight began in October 2015, when Vivendi bought Ubisoft shares in two separate actions and reached a 10.4% stake. Yves Guillemot called the move "unwelcome" and feared a hostile takeover. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2016, he stressed that Ubisoft had to stay independent to protect its creative freedom. He later explained his thinking: "when you're attacked with a company that has a different philosophy, you know it can affect what you've been creating from scratch." He added: "So you fight with a lot of energy to make sure it can't be destroyed." Anne Blondel-Jouin told PCGamesN that Ubisoft's success owed partly to "being super independent, being very autonomous."

  Vivendi also moved against Gameloft, the mobile publisher the Guillemots owned. In February 2016, it bought €500 million of Gameloft shares and passed 30%. French law then required a public tender offer, and Vivendi completed its takeover of Gameloft by June 2016. In Ubisoft's own shares, Vivendi held 15% by then, against roughly 9% for the Guillemots. The family asked for more Canadian investors to help. By June 2016, Vivendi had reached 20.1% and denied it was planning a takeover.

  At the annual board meeting in September 2016, Vivendi held 23% of the shares, and the Guillemots had raised their voting share to 20%. Vivendi asked for seats on the board. The Guillemots argued that Vivendi was a competitor and persuaded other voters to refuse. By December 2016, Vivendi held 25.15%. Reuters reported in April 2017 that a takeover seemed likely that year. Some of Vivendi's shares were approaching the two-year mark that would give them double voting power, which could push Vivendi past 30%. As of June 2017, the Guillemot family held 13.6% of the share capital and 20.02% of the voting rights. In October 2017, Ubisoft arranged to buy back 4 million shares by year end so Vivendi could not buy them.

  In November 2017, Vivendi said it had no plan to acquire Ubisoft for six months. It also said it would keep its interest under the 30% threshold despite the coming doubling of its voting rights. Vivendi still described its Ubisoft stake as a possible capital gain of over 1 billion euros. On the 20th of March 2018, the two companies ended the standoff. Vivendi agreed to sell all of its shares, more than 30 million, and not to buy any for five years. Tencent bought some, ending up with about 5.6 million shares, roughly 5% of the total. The same day, Ubisoft announced a partnership with Tencent to bring its games to China. Vivendi had fully exited by March 2019.

  In September 2022, Tencent invested again, this time in Guillemot Brothers Limited, the holding company for part of the family's stake. Tencent gained 49.9% of that company, and the Guillemots' voting share in Ubisoft rose to about 30%. Yves Guillemot said Tencent would help bring games to China, help pay off debts and discourage potential buyouts.

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• 7. Culture Under Scrutiny

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  Around 2001, Ubi Soft created an editorial department headed by Serge Hascoët as editor in chief. Hascoët had worked beside Michel Ancel on Rayman in 1995 to refine it, and he wanted to apply that polish across every game. Until 2019, most games Ubisoft published passed through this department.

  By mid-2019, Bloomberg Businessweek reported, Ubisoft had nearly 16,000 developers. It produced five to six major AAA releases a year, against two or three at rivals. Yet its net revenue per employee was the lowest of the four companies compared, because its games sold less. Bloomberg Business partly blamed consumer habits, since buyers were purchasing fewer games with long playtimes, and most of Ubisoft's big releases were long. In October 2019, Ubisoft postponed three of its six planned titles to 2020 or later so it could improve the others. In January 2020, it said it would reorganize its editorial board. Management called its games stagnant and too uniform, and it blamed that for weak sales.

  In June and July 2020, the #MeToo movement brought a wave of misconduct accusations against Ubisoft employees, from inside and outside the company. An internal investigation and a study by the newspaper Libération found records of misconduct and troubling behaviour going back up to 10 years, which human resources departments had dismissed. Some staff quit or were fired. They included Hascoët, Maxime Béland, co-founder of Ubisoft Toronto, and Yannis Mallat, managing director of Ubisoft's Canadian studios. Yves Guillemot introduced changes while the company investigated further.

  In February 2021, Ubisoft told investors that AAA releases would matter less after fiscal year 2022. Chief financial officer Frederick Duguet described a model that paired strong releases with "back catalog dynamics" and added free-to-play and other premium experiences. Later that year, Ubisoft began labelling games from its first-party studios as "Ubisoft Originals." It also announced an open world Star Wars game, ending EA's exclusive rights to make Star Wars titles.

  Blockchain games became another gamble. Ubisoft co-founded the Blockchain Game Alliance in September 2018, and Yves Guillemot argued that crypto items would let players truly own digital goods. In December 2021, Ubisoft announced Ubisoft Quartz, which let players buy uniquely identified customization items and trade them using the Tezos currency. It was the first "AAA" push into blockchain games, and audiences hated it. The announcement video reached a 96% dislike ratio on YouTube, and Ubisoft developers criticized the idea internally as well. Ubisoft later unlisted the video.

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• 8. Cuts and Restructuring

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  In July 2022, Ubisoft cancelled Splinter Cell VR and Ghost Recon Frontline, along with two unannounced titles. Another three unannounced games went in January 2023 after disappointing quarterly results. In an email to staff, Yves Guillemot asked everyone to be "especially careful and strategic with your spending and initiatives." He also wrote: "The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality." Union workers at Ubisoft Paris objected to the message, called a strike and demanded higher pay and better conditions.

  In August 2023, Ubisoft agreed to a 15-year deal with Microsoft to license cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard titles. The deal came as Microsoft sought approval for its Activision Blizzard acquisition from the UK Competition and Markets Authority. It allowed those games to appear on Ubisoft+.

  Headcount fell from 20,279 in 2022 to 19,410 in September 2023. In November 2023, Ubisoft laid off 124 employees from its VFX and IT teams, and in March 2024 it cut 45 from publishing. Another 45 went from its San Francisco and Cary, North Carolina, offices in August 2024. By the end of September 2024, the total had fallen to 18,666.

  In 2024, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, XDefiant and Star Wars Outlaws all sold poorly or lost players after launch. The stock sank to nearly its lowest level in a decade. Ubisoft promised to investigate its development cycles and adopt a "player-centric approach." It also pushed its next flagship game, Assassin's Creed Shadows, from November 2024 to February 2025. On the 16th of October 2024, over 700 Ubisoft employees in France began a three-day strike. They were protesting a requirement to return to the office three days a week. The STJV union organised it across offices in Paris, Montpellier, Lyon and Annecy. Workers also cited a lack of flexibility, salary increases and profit-sharing.

  In December 2024, Ubisoft announced that XDefiant would shut down in June 2025, less than a year after release. The closure of Ubisoft San Francisco and Ubisoft Osaka put up to 277 employees out of work. In January 2025, Ubisoft closed its Leamington studio and shrank others, affecting up to 185 staff.

  Ownership came under pressure too. Around September 2024, the shareholder AJ Investments said it wanted a private equity firm to buy Ubisoft and push out the Guillemots and Tencent. Reports in December 2024 said Tencent wanted a majority stake and a private company, with the family keeping control. On the 27th of March 2025, Ubisoft announced a subsidiary for Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six. Tencent would invest €1.16 billion for 25%, at a €4 billion valuation. The subsidiary, Vantage Studios, was unveiled in October 2025, with Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot as co-chief executives.

  In July 2025, Ubisoft said it would reorganize into "creative houses." At the end of August, it sold the rights to five titles, including Grow Home and Cold Fear, to Atari SA. In October 2025, it sought to cut about 60 positions at Ubisoft Redlynx and encouraged voluntary departures at Massive. Just before its half-year report in November 2025, Ubisoft delayed the report and asked Euronext to halt trading in its shares. It explained this as a way to limit speculation. On the 21st of November 2025, the report showed 17,097 employees at the end of September. In December 2025, Ubisoft acquired the free-to-play MOBA March of Giants from Amazon Games's Montreal studio, along with members of its team.

  In December 2025, about 60 workers at Ubisoft Halifax voted to unionize with CWA Canada, the first union of Ubisoft workers in North America. On the 7th of January 2026, Ubisoft said it was closing the studio, affecting 70 people, and claimed the decision predated the union vote. That month it announced a major restructuring into five creative houses, each with full financial ownership. It cancelled six games, including the planned Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. Yves Guillemot said the company had taken on projects after COVID in anticipation of demand that never came, and the change was needed to recoup around $200 million in costs. In March 2026, Ubisoft laid off about 100 people at Red Storm Entertainment and ended game development there. By the end of March 2026, its workforce stood at 16,590.

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