UPDATE: The morning after I published this, two Ubisoft employees who are representatives for their French trade union also called for Yves Guillemot to resign. Seems negative sentiment toward him is growing further.
Ubisoft's troubles seem unending these days. After years of failed releases, bad financials and a cratering stock price, the iconic French publisher who once traded blows for top of the list of the big players has been undertaking drastic measures to right its ship but just keeps listing further.
First they sold a chunk of their most valuable IPs to CCP puppet Tencent, then they closed their Halifax and Stockholm studios with the former totally not being because it just voted to unionize, then they had layoffs at Massive Entertainment. Then for the coup de grace of ass (coup de ass?) they announced a "major reset", cancelling 6 games (including the Prince of Persia remake many of us were eagerly awaiting), delaying 7 others and restructuring the company into 5 different "creative houses", effectively just business units dedicated to specific genres and player demographics. Of the 6 cancelled games, 3 of them were original IPs. This news was met with a collective dry heave as their stock tanked another 33%, well below what they IPO'd for in 1996 and taking their market cap to under a billion dollars. While not the lowest the stock's ever been, it's close and that low wasn't long ago. Suffice it to say, people aren't confident.
Companies have turned themselves around from worse and when times get tough--and boy are they tough in the games business right now--pain is often necessary to ensure a brighter future. But the reaction of nearly everyone to this announcement isn't hope, but collectively wondering how long Ubisoft can survive. Consolidation is never good for consumers and there's a lot of that happening in worrying ways right now.
The big question on my mind and I suspect many others though is why Yves Guillemot, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Ubisoft since it's founding is still in charge.
Many of the biggest and oldest publishers we know today began as scrappy upstarts back early days of the industry and Ubisoft is no exception. It was founded by Yves Guillemot and his four brothers back in 1986 when the market in Europe was still young. They started as a distribut, but very quickly entered development before they were a publisher, with their first release being Zombi for home computers of the day (warning: old and cringe video at that link). They slowly grew, becoming a big player in Europe, then worldwide, then joining the top echelon of AAA publishers between the 6th and 7th console generations.
One of the things that made them more interesting to me than other large publishers was that even though they had their tentpole franchises, they still invested in smaller, quirkier ideas and also published a lot of third-party titles. Many of these didn't pan out, but some did and even a lot of the ones that didn't were at least interesting and showed they were willing to take creative risks and expand the medium. They felt like a big company that still understood the art behind games.
The Assassin's Creed franchise really sent their fortunes skyward, but also marked when they right-turned into being a much more "traditional" AAA publisher. The weird and quirky titles fell away over time, they all but abandoned third-party publishing and they focused more and more on a handful of expensive to make, but reliable selling franchises, many of which were large open-world games and live services. Despite the scope of some of these titles, they managed to crank them out on a sometimes yearly basis by having an impressively complex network of worldwide studios which worked together, but also helped to keep their labour costs lower and spread work over multiple time zones. At the time, it was widely considered a brilliant model.
They managed to ride this for a good while, but the formula started cracking a few years back as an increasing number of existing players--myself among them--started to get tired of the sameness and young players started to get their time monopolized by garbage like Fortnite, Roblox and TikTok. Instead of responding with new ideas or retooling their existing ones to better suit what players wanted--seriously, who asked for 40+ hours of bland filler in every Assassin's Creed or Far Cry?--they just doubled down on what wasn't working anymore. They also made several new attempts to get into live services and while Rainbow Six Siege and The Division were successful, they also had a string of expensive failures. Personally, I still think XDefiant was pretty good, but people only seemed to care about it for a hot second.
Rather than taking a hard look reforming at their creative process early, they instead decided to place bets on ideas that anyone could have told was were stupid. Just a few highlights:
- Locking PC releases to the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft's own Connect.
- Telling players they should get "comfortable not owning games".
- Delisting The Crew and spawning the Stop Killing Games movement in the process.
- Calling the at best mediocre Skull & Bones a "quadruple-A game" to justify it's $70 price tag.
- Getting into the movie & TV business for some reason. I haven't seen everything they've made, but Mythic Quest and Splinter Cell: Deathwatch were awful and the Assassin's Creed movie supposedly was too.
- And my favourite of all: Launching an NFT platform right when the hate for that scam was reaching fever pitch. Despite the claims in that article, no other games got NFTs.
It's fashionable among gamers to hate on AAA publishers, but even staunch defenders of Ubisoft started to turn against them after all this. My interest in their output certainly went downhill, even as my interest in their franchises was waning. Opinion of the company has arguably never been lower, with many gamers now cheering their bad fortunes.
Throughout all of this and indeed, the entire company's history, there's one through line: Yves Guillemot.
To give the man his due credit, he's run Ubisoft for almost 40 years straight and took them from nothing to their highest highs. He invested in Canada and convinced the Quebec government to invest with him, building one of the world's premier game development hubs in Montreal. I will not deny his accomplishments, nor the praise he deserves for them. The problem is that the business landscape changes rapidly and not every leader is up for every challenge. Video games is arguably one of the fastest moving and riskiest creative industries there is, especially at the AAA level and while his successes are undeniable, his recent failures are as well.
At some point around the middle of the last console generation, Guillemot clearly became out of sync with industry trends and player wants. Instead learning and adapting, Ubisoft leadership just kept doubling down on what worked before but wasn't now, chasing moronic flash in the pan trends and seemingly never missing an opportunity to shove their feet in their mouths. They made the classic mistake of assuming they knew what their customers wanted, rather than asking them.
Part of leading a company or group of people is not only taking praise and profits for its successes, but accountability for its failures. A good leader would have realized when their strategy was faltering and either would have asked for help or admitted they were out of their league and stepped aside to let a new visionary have a go. Instead, Yves Guillemot decided to attack his customers, break the company into pieces, sell part of it to the CCP, harm the lives of many of his employees through layoffs, but still retaining the top job. He undoubtedly spins it as "I caused this mess, I should fix it", his recent actions show it's not about that, it's about his ego and wanting to stay in charge, fortunes of those under him be damned.
Ubisoft started as a family business and despite its size, the Guillemot family clearly still treats it as such, evidenced by Yves Guillemot's son being appointed Co-CEO of the new joint venture with Tencent that now administers their most valuable IPs. Ever wonder why despite all the turmoil, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is apparently still in development, despite having shown nothing in years and now having been in the oven longer than Duke Nukem Forever was? Would it surprise you to learn that the original Beyond Good & Evil is the only title on which Yves Guillemot is credited as Project Producer? What a strange coincidence!
This is a man who still sees the company as his and his family's, despite it being publicly traded. That's all well and good if you're a small business and only your family stands to be impacted, but Ubisoft still employs over 17,000 people. They deserve to be led by someone who cares about them and what they make, not someone who clearly just sees them as pawns on his path to riches and hopeful redemption.
Yves Guillemot could have retired from Ubisoft when he first realized he was out of his depth, his fortune and legacy both riding high. Honestly, I think both are well deserved for what he accomplished until relatively recently. Instead, he led them from their peak to blunder after blunder, quite possibly past the point of saving. Like Bruno Bonnell, Phil Harrison, Brian Farrell, the Caen brothers and many more legacy games industry leaders, said industry has left him behind, but he'd rather see his company it go down in flames with him at the helm than succeed with someone else. That's both infuriating and sad.
It's time for Yves Guillemot to accept and admit his failings and leave what's left of Ubisoft to someone more capable. This industry needs more competition, not less and if Ubisoft is to regain its prominence, it's clearly not going to be under him.
