Henderson on the situation at Ubisoft: the company is in a decadent mood, new games are poorly sold
Insider Tom Henderson has published a lot of material on Ubisoft. His sources told how the company is doing.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
We have selected the main theses.
- Employee morale is at an all-time low. They fear that Ubisoft, following many other companies, may carry out major layoffs. Despite the fact that she started making cuts a year ago: since January 2023, Ubisoft has closed several offices due to financial problems and parted with some people. The last round of layoffs took place last November and affected 124 people.
- Ubisoft employees are also disappointed with many of the management's decisions. In particular, attempts to keep up with trends and constant delays in games.
- In late 2021 and early 2022, Ubisoft was working on about 12 games in the battle royale genre. A significant part of them were canceled after testing.
- Also at the end of 2021, Ubisoft became interested in NFT and introduced the Quartz platform. The project was negatively received by the audience.
- Ubisoft is currently making at least three escape shooters: The Division Heartland, a game in the Far Cry universe codenamed Project Maverick, and a new IP in the World War II setting. Their developers are not sure that the company will not cancel the projects.
- The development of Skull and Bones has already cost $200 million. The delays are mainly due to the influx of managers who are trying to move up the career ladder. Because of this, the vision of the game is constantly changing, and the developers do not understand what they need to do.
- Prince of Persia Revenue: The Lost Crown is now worth $15 million. The audience of the game is 300 thousand people.
- Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora earned approximately $133 million. It was played by 1.9 million people.
- Assassin's Creed Mirage performed better. She earned $250 million and attracted 5 million players.
- Ubisoft has two major releases planned for 2024: Star Wars Outlaws in the first half of the year and Assassin's Creed Codename Red in the second half of the year. In 2025-2026, she is preparing to release a new Ghost Recon, two games in the Far Cry universe, two games in the Assassin's Creed universe and a remake of Splinter Cell.
