During a press event to set out the future of Ubisoft, boss Yves Guillemot spoke briefly about the crisis in the workplace, which began in 2020.
Numerous reports of sexual misconduct led to a departure from the company, but Ubisoft has since — and even this week — come under pressure from employees who believe the publisher hasn’t done enough.
On Thursday, in Paris, at a briefing attended by Eurogamer, Guillemot described the moment as a “stumble” that the company had since acknowledged and learned from.
“Our goal is to provide them with the best working environment to thrive and reach their full potential,” said Guillemot. “In a context of [a] great realignment, we want to build one unique employee value proposition and make changes when needed.
“First, we want to ensure an inclusive, rewarding and respectful workplace for all. Yes, we stumbled. And we recognized that. We learned a lot along the way and made meaningful progress with concrete action plans led by our leaders together with Anika Grant, our chief people officer, and Raashi Sika, our VP of Diversity and Inclusion.
“Despite the turnover that has affected our entire industry during the pandemic, we hired more than 4,000 people in the past fiscal year, including more than 600 people who were rehired, as well as senior talent from other leading companies.”
During an extensive discussion, Guillemot also spoke about Tencent’s recent acquisition of Guillemot Brothers, which gave it more ownership of Ubisoft, though notably left it control of a seat on the company’s board of directors.
“The goal is to do more business on mobile first,” says Guillemot. “We started four years ago and the games are coming up and they are of very high quality. We think it will really help the business grow, so we’re also looking for new areas where we can do more business. That’s why we wanted to really grow collaboration… to grow the business and generate more revenue and make sure our brands are really all over the world. We see that making AAA games on mobile is pretty, pretty hard. So we do some in-house, but we’re also working with partners like Tencent to create some as well.”
Responding to reports of a fall in the stock price after the Tencent deal was made public, Guillemot suggested that this was due to the market seeing a smaller opportunity for investment for a quick sale, and perhaps a reduced opportunity for collaboration. with other partners – something Guillemot said was incorrect.
“A major negotiation with Tencent [was] that we have the right to do what we want… People feel that we are only with one partner, which is not the case, we are really open to everyone. But you know, in the short term our goal – and the medium term – is to try to show what we can achieve in our studios and grow the stock price by building projects that will be the best in the business.”
Ubisoft memorably repulsed a previous hostile takeover attempt of Vivendi, but the past year has been the subject of numerous reports suggesting some sort of sale was more likely. I asked Guillemot if Ubisoft’s independence was still as crucial as it once was.
“Yes, it is,” Guillemot said to me. “We want to be in a position to give all Ubisoft employees a long-term perspective so they can really make games that they believe will be the best in the business.” While that didn’t rule out partnerships with other companies, Guillemot continued, Ubisoft’s future remains its own.
“Our first intention is to own our destiny. That’s why we invest in new technologies. That’s why we look at how we can use those technologies to create new brands, and so on. Our goal is really to grow in this industry, with all the tools that will make our brands and our teams some of the most recognized in the industry. And I think we can do that.”
As part of that effort, Guillemot announced that third-party games would be made available as part of its own Ubisoft+ subscription, soon to be released on PlayStation and Xbox. This detail may shed new light on the company’s decision last year to label its own games as “Ubisoft Originals”.
“With Ubisoft+, we are offering players easy access to our catalog through a single subscription, our efforts include PC, Stadia, Amazon, Luna and GeForce Now, and will be available soon on PlayStation and also Xbox,” said Guillemot. “Our back catalog has over 100 active games, [and] this makes us a major player in the democratization of games, providing high-quality, diverse experiences, accessible and appealing to a large audience.
“Providing that content will help us have a long-term presence across all platforms, including all platforms – including the mobile platforms. We are proud to announce that we are now open to third parties as well. Ubisoft+ will third-party and indie games on the platform.”
Finally, I asked Guillemot about the future of Quartz, the critically acclaimed NFT program, and what Ubisoft’s thoughts were about continuing to work with blockchain and similar technologies.
“We’re looking at all the new technologies and we’re very cloud, on the new generation of voxels, and we’re also looking at all Web3 capabilities,” Guillemot told me. “We recently tested a few things that give us more information about how it can be used and what we need to do in the video game universe. So we’re testing ground with some games that… we’ll see if they really live up to that.” the need of a player, [and then they] will happen on the market. But we’re still in research mode, I’d say.”
Eurogamer met Ubisoft this week at its Paris office, for which Ubisoft covered travel and lodging expenses.
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