The campus, which is somewhat incongruous here, would fit seamlessly into Silicon Valley. It is an upgrade for Ubisoft, a flagship of the French technology sector, whose previous headquarters was behind a parking garage and housed about 650 people.
Ubisoft is one of the largest publishers in the video game industry, a multinational corporation best known for “Assassin’s Creed,” “Far Cry,” and putting Tom Clancy’s name on more things than even the prolific military novelist. Now the company and its portfolio of more than 100 active games are seen as a desirable target for competitors as the industry enters a period of consolidation. Ubisoft has also been the epicenter of some of the industry’s most seismic changes in recent years, including a reckoning around workplace misconduct — an issue the company’s leaders claim they’ve addressed well and are trying to put behind them. .
As the video game industry evolves, Ubisoft must evolve with it – or try to die. That’s the message business leaders wanted to get across at an event in Saint-Mande on Thursday, where they previewed a long-term strategy focused on a range of games, partnerships and technologies designed to take the company to the next chapter of the industry. bring.
Some of these initiatives, unveiled to the public on Saturday in a showcase titled “Forward”, include a partnership with Netflix to produce three new mobile games starting in 2023, expanding the indie game catalog available on Ubisoft+. the company’s game subscription service, and a plan for the future of Assassin’s Creed for the 15th anniversary of Ubisoft’s best-known franchise.
The video game industry has not been immune to the economic disruptions of recent years, including the impact of the pandemic on consumer spending and supply chains. But major players, including Ubisoft CEO and co-founder Yves Guillemot, expect it to grow to more than $300 billion by 2030. Companies seeking a slice of that market face headwinds: technologies change, as do players’ quality expectations; talent in this field is in high demand and hard to find; and norms and standards are evolving, with developers and players resisting what they see as a culture of sexual harassment, lack of diversity and poor working conditions prevalent in the industry.
“This is going to be a challenging and relentless journey: either you keep up with the pace of change or you’re out,” Guillemot said Thursday, shortly after it was announced that Tencent had acquired a minority stake in the company Guillemot and his brothers founded in 1986. and what makes them run Ubisoft.
While recent flagship titles like “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla” and “Far Cry 6” have proved successful from a commercial standpoint, things haven’t fared so well on the live service front – easier-to-money multiplayer games that require constant updating. . Well, with upcoming games like “XDefiant” not garnering fanfare, while previous attempts like the Battle Royale title “Hyper Scape” and an NFT-laden update for “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint” crashed and burned. Ubisoft has now endured several tough fiscal quarters and is struggling to find another hit amid delays and mediocre releases. In July, before Tencent’s announcement, Guillemot called on staff to cut costs where possible.
As the company plans for the future, it focuses its strategy on a handful of its most successful properties. Set in 9th-century Baghdad as a return to the series’ narrative origins, the newly announced “Assassin’s Creed Mirage” is Ubisoft’s first step toward a live service future for its largest franchise. It will be released in 2023, the company announced on Saturday, and will feature Iranian-American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo as the voice of Roshan, mentor of street thief-turned-master-murderer Basim Ibn Is’haq.
After that, ‘Assassin’s Creed Codename Red’ is set in feudal Japan. It is followed by “Codename Hexe”, a game with a decidedly witchy feel about which the company has revealed few details, other than being developed by Ubisoft Montreal. Ubisoft will also release a free-to-play mobile game called “Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade”, set in 215 BC. China.
“Red” and “Hexe” will connect to a larger Assassin’s Creed hub called “Infinity,” alongside multiplayer experiences the company is pursuing, including one codenamed “Invictus.” Historically focused on a single player, Assassin’s Creed may or may not make an elegant leap into this new era of gaming. Undoubtedly, Ubisoft is putting a big bet, bringing together more than a dozen studios to create the next batch of sequels in the long-running (and parkouring) series.
Ubisoft will also partner with Netflix to produce a mobile game “Assassin’s Creed”. In 2023, as part of the same partnership, they will release mobile games based on Ubisoft’s “Valiant Hearts” and “Mighty Quest”.
Ubisoft has tried to grow with these new projects. It hired 4,000 people during the fiscal year ending March 2022 — nearly a third of them women, according to Chief People Officer Anika Grant. Six hundred of those new hires had previously left the company and were rehired — a sign, Marie-Sophie de Waubert, Senior Vice President of Studio Operations, says, “that people are feeling the change” at Ubisoft.
Since the summer of 2020, the company has been the subject of a #MeToo settlement, with employees accusing its leadership of tacitly enabling a culture of misconduct and abuse. While several accused executives left the company in the wake of investigations, some employees — including a collective of current and former employees called “A Better Ubisoft” — continue to report dissatisfaction with the leadership’s handling of reports of misconduct.
“Yes, we stumbled, and we acknowledged that,” Guillemot said euphemistically on Thursday. The CEO — who was named in a complaint filed in July 2021 by a French union and some employees alleging “institutional sexual harassment” at the company — said Ubisoft has “learned a lot over time” and “has made meaningful progress”.
Since 2020, Ubisoft has rolled out a new misconduct reporting system, hired a diversity and inclusion team, and required corporate executives to receive anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training, says Grant, who was hired last April to lead a controversial HR team that itself had been the subject of employee complaints. “It’s not where it was a year ago,” she said. “I feel like we’ve moved on as an organization.”
Members of “A Better Ubisoft” wrote in a Q&A published Wednesday on a website run by the Assassin’s Creed Sisterhood movement, a community of fans advocating for better gender representation in the franchise, that they want to see the changes introduced. implemented at the company. the aftermath of the scandals is inadequate. Some members, quoted under pseudonyms, said the diversity and inclusion team is “understaffed and underfunded”, complained of a top-down approach from management and said some of those accused of misconduct were still with the company.
Grant, the chief people officer, said everyone at Ubisoft who has been complained about has been investigated. “If they stay, they are either acquitted, or they have been properly disciplined,” she told The Post.
“A lot of talking and not much walking,” said a pseudonymous member of “A Better Ubisoft”.
“From what I see of the entire company, I don’t think this is fair,” Marc-Alexis Cote, vice president and executive producer of “Assassin’s Creed,” told The Post on Thursday. Cote, who also led Ubisoft’s Quebec City Studio, one of several studios named two years ago in complaints about toxic work environments at the company, said: “A lot has changed since 2020, both within the [Quebec] studio and within Ubisoft in general”, with regular dialogues with staff and the implementation of more “cooperative” and less “competitive” ways of working.
“The Ubisoft of 2022 is not the Ubisoft of 2020. It’s a good thing,” Cote said. “And I hope that the Ubisoft of 2024 is not the Ubisoft of 2022 and that we are on the path to continuous improvement,” he added.
All this turmoil leaves Ubisoft in a precarious state as the video game industry enters a period of unprecedented consolidation, exemplified by Microsoft’s $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, Take-Two’s $12.7 billion buyout of Zynga. and Sony’s $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie. Tencent’s nearly $300 million purchase of a 49.9 percent economic stake in Guillemot Brothers Limited increases the Chinese conglomerate’s control over Ubisoft, from which it previously bought a 4.5 percent stake. According to Guillemot, this is not a harbinger of a takeover.
Within Ubisoft, news of the Tencent investment seems to have come across well with executives, who say they support Guillemot’s message, set out in an email to staff reviewed by The Washington Post, that Ubisoft will remain independent. “From a creative perspective, it’s business as usual — it doesn’t affect us at all,” said Fawzi Mesmar, Vice President of Editorial at Ubisoft.
But “what I know for sure about the gaming industry, having been here for 20 years, is that it will always change,” he added. “There is never a dull moment.”
Nathan Grayson contributed to this report.
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