The French publisher has slowly established a new pattern of behavior over the last year.

Most recently, Ubisoft talked about being behind in sales and canceling three of its games (we wrote over the weekend that CEO Yves Guillemot expects everyone to do their best work and spend the least when he has promised no change and no, cutting his salary is not the answer to the problem!). Let us not forget that in July, the French company canceled four more projects, and two have not even been announced. The Skull & Bones delay has continued: the pirate game has now been postponed to 2024. Add to this the sexual harassment cases of Activision Blizzard King’s magnitude (more than one of which happened in their Singapore studio that happens to develop Skull & Bones…), the failure with NFTs, and the uncertain future of more than one of their games (Beyond Good & Evil 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake…).

They canceled Ghost Recon Frontline (it was a free-to-play project) and Splinter Cell VR, announced in September 2020, and since Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope did not “live up to sales expectations” (ditto the latest installment of the Just Dance franchise, Just Dance 2023; somehow, this annual release has been going for a while inexplicably, the Nintendo Switch-exclusive franchise could be in trouble. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is still to come (meanwhile, the second Avatar movie has been released…), and Assassin’s Creed may have over-expanded. And in the next financial year (April 2023 to March 2024), they plan to release another big, unannounced game…?

Ubisoft has told investors that it has built its big franchises on a game-as-a-service (GaaS) basis for the last four years, as that was its strategy with the quintet of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and The Division because it was the new international trend. However, the games from the investment phase have yet to be released, and the French publisher is cutting its profit expectations by half a billion dollars because of it. Where is 2018 now, when Ubisoft’s shares were worth more than $100? On Thursday, after a 21% drop, the French company’s stock was trading at around $20, a level not seen in seven years.

It will be difficult for the French to recover from it.

Source: Gamerant