Ubisoft to tackle ‘polarized’ comments in its new strategy

Ubisoft reaffirmed its efforts to move toward a more player-centric strategy for its games, while announcing that it’s looking closer into “polarized” comments aimed at Ubisoft developers and games.

The publisher and developer has been internally working on changing some long-standing Ubisoft release traditions involving season passes, early access for certain preorders, and launching PC games on its own platform ahead of ones like Steam. It’s already released Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Star Wars Outlaws on Steam since its original announcement, which involved delaying the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows from November to February to ensure it’s polished.

“Despite recent setbacks, we are continuing to deeply transform Ubisoft in order to restore the level of creativity and innovation that built Ubisoft’s success while delivering stronger execution and predictability,” CEO Yves Guillemot said in a press release ahead of the company’s first-half of fiscal year 2025 financial call. “To succeed, we must redouble our focus on execution and reinforce a player-centric mindset in everything we do.”

Guillemot added that theses efforts include “tackling the dynamics behind polarized comments around Ubisoft so as to protect the Group’s reputation and maximize our game’s sales potential.”

The CEO doesn’t specify which ones, but there has been a lot of anger online directed toward developers working on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The backlash has concerned the inclusion of historical Black samurai Yasuke as one of the main characters, among other things.

When asked about his thoughts on the video game industry right now in an interview on the Ubisoft website, Guillemot pointed to “malicious and personal online attacks” directed at Ubisoft employees and partners.

“I want to make it clear that we, at Ubisoft, condemn these hateful acts in the strongest possible terms, and I encourage the rest of the industry and players to denounce them, too,” he said.

The company also confirmed on that Star Wars Outlaws did indeed perform worse than expected, and is working on fixes to improve the game’s quality. It’s already released some hotfixes and updates to make stealth more enjoyable, for example.

The most profitable Ubisoft franchises continue to be Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six Siege, although the latter continues to do excellent numbers that are still growing. Rainbow Six Siege has topped 3.5 billion euros in revenue, putting it only behind the Assassin’s Creed series. Live service games generally do well for the company, with The Crew franchise being a particular standout with 8 million active players over the past three months.

Oddly enough, there is very little mention of Skull and Bones, Ubisoft’s open-world pirate RPG that released earlier this year, and how it performed. The company did confirm that the game’s fourth season will be released by the end of 2024. That said, it did finally release an NFT game (thanks IGN) after announcing it would be investing in blockchain technology. It released NFT platform Quartz in 2021 and launched its first NFT cosmetics in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, although it ended support months later. The new game is called Champions Tactics, and it launched to little fanfare this week. There’s no mention of NFTs, blockchain, or web3 in Ubisoft’s financial report either.