Ubisoft has gone through many rough patches in recent years, but the CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, is enacting a plan to save the company.
Recent months have not been exactly good for Ubisoft as they have gone through many layoffs and studio closures due to the less-than-great sales of its recent games. In an interview with Variety, Guillemot spoke about how these lay-offs and closures are all part of a plan to reignite the spark that Ubisoft once had.
The current idea is to reformat its studios into “Creative Houses.” Essentially, every house will have full responsibility over its assigned brands’ development, plus its profit and loss. They will design new IPs and operate like their own dedicated business with transparent accountability geared toward performance and actual autonomous creativity.
The latest addition to the creative house project is Vantage Studios, which seems to be in charge of making new games under the Far Cry, Rainbow Six Siege, and Assassin’s Creed IPs. “We have a solid pipeline underway across Vantage Studios. Under the Assassin’s Creed brand, several titles are in development, spanning both single-player and multiplayer experiences, with the ambition to further grow a community that exceeded 30 million players last year,” said Guillemot. He also claimed that they have two ongoing Far Cry projects underway and are putting more resources into Rainbow Six Siege events.
Before all of this restructuring happened, the company cancelled six games from its selection of recognized games, especially the highly anticipated Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake. This doesn’t bode very well for the company, even though Guillemot says, “While such decisions are never easy, they allow us to concentrate our talent on the highest-potential projects and ensure that every release meets the quality our players expect.” Despite three of the cancelled games being entirely new IPs, it can only be speculated on what Ubisoft’s current projects are.
Speaking of current projects, one of the only games in development that didn’t get cancelled was the Splinter Cell Remake. This is still a shock because, according to MobileSyrup, Ubisoft just recently laid off 40 employees working on the remake since 2021 from the Toronto office. Even now, Ubisoft says that the game is not cancelled, but judging by recent trends, it could just be a matter of time. Especially so since 1,200 Ubisoft employees went on strike a couple of weeks ago because of the same cost-cutting measures.
Only time will tell if or when Ubisoft will come out of this restructure still kicking or not. In the meantime, we just have to hope that new Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed games will come out soon.
