Ubisoft has launched a new subsidiary dedicated to its big three IPs – Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry – in a move CEO Yves Guillemot calls a “new chapter” for the company. Chinese conglomerated Tencent will hold a minority stake in the new entity, having invested €1.16bn.
Ubisoft’s announcement follows several recent reports such a move was being considered behind the scenes. Earlier this month, Bloomberg claimed Ubisoft was mulling over the launch of a fresh business unit part-owned by outside companies, noting such a tactic could potentially result in the new entity being valued higher than Ubisoft itself following years of falling share prices and a string of disappointing game launches.
In today’s official announcement, Ubisoft valued its new subsidiary at around €4bn. This, it wrote, “highlights the strong value of [its] IPs, significantly reinforces its balance sheet, and enables the company to continue its efforts to become a more agile organisation, unleash the full creative potential of its teams and better align its resources with the constantly evolving expectations of players.”
It also confirmed the business unit will be the new home of all Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far cry development teams based in Montréal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona, and Sofia. Additionally, the subsidiary will control each series’ “back-catalog and any new games currently under development or to be developed.”
“Today Ubisoft is opening a new chapter in its history,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot wrote in a statement accompanying the announcement. “As we accelerate the company’s transformation, this is a foundational step in changing Ubisoft’s operating model that will enable us to be both agile and ambitious. We are focused on building strong game ecosystems designed to become evergreen, growing high-performing brands and creating new IPs powered by cutting-edge and emerging technologies.”
As to what the new subsidiary will actually do, Guillemot says it’ll focus on “transforming [Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry] into unique ecosystems”. The announcement takes this a little further, claiming the “greater investment and boosted creative capacities [will] drive further increases in quality of narrative solo experiences, expand multiplayer offerings with increased frequency of content release, introduce free-to-play touchpoints, and integrate more social features.”
Away from the new subsidiary and its three big name brands, Ubisoft says it’ll concentrate on “nurturing the development of iconic franchises including Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and The Division, accelerating the growth of top performing titles and leveraging disruptive technologies on selected new IPs, while continuing to deliver state-of-the-art production game engines and online services.” More details are set to be shared at a later day.
This seismic shake-up of Ubisoft’s structure follows a tumultuous few years for the publisher – which earlier this year confirmed it was undertaking a strategic review to help it right-size the business, amid tumbling share prices and a number of high-profile flops, including last year’s Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisoft’s failings have also significantly impacted staff – a string of job cuts and studio closures in recent times have seen its employee numbers shrink from over 20,279 people in 2022, to 18,666 in September 2024, with more redundancies having been made since then.
It remains to be seen whether Ubisoft’s newly announced subsidiary can help change its fortunes, but the publisher has recently celebrated the launch of Assassin’s Creed Shadows after numerous delays. Earlier this month it said Shadows had topped over two million players, “surpassing the launches of [Assassin’s Creed] Origins and Odyssey”.