Claude Guillemot

Educational content

Ubisoft has been partnering with various museums to help bring the research and modeling that has been done for games in the Assassins Creed and Far Cry series as part of museum exhibits. This extends from the addition of Discovery Tours in the Assassins Creed games, which allowed players to explore the games' world without other gameplay aspects.

Investment by Tencent (2018–2022)

Since 2018, Ubisoft's studios have continued to focus on some franchises, including Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy's, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs. As reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, while Ubisoft as a whole had nearly 16,000 developers by mid-2019, larger than some of its competitors, and producing 5 to 6 major AAA releases each year compared to the 2 or 3 from the others, the net revenue earned per employee was the lowest of the 4 due to generally lower sales of its games. Bloomberg Business attributed this partially due to spending trends by video game consumers purchasing fewer games with long playtimes, as most of Ubisoft's major releases tend to be. To counter this, Ubisoft in October 2019 postponed 3 of the 6 titles it had planned in 2019 to 2020 or later, as to help place more effort on improving the quality of the existing and released games. Due to overall weak sales in 2019, Ubisoft stated in January 2020 that it would be reorganizing its editorial board to provide a more comprehensive look at its game portfolio and devise greater variation in its games which Ubisoft's management said had fallen stagnant, too uniform and had contributed to weak sales.

Stemming from a wave of sexual misconduct accusations of the #MeToo movement in June and July 2020, Ubisoft had a number of employees accused of misconduct from both internal and external sources. Between Ubisoft's internal investigation and a study by the newspaper Libération, employees had been found to have records of sexual misconduct and troubling behaviour, going back up to 10 years, which had been dismissed by the human resources departments. As a result, some Ubisoft staff either quit or were fired, including Hascoët, Maxime Béland, the co-founder of Ubisoft Toronto, and Yannis Mallat, the managing director of Ubisoft's Canadian studios. Yves Guillemot implemented changes in the company to address these issues as it further investigated the extent of the misconduct claims.

Ubisoft stated in its end of 2020 fiscal year investor call in February 2021 that the company will start to make AAA game releases less of a focus and put more focus on mobile and freemium games following fiscal year 2022. CFO Frederick Duguet stated to investors that "we see that we are progressively, continuously moving from a model that used to be only focused on AAA releases to a model where we have a combination of strong releases from AAA and strong back catalog dynamics, but also complimenting our program of new releases with free-to-play and other premium experiences." Later that year, the company announced it would start branding games developed by its first-party developers as "Ubisoft Originals".

In 2021, it announced that it would be making an open world Star Wars game. The deal marked an end to EA's exclusive rights to make Star Wars titles. In October 2021, Ubisoft participated in a round of financing in Animoca Brands.

In November 2021, Ubisoft announced the development of its first Ubisoft Entertainment Center, created by experience design firm Storyland Studios and Alterface. The first location is set to open in Studios Occitanie Méditerranée by 2025.

Ubisoft has been increasingly involved in blockchain-based video games since the later 2010s. The company is a co-founder of the Blockchain Game Alliance, which was established in September 2018 and is a consortium of several companies active in the blockchain space that seeks to explore the potential applications of this technology in the video game industry and publicly promotes the use of blockchain-based content in video games. According to Yves Guillemot, one of Ubisoft's co-founders, crypto-based content in video games will allow players to actually own digital content within it, while growing the video game industry in the process. Ubisoft furthermore announced its Ubisoft Quartz blockchain program in December 2021, allowing players to buy uniquely identified customization items for games and then sell and trade them based on the Tezos currency, which Ubisoft claimed was an energy efficient cryptocurrency. This marked the first "AAA" effort into blockchain games. The announcement was heavily criticized by audiences, with the Quartz announcement video attaining a dislike ratio of 96% on YouTube. Ubisoft subsequently unlisted the video from YouTube. The announcement was also criticized internally by Ubisoft developers.

In July 2022, Ubisoft announced that it had cancelled Splinter Cell VR and Ghost Recon Frontline, along with two other unannounced titles. In September, Tencent invested another €300 million into Guillemot Brothers Limited, the company that holds part of the Guillemots' ownership of Ubisoft. This gave Tencent 49.9% ownership in this holding company and increased the Guillemots' share of voting rights within Ubisoft to about 30%. Yves Guillemot said that Tencent would be working closely with Ubisoft, helping to bring its games into China while assisting in paying off Ubisoft's debts and preventing the company from potential buyouts.

Other lawsuits

In 2008, Ubisoft sued Optical Experts Manufacturing (OEM), a DVD duplication company for $25 million plus damages for the leak and distribution of the PC version of Assassin's Creed. The lawsuit claims that OEM did not take proper measures to protect its product as stated in its contract with Ubisoft. The complaint alleges that OEM admitted to all the problems in the complaint.

In April 2012, Ubisoft was sued by John L. Beiswenger, the author of the book Link who alleged copyright infringement for using his ideas in the Assassin's Creed franchise. He demanded $5.25 million in damages and a halt to the release of Assassin's Creed III which was set to be released in October 2012, along with any future games that allegedly contain his ideas. On 30 May 2012, Beiswenger dropped the lawsuit. Beiswenger was later quoted as saying he believes "authors should vigorously defend their rights in their creative works", and suggested that Ubisoft's motion to block future lawsuits from Beiswenger hints at its guilt.

In December 2014, Ubisoft offered a free game from its catalogue of recently released titles to compensate the season pass owners of Assassin's Creed Unity due to its buggy launch. The terms offered with the free game revoked the user's right to sue Ubisoft for the buggy launch of the game.

In May 2020, Ubisoft sued Chinese developer Ejoy and Apple and Google over Ejoy's Area F2 game which Ubisoft contended was a carbon copy of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. Ubisoft sought copyright action against Ejoy, and financial damages against Apple and Google for allowing Area F2 to be distributed on their mobile app stores and profiting from its microtransactions.

In November 2024, two Californians—Matthew Cassell and Alan Liu—filed a class action lawsuit against Ubisoft in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, after Ubisoft announced the shutdown of The Crew servers. Cassell and Liu accused the company of misleading players into believing that their purchases of the game were permanent instead of buying limited licenses and for "falsely represent[ing]" that the physical copies contained the game's files instead of simply a key to unlock the DRM for the game.

In January 2026, former Ubisoft worker Marc-Alexis Côté said he will sue the company for CAD 1.3 Million over a forced exit from the company. He claimed he was replaced and that he learned in the summer of 2025 it was looking for a new boss for the Assassin's Creed franchise, he was told the role was not to be based in Canada and instead in France, the lawsuit allegedly claimed that he was offered a "Head of Production" role, Ubisoft told him not to go to work on 13 October, a day before he was departed, his lawsuit also asks for 75K$ CAD in damages and severance pay

In April 2026, French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir with support from Stop Killing Games sued Ubisoft over the shutdown of The Crew, asserting Ubisoft misled consumers on the permanence of availability for the game.