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The stock price has plummeted, the game has hit the street, and the new work has bounced, what happened to this big factory?

Compilation / Mobile Game That Little Thing Zeta

Ubisoft's development hasn't been going well for the past few months.

The stock price has plummeted, the game has hit the street, and the new work has bounced, what happened to this big factory?

Recently, Ubisoft suddenly announced that the new "Assassin's Creed" series "Assassin's Creed: Shadow" has jumped tickets, and the release date has been postponed from the original November to February 14, 2025. According to Ubisoft, the company made this decision with the aim of further optimizing the game to provide players with a satisfying experience.

"While the game was already feature-complete, we decided to devote more time to improving the game based on the experience gained from the release of Star Wars: Outlaws." In a statement, Ubisoft said, "We believe this will help one of the biggest titles in the entire franchise fully realize its ambitious vision, especially the promise of giving players access to dual-protagonist adventures." In the game, Naoe and Yasuke bring two completely different styles of play. ”

"Assassin's Creed: Shadows will also move away from the traditional season pass format. On February 14, 2025, all players will be able to play the game at the same time. Plus, we're giving away the first expansion pack for free to those who pre-order the game. ”

At the same time as announcing the jump in Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Ubisoft publicly admitted for the first time that Star Wars: Outlaws had failed to meet expectations in terms of commercial performance. "In response to player feedback, Ubisoft's development team is now fully mobilized and will quickly implement a series of updates to improve and refine the player experience and propel Star Wars: Outlaws to a long-term strong game with a large number of players during the Christmas season," Ubisoft said in a statement. This game will be released on Steam on November 21st. ”

One more important change: starting next February, all of Ubisoft's new games that include PC versions will be available on the Steam store on launch day.

In an investor call on Wednesday, Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves · Guillemot admitted that the company has indeed had a lot of difficulties lately.

"Our second-quarter results were lower than expected, prompting our decision to address issues quickly and resolutely, to focus more on a player-centric, gameplay-first approach going forward, and to remain steadfast in our commitment to delivering the long-term value of our own brand." "While it will take longer for us to see the tangible benefits of the company's transformation, we will remain committed to our current strategy and focus on two key core areas – open world adventures (gaming) and game-as-a-service native experiences – with the goal of driving growth and generating strong cash flow." ”

"Finally, I'd like to talk about some of the polarizing comments about Ubisoft in recent times. I want to reiterate that Ubisoft is an entertainment-first company, and our goal is to create games for the widest possible audience, not to promote any particular values. In the future, we will continue to create games for fans and players to enjoy. ”

As a game publisher with star IPs such as Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Prince of Persia, why is Ubisoft in such trouble? In an op-ed published some time ago by GameIndustry.biz, the author, Rob Fahey, gave an in-depth analysis on this topic.

The following is a compilation of the content of the article on the mobile game:

Since going public in 1996, Ubisoft has repeatedly fought against outside forces that have tried to buy the company, or to compete for control of the company.

The stock price has plummeted, the game has hit the street, and the new work has bounced, what happened to this big factory?

Ubisoft was a European distributor whose main business was to represent other companies' games, but in just a few years after its launch, a series of smart decisions allowed Ubisoft to quickly gain a foothold in the global market, and it has several key IPs in its hands. This, in turn, has led to a strong interest in some of the larger companies seeking growth through the acquisition of Ubisoft.

In 2004, EA acquired a nearly 20 percent stake in Ubisoft — a prelude to a hostile takeover by Ubisoft executives at the time. In 2010, EA eventually sold its stake in Ubisoft, but a few years later, Ubisoft had to face an even more serious hostile takeover: the Guillemot family, who founded Ubisoft, was embroiled in a three-year "business war" to prevent France media giant Vivendi from gaining a controlling stake in the company.

Just look at Ubisoft's stock price chart and you can see the traces that these battles have left on Ubisoft. If you just look back at the past few years, you'll notice that Ubisoft's share price has performed very badly, with the company's market value losing about half in the last year, and Ubisoft's stock price has performed poorly every year since 2020.

The stock price has plummeted, the game has hit the street, and the new work has bounced, what happened to this big factory?

A few years ago, the "stay-at-home economy" drove gaming companies' valuations soaring, but for Ubisoft, the boost was short-lived. Ubisoft's share price has been declining so far in 2021: just a few weeks ago, Ubisoft's stock price plummeted again, perhaps due to the disappointing commercial performance of the company's new title, Star Wars: Outlaws.

Interestingly, though, if you stretch the timeline, you'll find that Ubisoft's stock price has been inflated for a long time.

Until 2020, Ubisoft's valuation was very high, due in large part to the "after-effects" of its founding team's struggle with Vivendi: the Guillemott family used all their resources to increase their stake and voting rights in Ubisoft, and Vivendi also acquired more shares at higher and higher prices to bring his own stake to 30%, triggering the takeover bid.

This strategy worked. In 2017, when Vivendi was close to reaching its goal, Ubisoft's share price had soared to nearly 10 times that of 2015, when Vivendi acquired a 10% stake in Vivendi...... However, Vivendi eventually chose to give up and left the table after selling a large stake in Tencent to Tencent. This presented Ubisoft with a strange problem: the battle for control led to an over-inflated share price, and in the years that followed, Ubisoft had to go through very difficult times as the stock price inevitably returned to the average.

Today, Ubisoft's valuation has fallen to a level close to that of Vivendi's initial stake in 2015, meaning that Ubisoft hasn't made any meaningful progress over the past decade. During this period, Ubisoft investors have not seen any returns already at best, with a significant number of them losing nearly 90% of their investments.

You can almost imagine that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot might have felt relieved when a so-called active investor popped up two weeks ago and issued an open letter asking Ubisoft to accept ·a takeover from a private equity firm. Because in a way, that open letter diverted attention and brought Ubisoft executives to their familiar "battlefield" - hostile investors threatening to buy the company and drive the Guillemot family out! In boss fights like this, the Guillemot family once successfully fought against powerful opponents, but now their opponents are not well-known, with less than 1% of the shares.

It's obviously much easier for Ubisoft's management to deal with small investors than it is to do a real internal introspection about why the company is lagging far behind its competitors in the gaming industry in many business metrics and what problems it is running into managing the [game] development process.

In fact, much of the expression in the open letter was rather amateurish, even flawed, and looked more like a parody of "fun people" than any serious analysis or investment strategy. In addition to some of Ubisoft's most important IP misspellings, the author's understanding of how the game company works is extremely shallow...... In short, the contents of the open letter are not worthy of serious attention by large companies or their investors.

The stock price has plummeted, the game has hit the street, and the new work has bounced, what happened to this big factory?

However, while that open letter didn't help Ubisoft's diagnosis or treatment of the disease, the author was right about at least one thing: Ubisoft was very sick and showed no signs of getting better.

In terms of commercial success, Ubisoft can't compare with other triple-A publishers, falling behind in almost all comparisons of company profits, revenue per employee, average product revenue, etc. Ubisoft has a large number of well-known and popular IPs – Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Far Cry, and more – but it has struggled to launch successful games around them. At the same time, Ubisoft has tried to develop new IPs in recent years, but it has not been going well, with projects such as Black Sails and Unruly Alliance seemingly failing to meet their commercial goals.

From the source, compared to other triple-A publishers, Ubisoft lacks best-selling games that can steadily attract money, such as Activision's Call of Duty series, EA's sports games, Take-Two's GTA Online, etc. Ubisoft has also made some strategic decisions in this direction, trying to develop online service games like Unbound Alliance, but with little success. (As a shooter against Call of Duty, Unruly Alliance simply can't shake the latter's market position.) )

There is also an opinion that Ubisoft is an overly bloated company – its staff is much higher than its competitors. Ubisoft hires too many employees and publishes too many games, but the average revenue per Ubisoft employee, game products, is still not high compared to its competitors...... This suggests that Ubisoft's top management is having a problem using and allocating resources efficiently and making informed decisions around the product line, instead haphazardly letting its studios make a large number of games in the hope that one of them will be successful.

The stock price has plummeted, the game has hit the street, and the new work has bounced, what happened to this big factory?

It's also a question that Yves · Guillemot and other Ubisoft executives around him can't avoid.

As the company's co-founder and CEO, Yves · Guillemot has been at the helm of Ubisoft for more than 30 years. Over the years, Guillemott has been doing everything in his power to maintain his leadership position at Ubisoft and has proven himself to be a cunning and resourceful board fighter, maneuvering between giants like EA, Vivendi, and Tencent, even occasionally using their powers against each other to achieve his own ends.

But on the other hand, judging from the current situation of Ubisoft, Guillemot does not seem to be good at strategizing around how to develop products and how to allocate resources...... Of course, the treatment proposed by the activist investors is far worse than Ubisoft's illness itself – if a private equity firm buys Ubisoft, lays off employees and divests assets, Ubisoft could collapse entirely in a few years.

Ubisoft still plays a very important role in the gaming industry, but the company's top management needs a real change, and its product line needs to be more rigorously and efficiently supervised and managed. Yves · Guillemot has spent his life running Ubisoft, however, investors and stakeholders have reason to question him and demand that he prove that he is still the right person to lead the company through the current challenges.

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