2023-05-16 19:33:58
After a “challenging” year of losses and few releases, Ubisoft is preparing to pour resources into the Assassin’s Creed franchise to secure its future. This includes a restructuring that will increase the workforce to develop the Assassin’s Creed title by 40% in the coming years, following layoffs that reduced the company’s global workforce to less than 20,000.
In its full-year earnings today, Ubisoft said net sales fell 14.6% to 1.81 billion euros ($1.97 billion) in the fiscal year just for its flagship releases Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, Just Dance 2023 and Rocksmith +. Last year, it reported a total operating loss of 500 million euros ($543 million). While Ubisoft previously said Sparks of Hope and Just Dance didn’t perform particularly well, other live-service games were making money, notably Assassin’s Creed which reached “registered active users” despite having no new game releases. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla now has 44% more players than Origins and 19% more players than Odyssey, Ubisoft reports.
Ubisoft went big with Assassin’s Creed
This explains why Ubisoft is poised to aggressively pursue the Assassin’s Creed franchise in the coming years. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is still slated for release in 2023, and there are three main games on the horizon, along with an additional VR game and a mobile game in the franchise.
Ubisoft has said it wants to increase the number of people working on the franchise across the company by 40% in the coming years to “fuel its ambitious expansion,” though this appears to come from a promised “targeted restructuring.” Cost-cutting measures have reduced the company’s global workforce to less than 20,000, down from 20,700 in September. Ubisoft tells investors it plans to continue to “strictly control hiring” and divest “non-core assets,” which means Ubisoft might see it reduce the total number of games it plays simultaneously (a process that’s already begun in earnest) and spend more time, money and manpower on Assassin’s Creed.
This does not mean that Assassin’s Creed does not really exist everything, despite of. Unlike many previous earnings reports and announcements, this quarter’s announcements did not come from game delays or cancellations. Ubisoft’s upcoming fiscal year (ending March 2024) includes not only Mirage, but Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Tom Clancy’s The Division Resurgence, Rainbow Six Mobile, The Crew Motorfest, Skull and Bones (now delayed six times), XDefiant, and as- Yet another unnamed “big game”. Ubisoft is expected to reveal more regarding these games at the upcoming Ubisoft Forward event on June 12th.
Also of note is Ubisoft’s particular interest in buildable AI. In its earnings report, Ubisoft says it is “uniquely positioned to lead” what it says will be the “transformation” of the creative industries with emerging artificial intelligence in 2023, which it says was demonstrated at its last Game Developers Conference in March. “Locally, early adoption is rapid, as creators and developers at all levels experiment with the technology and take advantage of the emerging generative AI landscape,” the press release says. “With them, Ubisoft is building a responsible structure with talent management and fair use at its core.”
A number of large companies have endorsed experimenting with generative AI, a sign of Ubisoft’s interest in integrating AI into game development. The implications of this use are yet to be seen, but Ubisoft has Potential applications discussed earlier, as NPC pathfinding by Ubisoft’s research and development arm La Forge. IGN previously explored both the benefits and concerns of the AI being developed during the recent AI Week.
Ubisoft’s forecast for next year calls for revenue of €400m ($435m) – which would be a significant improvement over its €500m loss last year.
Rebecca Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. You can find her on Twitter @tweet.
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