Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
The only possible explanation is that they didn’t use enough AI.
To make the games, or to cook their books?
Yes.
You’re correct! They should have fired at least 20% more of their staff and used AI to build everything, and not test any of it. It’s the only way.
Ubisoft is a textbook example of what happens when you pin your companies revenue on a small handful of IPs and milk them to the absolute fucking limit. I like assassins creed, but I’ve played enough of them for the rest of my life. Make something new my dudes.
They have so many great IPs that are just gathering dust or in development hell, yet they keep milking the same few games every year.
I remember when Ubisoft was a logo I liked seeing on my gaming screen.
Now it just looks like a flushing toilet.
I can never unsee that now.
I hear below the equator the logo spins in reverse
(Side note: this isn’t actually true - toilets swirl in a particular direction based on the design of the bowl and water jets, not whether or not they’re below the equator)
I saw what I imagine is a tourist attraction demonstrating that it’s “true” but you can definitely see them rotate their arm in opposite directions. They unplug a sink that that carry across the equator.
That logo quit being worthwhile seeing 15 years ago.
Yeah… I didn’t say when that was. 👴
Yeah, it was around the time when I was excited for the Assassin’s Creed games.
Far Cry 1 times.
Ubisoft better get comfortable with not owning their own company.
You cheer this on, but what are the odds that saudi arabia buys them up?
How many things do you want owned by the worst country bar none for human rights? (yes I am aware the US is racing to catch up, but is nowhere near as bad per capita).
Let’s give Ubisoft to North Korea then
That one Steam user will be hyped as fuck.
Finally, a games company that praises the glory of the regime.
I’m not sure how much I should care. I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game in decades anyway. They don’t make anything I need, so it’s not like it’s an inconvenience to boycott.
Every now and then someone calls for a boycott, and I say that I’ve already been boycotting them all my life, and didn’t even know it.
Alternatively, sometimes there are calls to boycott something, and it turns out I’ve been boycotting them for years over some old atrocity. For instance, United Airlines gets boycotted regularly, but I’ve been boycotting them for decades, for lots of other shitty behavior (destroying guitars, beating up doctors who refuse to give up their paid-for seat, etc.), as well as having the highest fares in the business.
You don’t think the saudis having a great deal of control over the content your fellow countryman engages with has any effects you should care about?
You underestimate my level of cynicism at this point. You also underestimate my disrespect for the average gamer. If they’re not lapping up one form of propaganda, they’re lapping up another.
Absolutely the case, but we can’t throw nuance to the wind just because bad things will continue to happen. SA propaganda is definitely note worthily worse than many other forms.
Whats more, I feel that gaming generally is more focused on trying to use marketting dark patterns to encourage spending than pushing any messages typically. This makes them, in my mind, even more vulnerable as they won’t even be expecting it as their viewpoints change over time.
What’s he going to do to stop it? It’s not his fault
Where did you read me saying it was their fault, or that I expected them to stop it?
I said neither thing.
All I am saying is it’s something to pay attention to, and its not good when media sources are bought by the saudis.
Why keep this in mind? In case there is ever somewhere that does make this relevant. Like maybe it should be in the eyes of the public more such that its a political talking point so regulating agencies are less happy with letting companies be sold to SA.
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat because they’re not as worried as you are about the hypothetical odds of the buyer being Saudi Arabia, and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
It’s just a weird thing to press someone on
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat
I’m just going to stop you right there. You’re reading in a whole lot of malice into a pretty benign comment pointing out why someone might care in spite of not caring about their games.
and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
I don’t believe any specific country was named in the context of that point. The USA was only brought up to preempt comments derailing the point of my comment by bringing it up.
Man, they have had some really good IP over the years and somehow managed to ruin all of it.
That’s what you get when you don’t want to pay people for their work and try to keep teams together. The newbies aren’t going to care about the rich history of the games they’re banging out code for at 3 AM on a Saturday.
The usual cycle. They get good, get big, get shit, get insolvent or bought up until there’s no bigger fish anymore (in which case you have to live with shit until they get insolvent after a long time).
This is good news for everyone who is not an ubisoft shareholder
how so?
Why? What relevance is Ubisofts poor record keeping to non-shareholders?
This is what happens when you abandon Splinter Cell.
It’s what happens when you operate your company with an accountant mentality. The focus is 100% on money, and 0% on creativity.
They always realize too late that customers won’t just give you money, you have to offer them something decent in exchange, but accountants don’t know how to do that, which is why you NEVER let accountant craft the business strategy for a company.
If they try to offer suggestions, you scream at them to get back to their hole and count the money like they’re supposed to, and when their opinion is needed, it will be solicited, which will be NEVER.
The irony is that they actually have some pretty unique and creative ideas spread out in most of their open-world games despite the jokes about how they’re all the same. If they cared about making good shit and not just money, they could have a game that rivals or surpasses Grand Theft Auto.
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
The only games in my Steam library that I can’t play are Ubisoft.
Fuk Ubi. Forever. I would be happy if they went under.The Nestle of video games. Because just like the food empire it never got flagged by the EU for overreach.
Nintendo would like a word.
The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.
Just emulate them.
The only Ubi game I play is Just Dance Now. Sadly I can’t think of a non-Ubi alternative to that gameplay :/
The rabbit hole goes deep on this one.
I found it surreally hard to find new dance game - until I discovered that much of the player community had (I guess?) moved to an open source game engine called StepMania.
I play StepMania happily enough, now. It is nice how many different songs I can now add with community contributed step configurations.
Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.
So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c
Oh awesome! It’s like Frets on Fire but for DDR
Most likely they fucked up their report and they’re using the rules of the exchange to suspend trading until they fix the mistake. But Ubisoft has been running on fumes for some time now, shitting out the same 3 or 4 games over and over again so I doubt their financials are that great.
Either way, he recommended that everyone “freak the fuck out for the next few days and speculate as much as possible until they announce something,”
Advice after my own heart. Freaking out and speculating are always the best move.
Yikes bikes. Obviously the writing has been on the wall for a minute. But I didn’t realize it would happen in one minute.
For being too fat for their own good, tear the damn thing down.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
They are also hellbent on infecting everything they touch with Denuvo malware. I haven’t bought anything of theirs in years for that reason alone.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
Oh wow you anger much less easily.
I started boycotting when they started forcing uPlay even in Steam games.
To be fair, they are too big.
They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.
My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.
“We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…animated show!”
Or “We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…addon for an always online single player game that no one likes…"
Fans: “We get to play as Sam Fisher again? Awesome!”
UBI:
Nah fuck that if they make a new splinter cell game it would end up being open world with a cosmetic store
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up???
By treating their paying customers like worthless trash/criminals/scum/pirates/etc. Which is what Ubisoft has spent the past 10 years doing.
Not only that but E33 showed people what ex-ubisoft devs could do when you actually let them be creative.
I’ve never heard of this happening before? I’m sure it has, but first time for me.
Same. Companies can just halt trading of their stock?
Yeah, it happens to prevent a mass sell-off because of speculation.
Even if the news is positive, postponing is enough to make people speculate, so it’s a valid reason to halt trading.
Although I doubt it’s gonna be positive news for shareholders.
It happens sometimes. Usually it is when there are rumors that will have a significant impact on the stock. In that case the stock can be halted until the company gives a statement about it. I’m not sure if it is the company can halt it, I think they can request it and provide information why it should be halted and then it is up to the stock exchange to determine. And the stock exchange has its own rules for when to halt the trade.
I expect Ubisoft to update during the next week or perhaps already during the weekend and then the trading can continue.
Yes because its all completely fabricated bullshit.
Pretty much a scam.
Oh it has, but the implications become clear when you look at the ones that did. Like evergrand…
Maybe the dog ate their homework?
