ANALYSIS: Ubisoft Faces Its Most Challenging Year in its History

It's been widely reported that Ubisoft is currently in talks with advisors about ways to stabilize the business, with the most recent reports suggesting that Tencent was set to buy out the company and take it private. Those talks seem to have stopped, as a significant term in negotiations revolved around the Guillemot brothers' insistence on retaining control, which is likely a term that Tencent probably wouldn't want to agree to. After all, the Guillemot brothers essentially put Ubisoft in this predicament in the first place.

For now, the negotiation halt seems to be a strategy both sides are playing. Tencent will continue to snap up shares and raise its stake. At the same time, the Guillemot brothers will want to wait until late February to early March to reignite negotiations, as Ubisoft is set to release the highly anticipated Assassin's Creed Shadows on February 14. An Assassin's Creed Shadows failure gives Tencent more opportunities to increase its stake at a lower share value.

Despite Ubisoft's board launching an investigation into the company's struggles (of which 5 members are from the Guillemot family, by the way), no one, at least to those I've talked to, believes it will lead to any change. Speaking with past and current Ubisoft employees at various levels in the company, it's widely speculated that CEO Yves Guillemot would rather go down with the [Skull & Bones] ship rather than give up his position with a similar sentiment reflected about the other Guillemot brothers. It's a hurdle the company will somehow need to overcome wherever Assassin's Creed Shadows lands, even if it's a success.

Yet, on the flip side, Ubisoft continues pumping money into Project U, Project Scout (another Battle Royale heavily inspired by Apex Legends), Project Maverick (a Far Cry extraction-based shooter), NFT games, and several more titles that almost everyone with common sense will say is not going to provide a return on investment. To be clear, I'm not saying that Ubisoft needs to stop trying "new" ideas (the Animal Crossing-inspired ALTERRA in development at Ubisoft looks phenomenal in my opinion), but some projects are so blatantly destined to fail, that it's mind-boggling that the company continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year, that they don't have, on projects in the hopes that they are the next Fortnite.