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.
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.
This is good news for everyone who is not an ubisoft shareholder
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.
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 only possible explanation is that they didn’t use enough AI.
To make the games, or to cook their books?
Yes.
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
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 on form of propaganda, they’re lapping up another.
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
For being too fat for their own good, tear the damn thing down.
I remember when Ubisoft was a logo I liked seeing on my gaming screen.
Far Cry 1 times.
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.
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.
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.
Yes because its all completely fabricated bullshit.
Pretty much a scam.
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.
Oh it has, but the implications become clear when you look at the ones that did. Like evergrand…
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.
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.
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
Maybe the dog ate their homework?
Saudi Arabia:
e-sports washing
Its not sports anymore. Its just media washing.
Comedy, games, whatever they can get their blood soaked hands on.
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.
“We’ve finally decided to listen to fans. We’re releasing a new Splinter Cell…animated show!”
Nah fuck that if they make a new splinter cell game it would end up being open world with a cosmetic store
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.
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.
Oh wow you anger much less easily.
I started boycotting when they started forcing uPlay even in Steam games.
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.
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.
I don’t think video game companies should have gotten this big and/or complex……
I’m noticing it happens with all companies.
They start out small and can’t afford to pay businesspeople to figure out how to fuck over their customers as hard as possible.
Then, after the company is successful thanks to the hard work of the workers, the business-school people start applying in droves to make sure every company operates like gas stations across the street from each other.
It results in companies making decisions like having higher budgets for advertising than what they spend on actually making a product, because the data says it will make them more money and stupid customers keep reinforcing it.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until our culture stops valuing people based on their wealth. I have no hope for that to happen in my lifetime.
Professional (as in they earn money, not skill level) Xers fuck everything up. (here, X is an arbitrary verb or a brand name)
My anecdotes: Youtube was good before professional youtubers became a thing (systemic problem, people are not the issue but the environment which breeds them), now it’s attention economy and or one topic discussed for 50 minutes (a video explaining the same topic with the same intensity from 10 years ago is 2 minutes long)
Gamers were problematic but harmless, professional gamers caused betting pandemic (sponsored content).
Streamers were funny, professional streamers are sexy/deadly-sells-to-children.
I liked it when people were sharing stuff online because they were bored, and not because they were hungry.
The last line you said is top notch and sums it up well.
