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Ubisoft

Ubisoft and Tencent form new subsidiary, Vantage Studios, to lead development for the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six franchises

by admin October 4, 2025

The breakout game development business co-owned by Tencent and Ubisoft finally has a name: Vantage Studios. Eurogamer understands from a source that it’s starting operations today, and will be responsible for new games across many of Ubisoft’s biggest IPs, such as Far Cry, Rainbow Six Siege, and Assassin’s Creed.

Vantage Studios is composed of 2,300 employees across multiple Ubisoft game development teams, including those from Montreal Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Sofia, and Barcelona. The studio will be run by the duo of Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot.

Vantage Studios operate under a less centralised model compared to Ubisoft proper, with each development team having more ownership over its own respective project. This in theory would allow developers to be more fluid, and pivot according to industry changes and player expectations, per Eurogamer sources.

Check out Eurogamer’s video review of Assassin’s Creed Shadows here.Watch on YouTube

The formation of Vantage Studios comes as the climax of a tumultuous period for Ubisoft, which reportedly was considering this new venture with Tencent in January of this year following years of lacking performance. This new venture, which would bring many of Ubisoft’s biggest IPs under a new roof, was officially announced in March with Tencent taking a €1.16bn stake in the new business entity.

As for Tencent’s involvement, the Chinese company will have a 25 percent stake in Vantage Studios, and will act in an advisory role to the subsidiary’s leadership team. However, Guillemot and Derennes will retain control over both creative and business decisions. Ubisoft hopes this will allow its teams to have a better degree of creative freedom, per a source familiar with the subject.

How other studios, most notably Massive Entertainment, will operate going forward currently remains unlear. Eurogamer understands the publisher wants its devs to operate in a more decentralised way, with developers taking more ownership of the titles they’re working on – the company employs approximately 20,000 staff at the time of writing (per its site), and how the other ~17,000 staff will fit into this new vision remains to be seen.

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Mad-lad fans have revived The Crew after Ubisoft killed it: ‘No one will ever be able to take this away from you now’

by admin September 15, 2025

I’ll be honest, I never really understood all the ardour for The Crew, but that’s no criticism. There are plenty of games (hello, Mafia 3) that I love to the absolute bafflement of my friends and loved ones, and I’d be very sad if they got taken away. So even if I don’t know what people see in The Crew, I certainly understand the upset at Ubisoft killing the servers and making the game unplayable last year.

One response to that bit of videogame vandalism was, of course, the Stop Killing Games campaign, but other fans took a different tack. The good folks at The Crew Unlimited have been beavering away at a fanmade revival of the game for over a year and a half: a server emulator with both offline and online modes—”Your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now.”

It’s out today, and will let you play the defunct CaRPG like Yves Guillemot never Old Yeller’d it. There is, of course, one issue: you need to already have a copy of The Crew for it to work. With the game scrubbed from history like Nikolai Yezhov, that’s easier said than done, though the project itself says on its Discord that “The truth is that, as long as you manage to run the game files, we have absolutely no way to tell a legit copy from a non-legit one, so we just have to let you in.” So whether you own The Crew legitimately or you’re some kind of criminal, it sounds like it’ll work.

Don’t be a criminal though. I think I’m legally obligated to say you should not be a criminal. Not even if the crime is cool.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Regardless, I suspect there aren’t many people out there who are A) desperate to play The Crew but B) don’t already have access to it. And if you do, running The Crew Unlimited is easy as pie. All you have to do is download the mod, run its launcher, point at your TheCrew.exe, then go hogwild living like it’s 2014 all over again. I hope publishers stop killing games some day, but for now, what is dead may never die.

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September 15, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Ubisoft workers raised concerns over alleged deal with Saudi Arabia, says new report

by admin September 12, 2025

Ubisoft staff raised concerns with management over the company’s alleged dealings with Saudi Arabia.

According to a report by Game File’s Stephen Totilo, published on September 10, 2025, some Ubisoft staff internally questioned the company’s alleged dealings with Saudi Arabia earlier this year, following a report that Ubisoft leaders, including CEO Yves Guillemot, accompanied French president Emmanuel Macron to the country to meet with Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) and other Saudi leaders in 2024.

Game File reported that a representative from Ubisoft’s social and Economic Committee (CSE) directly questioned company management about whether “seeking a contract with a person accused of crimes against humanity for ordering the assassination (including his dismemberment and dissolution in acid) of a journalist, could contribute to the Ubi-bashing the company is currently suffering?”

“Yves Guillemot’s participation in the President of the Republic’s trip, as CEO of a renowned French company in the field of culture and technology, is a contribution by Ubisoft to the development of France’s ‘soft power’,” Ubisoft management allegedly responded, before saying: “We do not comment on rumours.”

Ubisoft management reportedly went on to clarify that it sees a difference between MBS, who the US government found to have directly approved the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

According to the report, Ubisoft management stated that it did not see the PIF’s money as MBS’s money and that “talking with partners who do not share our democratic values does not mean abandoning them.”

In response, the CSE reportedly called management’s attitude “naive” and noted they didn’t respond to the question regarding the impact that dealings with Saudi Arabia could have on the company’s image.

In January 2025, a month after Guillemot’s trip to Saudi Arabia, French publication Les Echos reported that, according to its sources, Ubisoft had entered into a partnership with Savvy Games Group, owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

This deal allegedly involved the creation of DLC for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which Ubisoft developers said in a 2024 AMA (via Rock Paper Shotgun) had been “designed as a standalone experience without any DLC plans.”

While Ubisoft hasn’t confirmed a deal with the Savvy Games Group or Saudi Arabia generally, the company announced on August 23, 2025, that Assassin’s Creed Mirage will receive free DLC later this year, which will be set in ninth-century AlUla (a city in Saudi Arabia).

The DLC was first announced by Guillemot on stage in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the New Global Sport Conference.

When asked whether Mirage’s new DLC is funded by the PIF, a Ubisoft spokesperson told Game File:

“This title update to Assassin’s Creed Mirage was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations, through access to experts, historians, and resources to ensure the creation of an authentic and accurate setting.”

Update: GamesIndustry.biz reached out to Ubisoft for comment on this story. A spokesperson provided the same response given to Game File. The statement reads:

“For now, we’re not sharing more details beyond that fact that this title update to Assassin’s Creed Mirage was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations, through access to experts, historians and resources to ensure the creation of an authentic and accurate setting.”

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September 12, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Far Cry series will push multiplayer “more predominantly” going forwards, according to Ubisoft boss

by admin September 11, 2025

The future of the Far Cry series will see multiplayer bits pushed “more predominantly”, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. The exec said this thing on stage at a conference in Saudi Arabia last month (thanks, Game File), around the same time he announced the Assassin’s Creed Mirage DLC the company have partnered with the Saudi government on.

Asked about the future of the series that brought us that one scene where the pirate guy talks about the definition of insanity before kicking you into a big hole, Guillemot said that the publishers’ goal “on Far Cry [is] really to bring the multiplayer aspects more predominantly pushed, so that it can also be played for a long time by players.”

Yves, believe me, you can play a single player game for a very long time. His comments come a couple of years on from reports claiming that Ubisoft were working on both the next mainline entry in the series, Far Cry 7, and a multiplayer-only spin-off. Kotaku’s report at that point alleged Far Cry 7 will see the series move on from the Dunia engine, in use since Far Cry 2. The muliplayer game was claimed by Insider Gaming to be an extraction shooter set in the Alaskan wilderness.

While Far Cry’s always been more of a single-player romp of explosions and bullets for me, though the last couple of entries have obviously featured plenty of co-op in addition to traditional online multiplayer. I can’t recall the matches and modes themselves being anything exceptional, if still fun. However, the map editors they came with were brilliant if, like me, you were a 15-year-old who liked building houses and hideouts, but reckoned getting really into Minecraft would be the final nail in your secondary school cool factor coffin.

Then again, maybe I’m not the person to ask given I’ve still not given Far Cry 6 a go, despite having played every other entry since 2. I just keep forgetting 6 exists, then remembering, reading reviews, and concluding that it’s probably not worth it until the next sale, by which point I’ve forgotten again. Far Cries 2 and 3 were the shooter’s peak in my book, at their best when you were setting half of Africa on fire just to kill three guys or blowing an outpost into the sea. My dad, meanwhile, swears by the original and caveperson spin-off Primal.

I’d interrupt his latest Horizon: Zero Dawn playthrough to ask if he’d care about a multiplayer-only Far Cry, but I think I know what the answer’d be.

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September 11, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Ubisoft lays off nine roles, primarily within publishing team

by admin September 11, 2025

Ubisoft has cut nine roles, primarily from its publishing team, to enable a “smooth” launch for its new Tencent-backed subsidiary.

Originally reported by Game Developer on September 10, 2025, a Ubisoft spokesperson confirmed in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz that the company has restructured some teams to facilitate the launch of the new subsidiary.

“With the formation of a new Ubisoft subsidiary, we’ve made strategic structural decisions to ensure a smooth and swift launch,” the statement reads.

“As part of this, some of our production and publishing teams will be transitioned to other Ubisoft brands and projects.

“Unfortunately, nine roles, primarily within our publishing team, are directly impacted. We are committed to providing support to everyone affected by this change.”

In March 2025, Ubisoft announced it had “accelerated its transformation” by creating a new subsidiary based on its Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six brands, with Tencent to invest a minority stake of €1.16bn ($1.25bn) to expand the games’ “truly evergreen and multiplatform ecosystems.”

The new subsidiary is headed up by co-CEOs Christophe Derennes (Ubisoft’s former North American managing director) and Charlie Guillemot (son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot).

In July 2025, Ubisoft published its first-quarter financial results for the 2025-26 fiscal year, revealing that earnings were “below expectations” (with revenue down 3.9% year-on-year), and that Rainbow Six: Siege’s performance had been “lower-than-expected.”

At the time, the company said it would reorganise into Creative Houses, business units to “enhance quality, focus, autonomy and accountability while fostering closer connections with players.”

The Tencent subsidiary is the first of these Creative Houses, with Ubisoft stating the monetary injection from the Chinese megacorp will be used to “strengthen Ubisoft’s balance sheet by significantly reducing its consolidated net debt position, accelerate the group’s transformation, and sustain growth of selected franchises.”

The cutting of these nine roles is the latest round of layoffs for Ubisoft, which laid off 19 people from the Tom Clancy: Ghost Recon studio, Red Storm, in July and cut 185 jobs in January in a bid to “prioritise projects and reduce costs.”

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September 11, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Fan-made The Crew revival gets a release date, a year and a bit on from the Ubisoft racer’s controversial shutdown

by admin September 2, 2025

The developers behind The Crew Unlimited, a community project that aims to make Ubisoft racer The Crew playable again following its unceremonious shutdown last year, have announced a release date.

If you need a bit of a refresher, Ubisoft’s decision to take The Crew’s servers offline in March 2024 rendered it totally unplayable even for those who own a physical copy, due to its online-only nature. That’s since served as the spark for the Stop Killing Games campaign we’ve reported on as its organisers have petitioned lawmakers across the world to ensure companies are required by law to put concrete end-of-life plans in place, when they decide to switch a game’s servers off. It also set a group of Crewers off on a quest to make the game playable again.

For a year or so, The Crew Unlimited’s devs have been working towards that goal. They’ve now announced a release date for their creation, which comprises of a server emulator designed to stand in for those Ubisoft took offline. As per an announcement on Discord from project lead whammy4, it’ll come out on September 15th, 2025, and be distributed for free to minimise the chances of the publisher directing their lawyers to intervene.

“We were trying everything we could, anything to preserve the game,” reads The Crew Unlimited’s freshly published website. “We eventually came to the conclusion that writing a server emulator for The Crew was the best and only solution. This would allow us to effectively implement both an Offline Mode and an Online Mode back into the game, Offline Mode simply being a local server running on your computer while playing the game. Your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now.”

The Crew Unlimited’ll be grabbable from that same site once it’s live, and you’ll need to have owned The Crew on PC before to access it, as the devs won’t be illegally distributing game files. You know, because that’d almost definitely result in Ubisoft’s lawyers coming down like a ton of bricks. Though, the project’s Discord FAQ does see them admit that they’ve got no way on their end of telling a legit copy from a pirated copy, so they’ll have to let all players in regardless, which sounds far from ideal.

In a Discord discussion linked in the FAQ, the devs have made some notes about what works in terms of re-downloading your old The Crew save files. I’d say players may well be in for a tricky time getting things up and running. The devs say you’ll need to start from scratch unless you only want to play offline, and have already used a tool they developed to dump your save prior to the game’s shutdown.

Meanwhile, they also hint that their online server may harbour a few additions or changes. That said, the group insist tweaks outside of any new stuff would be limited to “technical improvements and careful rebalancing”, and that they’d “never change the core experience of the game”.

All in all, even though the project’s been public info for around a year now, with whammy4 having posted videos of them driving around in it to YouTube, it’s maybe worth waiting to see how the release plays out before you give it a go.

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September 2, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Atari acquires five Ubisoft Games

by admin August 30, 2025

Atari has acquired the IP rights to five Ubisoft games: Cold Fear, I Am Alive, Child of Eden, Grow Home, and its sequel, Grow Up.

Announced in a joint press release on August 26, 2025 (via Business Wire), the agreement “reflects a shared commitment to delivering high-quality gaming experiences while honoring the original spirit of the titles.”

Atari plans to “reintroduce” these games by “bringing them to new platforms and renewed publishing frameworks.”

“Millions of players have experienced these worlds over the years, and this will open the door for long-time players to revisit those memories while inviting new audiences to discover them for the first time,” said Deborah Papiernik, vice president of New Business at Ubisoft.

“Atari has a rich gaming legacy and deep appreciation for these classic titles, we’re excited to see how they’ll evolve and connect with players in fresh, meaningful ways.”

Atari plans to re-release these five titles under its own publishing label and to explore the possibilities of expanding their reach through “updated formats, new content, and extended distribution channels.”

“Ubisoft and Atari both have a legacy of crafting worlds that players can fall in love with – games that resonate with generations of players not just for how they played, but for how they made us feel,” said Wade Rosen, chairman and CEO of Atari.

“We’re excited to reintroduce these titles while also exploring ways to expand and evolve these franchises.”

Last month, Atari announced it had agreed to acquire Thunderful Group in a $5.2 million deal. The subscription agreement is subject to approval by Thunderful’s shareholders, who will vote at an extraordinary general meeting later today.

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August 30, 2025 0 comments

A member of the Coast Guard points a handgun at a zombie on the deck of a boat

Product Reviews

Atari now owns the rights to five Ubisoft games: Cold Fear, I Am Alive, Child of Eden, Grow Home, and Grow Up

by admin August 27, 2025

Ubisoft has reached into the back of the cupboard, grabbed the intellectual property rights for five games it wasn’t doing anything with, and sold them to Atari. The five games are Cold Fear (which is basically Resident Evil on a boat), I Am Alive (a post-apocalyptic survival platformer), Child of Eden (a psychedelic rhythm game), and both Grow Home and its sequel Grow Up (which are physics-based climbing games where you’re a cute robot).

“Ubisoft and Atari both have a legacy of crafting worlds that players can fall in love with—games that resonate with generations of players not just for how they played, but for how they made us feel,” Wade Rosen, chairman and CEO of Atari, said in a joint statement. “We’re excited to reintroduce these titles while also exploring ways to expand and evolve these franchises.”

While Atari may just be planning ports for Switch 2 and the like for this bundle of games, given that the publisher also owns Nightdive—the studio responsible for projects like the System Shock remake and more recently the re-release of Hexen and Heretic—there’s reason to hope at least some of these games will receive more high-effort revivals.

I’d personally love to see a remake of Cold Fear, a survival horror game set on a whaling ship during a storm. Original developer Darkworks put a lot of effort into modeling the constant heaving of the sea, making the deck of the ship shift beneath you while you were trying to shoot zombie parasites. A short, self-contained experience, it caught some flak for being about five hours long at release, but honestly that sounds ideal for a haunted-house survival horror game.

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August 27, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot summoned to French Court in relation to previous harassment trial against former employees

by admin August 27, 2025

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot will appear in court in October in relation to the sexual harassment allegations that emerged back in 2020 against a number of employees.

Back in June, three former senior Ubisoft employees received suspended prison sentences and fines after being found guilty of harassment. All three employees left the company in 2020 as part of a wave of resignations and dismissals.

However, as reported by French outlet BFM TV, a subpoena has been issued against Guillemot in relation to this case, meaning he’ll have to appear before the Bobigny court (Seine-Saint-Denis) on 1st October.

The summons for Guillemot was filed by the Solidaires Informatiques union and four individuals, “the same civil parties” as in the previous trial resolved in June.

Following an investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, no criminal proceedings will be held against Ubisoft or its management, which was confirmed during the closing arguments at the hearing in June.

“Our top priority is to ensure the absolute protection of the physical and moral integrity of its employees, through a policy of prevention and zero tolerance with regard to sexual or moral harassment, sexist behavior, assault, insult, or discrimination of any kind,” said Cecile Russeil, executive vice president of Ubisoft.

A union representative from Solidaires Informatiques has confirmed the summons was sent last month, but Guillemot was absent and his family refused to take his place. HR director Marie Derain and Ubisoft as a legal entity have also been summoned.

In 2020, following reports of harassment at the studio, Guillemot was asked how much he knew of the issues taking place. “It has now become clear that certain individuals betrayed the trust I placed in them and did not live up to Ubisoft’s shared values,” he said. “I have never compromised on my core values and ethics and never will. I will continue to run and transform Ubisoft to face today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.”

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.

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August 27, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Ubisoft CEO summoned to appear before French court in relation to harassment trial, as the publisher says it will ‘continue to cooperate with the justice system in this matter’

by admin August 25, 2025

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has been summoned to appear before a French court, following a trial in which three former executives were found guilty of workplace harassment in June.

In that trial, Serge Hascoët, Tommy François, and Guillaume Patrux were all given fines and suspended sentences ranging between twelve months and three years, after being convicted based on accusations including sexual misconduct, bullying and systemic racism. All three either resigned or were dismissed from Ubisoft following reports of their conduct in 2020.

Now, the trade union Solidaires Informatique and four other individuals, who were all involved in that original trial, have filed a subpoena instructing Guillemot to appear before the Brobigny District Court on October 1. As reported by French news network BFM TV (via VGC), the summons is in relation to that trial.

In a statement to VGC, Ubisoft confirmed it had received summons from the union and related parties to appear before the court, specifying that “these are the same civil parties and this summons is based on the same facts as those in the case judged by the court this past June, following an investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.”

Ubisoft added that “After that investigation, and contrary to the civil parties’ requests, the Public Prosecutor’s Office decided that there were no grounds to initiate criminal proceedings against Ubisoft or its management, a decision it confirmed during its closing arguments at the hearing last June.”

Ubisoft concluded by saying it would “continue to cooperate with the justice system in this matter, as it has done over the past five years in the review of the facts related to this case.”

Hascoët, formerly Ubisoft’s chief creative officer, received an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of €40,000/$47,190, after being found guilty of “psychological harassment and complicity in sexual harassment.” According to both court testimony and an internal Ubisoft investigation, employees under Hascoët were subjected to racial slurs and Islamophobic pranks.

François, meanwhile, was convicted on charges of sexual misconduct and attempted sexual assault, accused of trying to forcibly kiss an employee who was restrained during a holiday party. The former vice president of editorial and creative services received a heavier suspended sentence of three-years and a fine of €30,000/$35,340. Former game director Patrux received a 12-month suspended term and a €10,000/$11,800 fine. His sentencing described his bullying as “smaller scale” but “particularly intense”.

In May, it was reported that Guillemot and Ubisoft’s human resources director Marie Derain would be summoned to testify in the original trial. But Ubisoft denied this report, stating that “Neither Ubisoft, Yves, nor anyone from our HR team are parties to these proceedings.”

In addition to its statement responding to the summons, Ubisoft’s executive vice president Cecile Russeil said “Our top priority is to ensure the absolute protection of the physical and moral integrity of its employees, through a policy of prevention and zero tolerance with regard to sexual or moral harassment, sexist behaviour, assault, insult, or discrimination of any kind.”

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August 25, 2025 0 comments