Ubisoft

The Guillemot family had established themselves as a support business for farmers in the Brittany province in northwest France and nearby regions, including into the United Kingdom. The five sons of the family – Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel, and Yves – helped with the company's sales, distribution, accounting, and management with their parents before university. All five gained business experience while at university, which they brought back to the family business after graduating. The brothers came up with the idea of diversification to sell other products of use to farmers; Claude began with selling CD audio media. Later, the brothers expanded to computers and additional software that included video games.[6]

In the early 1980s, they saw that the costs of buying computers and software from a French supplier was more expensive than buying the same materials in the United Kingdom and shipping to France, and came upon the idea of a mail-order business around computers and software. Their mother said they could start their own business this way as long as they managed it themselves and equally split its shares among the five of them. Their first business was Guillemot Informatique, founded in 1984.[7] They originally only sold through mail order but soon were getting orders from French retailers, since they were able to undercut other suppliers by up to 50% of the cost of new titles. By 1986, this company was earning about 40 million French francs (roughly US$5.8 million at that time).[7] In 1985, the brothers established Guillemot Corporation for similar distribution of computer hardware.[7] As demand continued, the brothers recognised that video game software was becoming a lucrative property and decided that they needed to get into the industry's development side, already having insight on the publication and distribution side.[6] Ubi Soft (formally named Ubi Soft Entertainment S.A.) was founded by the brothers on 28 March 1986.[8][9] The name "Ubi Soft" was selected to represent "ubiquitous" software.[10]

Ubi Soft initially operated out of offices in Paris, moving to Créteil by June 1986.[11][12] The brothers used the chateau in Brittany as the primary space for development, hoping the setting would lure developers, as well as to have a better way to manage expectations of their developers.[6] The company hired Nathalie Saloud as manager, Sylvie Hugonnier as director of marketing and public relations, as well as several programmers, though Hugonnier had left the company by May 1986 to join Elite Software.[13] Games published by Ubi Soft in 1986 include Zombi, Ciné Clap, Fer et Flamme, and Masque, as well as Graphic City, a sprite editing programme.[14][15][16][17] As their first game, Zombi became a critical and commercial success, and had sold five thousand copies by January 1987.[18][17] Ubi Soft also entered into distribution partnerships for the game to be released in Spain and West Germany.[17] Ubi Soft started importing products from abroad for distribution in France, with 1987 releases including Elite Software's Commando and Ikari Warriors, the former of which sold 15,000 copies by January 1987.[17][19] In 1988, Yves Guillemot was appointed as Ubi Soft's chief executive officer.[9]

By 1988, the company had about a half-dozen developers working from the chateau. These included Michel Ancel, a teenager at the time noted for his animation skills,[6] and Serge Hascoët, who applied to be a video game tester for the company.[20] The costs of maintaining the chateau became too expensive, and the developers were given the option to relocate to Paris. Ancel's family, which had moved to Brittany for his job could not afford the cost of living in Paris, and returned to Montpellier in southern France, and the Guillemot brothers told Ancel to keep them abreast of anything he might come up with there.[6] Ancel returned with Frédéric Houde with a prototype of a game with highly animated features that caught the brothers' interest. Michel Guillemot decided to make the project a key one for the company, establishing a studio in Montreuil to house over 100 developers in 1994, and targeting the new line of fifth generation consoles such as the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation. Their game, Rayman, was released in 1995 to critical success, and is considered the game that put Ubi Soft in the worldwide spotlight.[6] Alongside this, Yves managed Guillemot Informatique, making deals with Electronic Arts, Sierra On-Line and MicroProse to distribute their games in France. By the end of the decade, Guillemot Informatique began expanding to other markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They entered the video game distribution and wholesale markets, and by 1993 they had become the largest distributor of video games in France.[21]

In 1996, Ubi Soft listed its initial public offering and raised over US$80 million in funds to help them to expand the company.[6] Within two years, the company established worldwide studios in Annecy (1996), Shanghai (1996), Montreal (1997), and Milan (1998).

One difficulty that the brothers found was the lack of an intellectual property that would have a foothold in the United States market; games like Rayman did well in Europe but not overseas.[6] When widespread growth of the Internet arrived around 1999, the brothers decided to take advantage of this by founding game studios aimed at online free-to-play titles, including GameLoft; this allowed them to license the rights to Ubi Soft properties to these companies, increasing the share value of Ubi Soft five-fold. With the extra infusion of €170 million, they were able to then purchase Red Storm Entertainment in 2000, giving them access to the Tom Clancy's series of stealth and spy games, highly popular in the United States.[6] Ubi Soft helped with Red Storm to continue to expand the series, bringing titles like Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series.[6] The company got a strong foothold in the United States when it worked with Microsoft to develop Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, an Xbox-exclusive title released in 2002 to challenge the PlayStation-exclusive Metal Gear Solid series, by combining elements of Tom Clancy's series with elements of an in-house developed game called The Drift. Splinter Cell helped not only to sell the Xbox console but established both Ubi Soft and its Montreal studio as important players in the video game market.[6]

In March 2001, Gores Technology Group sold The Learning Company's entertainment division (which included games originally published by Brøderbund, Mattel Interactive, Mindscape and Strategic Simulations) to them. The sale included the rights to intellectual properties such as the Myst and Prince of Persia series.[22] Ubisoft Montreal developed the Prince of Persia title into Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, released in 2003, another critically successful title.[6] At the same time, Ubi Soft also released Beyond Good & Evil, Ancel's project after Rayman; it was one of Ubi Soft's first commercial "flop" and was met with lukewarm reception at its release alongside a competitive 2003 release market, but which since has gained a cult following.[6]

Around 2001, Ubi Soft established its editorial department headed by Hascoët, initially named as editor in chief but later known as the company's Chief Content Officer. Hascoët had worked alongside Ancel on Rayman in 1995 to help refine the game, and saw the opportunity to apply that across all of Ubi Soft's games.[23][24] Until early 2019, nearly every game published by Ubisoft was reviewed through the editorial department and personally by Hascoët.[25]

The evolution of the Ubisoft logo. The initial logo was created on the company's founding in 1986. With the publication of Rayman, the company used the rainbow shape to show their shift from distributor to a publisher in 1995. The blue "swirl" was introduced in 2003 with the rebranding from "Ubi Soft" to "Ubisoft" as to represent a more mature company, alongside their acquisition of the Tom Clancy licence. The minimalistic swirl was introduced in 2017, designed to appear as windows into their game worlds while retaining a grain de folie (touch of madness).[26]

On 9 September 2003, Ubi Soft announced that they would change their name to simply Ubisoft, and introduced a new logo known as "the swirl".[27][28] In December 2004, rival gaming corporation Electronic Arts purchased a 19.9% stake in the firm. Ubisoft referred to the purchase as "hostile" on EA's part.[29] Ubisoft's brothers recognised they had not considered themselves within a competitive market, and employees had feared that an EA takeover would drastically alter the environment within Ubisoft. EA's CEO at the time, John Riccitiello, assured Ubisoft the purchase was not meant as a hostile manoeuvre, and EA ended up selling the shares in 2010.[6]

Ubisoft established another new IP, Assassin's Creed, first launched in 2007; Assassin's Creed was originally developed by Ubisoft Montreal as a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time but instead transitioned to a story about Assassins and the Templar Knights.[6] In July 2006, Ubisoft bought the Driver franchise from Atari, Inc. for a sum of €19 million in cash for the franchise, technology rights, and most assets. In July 2008, Ubisoft made the acquisition of Hybride Technologies, a Piedmont-based studio renowned for its expertise in the creation of visual effects for cinema, television and advertising. In November 2008, Ubisoft acquired Massive Entertainment from Activision.[30] In January 2013, Ubisoft acquired South Park: The Stick of Truth from THQ for $3.265 million.

Ubisoft announced plans in 2013 to invest $373 million into its Quebec operations over seven years, a move that was expected to generate 500 additional jobs in the province. The publisher is investing in the expansion of its motion capture technologies and consolidating its online games operations and infrastructure in Montreal. By 2020, the company would employ more than 3,500 staff at its studios in Montreal and Quebec City.[31]

In July 2013, Ubisoft announced a major breach in its network resulting in the potential exposure of up to 58 million accounts including usernames, email address, and encrypted passwords. Although the firm denied any credit/debit card information could have been compromised, it issued directives to all registered users to change their account passwords and also recommended updating passwords on any other website or service where a same or similar password had been used.[32] All the users who registered were emailed by the Ubisoft company about the breach and a password change request. Ubisoft promised to keep the information safe.[33]

In March 2015, the company set up a Consumer Relationship Centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The centre is intended to integrate consumer support teams and community managers. Consumer Support and Community Management teams at the CRC are operational seven days a week.[34]

Since around 2015, the French mass media company Vivendi has been seeking to expand its media properties through acquisitions and other business deals. In addition to advertising firm Havas, Ubisoft was one of the first target properties identified by Vivendi, which as of September 2017 has an estimated valuation of $6.4 billion.[35][36] Vivendi, in two separate actions during October 2015, bought shares in Ubisoft stock, giving them a 10.4% stake in Ubisoft, an action that Yves Guillemot considered "unwelcome" and feared a hostile takeover.[37] In a presentation during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, Yves Guillemot stressed the importance that Ubisoft remain an independent company to maintain its creative freedom.[38] Guillemot later described the need to fight off the takeover: "...when you're attacked with a company that has a different philosophy, you know it can affect what you've been creating from scratch. So you fight with a lot of energy to make sure it can't be destroyed."[39] Vice-President of Live Operations, Anne Blondel-Jouin, expressed similar sentiment in an interview with PCGamesN, stating that Ubisoft's success was (partly) due to "...being super independent, being very autonomous."[40][41]

Vivendi also acquired stake in mobile game publisher Gameloft, also owned by the Guillemots, at the same time it started acquiring Ubisoft shares.[42][37] In the following February, Vivendi acquired €500 million worth of shares in Gameloft, gaining more than 30% of the shares and requiring the company under French law to make a public tender offer; this action enabled Vivendi to complete the hostile takeover of Gameloft by June 2016.[43][44][45] Following Vivendi's actions with Gameloft in February 2016, the Guillemots asked for more Canadian investors in the following February to fend off a similar Vivendi takeover;[46][47][48] by this point, Vivendi had increased their share in Ubisoft to 15%, exceeding the estimated 9% that the Guillemots owned.[44][46] By mid-June 2016, Vivendi had increased its shares to 20.1%, but denied it was in the process of a takeover.[49]

By the time of Ubisoft's annual board meeting in September 2016, Vivendi had gained 23% of the shares, while the Guillemots were able to increase their voting share to 20%. A request was made at the board meeting to place Vivendi representatives on Ubisoft's board, given the size of their shareholdings. The Guillemots argued strongly against this, reiterating that Vivendi should be seen as a competitor, and succeeded in swaying other voting members to deny any board seats to Vivendi.[50]

Vivendi continued to buy shares in Ubisoft, approaching the 30% mark that could trigger a hostile takeover; as of December 2016, Vivendi held a 25.15% stake in Ubisoft.[51] Reuters reported in April 2017 that Vivendi's takeover of Ubisoft would likely happen that year,[35] and Bloomberg Businessweek observed that some of Vivendi's shares would reach the two-year holding mark, which would grant them double voting power, and would likely meet or exceed the 30% threshold.[52] The Guillemot family has since raised their stake in Ubisoft; as of June 2017, the family now held 13.6 percent of Ubisoft's share capital, and 20.02 percent of the company's voting rights.[53] In October 2017, Ubisoft announced it reached a deal with an "investment services provider" to help them purchase back 4 million shares by the end of the year, preventing others, specifically Vivendi, from buying these.[54]

In the week just before Vivendi would gain double-voting rights for previously purchased shares, which would have likely pushed their ownership over 30%, the company, in quarterly results published in November 2017, announced that it had no plans to acquire Ubisoft for the next six months, nor would seek board positions due to the shares they held during that time, and that it "would ensure that its interest in Ubisoft would not exceed the threshold of 30% through the doubling of its voting rights." Vivendi remained committed to expanding in the video game sector, identifying that their investment in Ubisoft could represent a capital gain of over 1 billion euros.[55]

On 20 March 2018, Ubisoft and Vivendi struck a deal ending any potential takeover, with Vivendi agreeing to sell all of its shares, over 30 million, to other parties and agreeing to not buy any Ubisoft shares for five years. Some of those shares were sold to Tencent, which after the transaction held about 5.6 million shares of Ubisoft (approximately 5% of all shares).[56] The same day, Ubisoft announced a partnership with Tencent to help bring their games into the Chinese market.[57] Vivendi completely divested its shares in Ubisoft by March 2019.[58][59]

Since 2018, Ubisoft's studios have continued to focus on its core franchises, including Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy's, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs, but found itself starting to trail its rival publishers Electronic Arts, Activision and Take Two. As reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, while Ubisoft as a whole had nearly 16,000 developers by mid-2019, larger than some of its competitors, and producing five to six major AAA releases each year compared to the two or three from the others, the net revenue earned per employee was the lowest of the four due to generally lower sales of its games. Bloomberg Business attributed this partially due to spending trends by video game consumers purchasing fewer games with long playtimes, as most of Ubisoft's major releases tend to be. To counter this, Ubisoft in October 2019 postponed three of the six titles it had planned in 2019 to 2020 or later, as to help place more effort on improving the quality of the existing and released games.[60] Further, due to overall weak sales in 2019, Ubisoft stated in January 2020 that it would be reorganizing its editorial board to provide a more comprehensive look at its game portfolio and devise greater variation in its games, which Ubisoft's management said had fallen stagnant and too uniform, and had contributed to weak sales.[61]

Stemming from a wave of sexual misconduct accusations of the #MeToo movement in June and July 2020, Ubisoft had a large number of high-level employees accused of misconduct from both internal and external sources. Between Ubisoft's internal investigation and a separate study by the newspaper Libération, several employees had been found to have long records of sexual misconduct and troubling behaviour, going back up to ten years, which had been dismissed by the human resources departments, but which had affected employee morale and game quality. As a result, several Ubisoft staff either stepped down or were let go, including Hascoët, Maxime Béland, the co-founder of Ubisoft Toronto, and Yannis Mallat, the managing director of Ubisoft's Canadian studios.[62][20] Yves Guillemot, whose role in managing these issues was unclear, implemented changes in the company to address these issues as it further investigated the extent of the misconduct claims.[63]

In 2020, they announced that they would be making an open world Star Wars game. The deal marks an end to EA’s exclusive rights to make Star Wars titles.[64]

According to Guillemot, Ubisoft recognised that connected sandbox games, with seamless switches between single and multiplayer modes provided the players with more fun, leading the company to switch from pursuing single-player only games to internet connected ones.[108] According to Guillemot, Ubisoft internally refers to its reimagined self as 'before The Division' and an 'after The Division'.[108]

In an interview with The Verge, Anne Blondel-Jouin, executive producer of The Crew turned vice-president of live operations,[108][109] noted that The Crew was an early game of Ubisoft's to require a persistent internet connection in order to play.[108] This raised initial concerns for gamers, hampering the game's initial success and sparked concerns internally at the company.[108]

Ubisoft Connect, formerly Uplay, is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications service for PC created by Ubisoft. First launched alongside Assassin's Creed II as a rewards program to earn points towards in-game content for completing achievements within Ubisoft, it expanded into a desktop client and storefront for Windows machine alongside other features. Ubisoft later separated the rewards program out as its Ubisoft Club program, integrated with Uplay. Ubisoft Connect was announced in October 2020 as a replacement for UPlay and its Ubisoft Club to launch on October 29, 2020 alongside Watch Dogs: Legion. Connect replaces UPlay and the Club's previous functions while adding support for cross-platform play and save progression for all future games and several of its current titles. It includes the same reward progression system that the Club offered to gain access to in-game content.[110] Several of the older games on the UPlay service will not be updated to support these new reward features that they previously had under the Ubisoft Club; for those, Ubisoft will unlock all rewards for all players.[111]

Uplay/Ubisoft Connect serves to manage the digital rights for Ubisoft's games on Windows computers, which has led to some criticism when it was first launch, as some games required always-on digital rights management, causing loss of same game data should players lose their Internet connection. The situation was worsened after Ubisoft's servers were struck with denial of service attacks that made the Ubisoft games unplayable due to this DRM scheme. Ubisoft eventually abandoned the always-on DRM scheme, though still require all Ubisoft games to perform a start-up check through Uplay/Ubisoft Connect their servers when launched.[112][113][114][115]

AnvilNext, formerly named Scimitar, is a proprietary game engine developed wholly within Ubisoft Montreal in 2007 for the development of the first Assassin's Creed game and has since been expanded and used for nearly all other Assassin's Creed titles and other Ubisoft games.

The Disrupt game engine was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and is used for the Watch Dogs games.[116][117] Majority of the engine was built from scratch and uses an aggressively multithreaded renderer, running on fully deferred physically based rendering pipeline with some technological twists to allow for more advanced effects.[118][119]

The Dunia Engine is a software fork of the CryEngine that was originally developed by Crytek, with modifications made by Ubisoft Montreal. The CryEngine was unique at the time as it could render large outdoor environmental spaces. Crytek had created a demo of their engine called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island which they had demonstrated at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 1999. Ubisoft saw the demo, and had Crytek build out the demo into a full title, becoming the first Far Cry, released in 2004.[120] That same year, Electronic Arts established a deal with Crytek to build a wholly different title with an improved version of the CryEngine, leaving them unable to continue work on Far Cry.[121] Ubisoft assigned Ubisoft Montreal to develop console versions of Far Cry, and arranging with Crytek to have all rights to the Far Cry series as well as a perpetual licence on the CryEngine.[122]

In developing Far Cry 2, Ubisoft Montreal modified the CryEngine to include destructable environments and a more realistic physics engine. This modified version became the Dunia Engine, which premiered with Far Cry 2 in 2008.[123][124] The Dunia Engine continued to be improved, such as adding weather systems, and used of the basis of all future Far Cry games, as well as James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, also developed by Ubisoft Montreal.[125][126]

Ubisoft introduced the Dunia 2 engine first in Far Cry 3 in 2012,[127] which was made to improve the performance of Dunia-based games on consoles and to add more complex rendering features such as global illumination.[128] According to Remi Quenin, one of the engine's architect at Ubisoft Montreal, the state of the Dunia Engine as of 2017 includes "vegetation, fire simulation, destruction, vehicles, systemic AI, wildlife, weather, day/night cycles, [and] non linear storytelling" which are all fundamental elements of the Far Cry games, and little of the original CryEngine code remained in the current version.[129]

The Snowdrop game engine was co-developed by Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft for Tom Clancy's The Division. The core of the game engine is powered by a "node-based system" which simplifies the process of connecting different systems like rendering, AI, mission scripting and the user interface.[130][131] The engine was also used in Tom Clancy's The Division 2 and other Ubisoft games such as South Park: The Fractured but Whole and Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. The engine will also be used in Massive's upcoming game based on James Cameron's Avatar and Lucasfilm's Star Wars is next-gen ready.[132]