It seems things aren’t rosy at Ubisoft as the publisher has published its latest earnings report, and there are more bad news than good. For starters, three unannounced games have just been officially canned even before we knew a thing about ’em.
As part of its report, the publisher mentions they are cancelling three unannounced projects on top of the four they already back in July 2022:
Ensure all our energy is focused on building our brands and live services into some of the most powerful within the industry. As a consequence, we have decided to cancel three unannounced projects, on top of the four already announced in July 2022.
In addition to that, the company’s focus seems to be focusing more on its established big brands moving forward.
As part of our increased strategic focus, adapt our organization to a more challenging market, with an expected net reduction of our non-variable costs base of more than €200m over the next 2 years. This will be achieved through targeted restructuring, divesting some non-core assets and usual natural attrition. Ubisoft will continue to look at hiring highly talented people for its biggest brands and live services.
Yves Guillemot co-founder and CEO of Ubisoft aims to have the company’s biggest brands be a “global phenomenon” with a focus on live service and cites Rainbow Six Siege as one of the examples.
The industry’s long-term prospects remain promising, and I am convinced Ubisoft is well positioned to benefit from this momentum thanks to the strength of our teams, brands, production capacity, technology and balance-sheet. Our back-catalogue remains very healthy with notably robust activity on Rainbow Six Siege, great momentum for our Assassin’s Creed games, and generally solid performance from our live games. We expect our strategy to build long-lasting live games and transform our biggest brands into truly global phenomenon with multiple offerings across platforms and business models, to ultimately generate significant value creation, with strong topline and operating income growth over the coming years.” – Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO
For reference, the known Ubisoft games that haven’t been cancelled and are due sometime this year are: Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull & Bones. There’s also a Star Wars game being built by Ubisoft’s Massive studio, though we’re unsure when that will hit the market.
Source: Ubisoft earnings report