Ubisoft, a game studio no stranger to what some call "toxic positivity" – a term used to describe a company culture that ignores pushback, criticism, and negative feedback – continues to fiddle while Rome burns, celebrating inconsequential numbers and meaningless milestones as their sales and revenues continue to decline.
Ubisoft
On the same day they released the financial report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025-26, Ubisoft also put out a series of stats for their latest title, Assassin's Creed Shadows, celebrating five million players trying the game, performing two billion stealth kills, traveling one billion kilometers, and petting 38 million animals. It feels absurd to have to point this out for the third time, but no, they still haven't revealed how many copies the game has sold or how much revenue it's brought in – which, by now, shouldn't surprise anyone, given Ubisoft's MO.
As you would imagine, those five million Shadows players – a stat rendered utterly irrelevant by the fact that the game is available through subscriptions, which cost far less than its $70 retail price – and 38 million petted beasts haven't helped Ubisoft much, with the aforementioned Q1 2025-26 financial statement showing that the numbers that actually do matter – like sales and net bookings – are still heading downward, continuing the trend exhibited in the studio's Full-Year 2024-25 disclosure.
According to the latest report, Ubisoft's sales for the first quarter amounted to €310.8 million, down 3.9% from the €323.5 million recorded in the first quarter of 2024-25. Net bookings haven't fared much better, totaling €281.6 million, a 2.9% decrease compared to €290.0 million in last year's Q1 and below the target of €310.0 million. The company itself attributes the decline to "lower-than-expected performance for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, a partnership that is now expected to materialize in Q2 and, to a lesser extent, an unfavorable foreign exchange impact."
Despite this not being the first quarter with a sales decline, Ubisoft maintains its signature toxic positivity, expecting net bookings for Q2 2025-26 to reach around €450 million, "driven by strategic B2B partnerships, including new ones, growing Rainbow Six Siege X contribution and material TV Series milestone-based revenues."
Where this positivity does show cracks, however, is in Ubisoft's confirmation that the Creative Houses previously mentioned in Yves Guillemot's internal memo to staff are not just some vague "new organizational ecosystem," but that the entire company will be reorganized into Creative Houses similar to the subsidiary they established with Tencent.
The thing is, this implies that going forward, all of Ubisoft's IPs will be partially owned by other companies, not just Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six. Furthermore, given that, as part of their contract with Tencent, Ubisoft may lose the majority of a new subsidiary's voting rights after two years, this appears to confirm that Ubisoft is indeed crumbling and may not exist at all in half a decade or so, with all of their franchises possibly owned by someone else.
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