Origins and first decade (1986–1996) By the 1980s, the Guillemot family had established themselves as a support business for farmers in the
Brittany province of France and other regions, including 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 agricultural products; Claude began by selling
CD audio media. Later, the brothers expanded to computers and additional software that included video games. In the 1980s, they noticed that the costs of buying computers and software from a French supplier were higher than buying the same materials in the United Kingdom and shipping them to France. They developed the idea of a mail-order business for computers and software. Their mother agreed they could start their own business as long as they managed it themselves and split its shares equally among the five of them. Their first business was Guillemot Informatique, founded in 1984. They originally sold only through mail order, but soon began receiving orders from French retailers, as it was able to undercut other suppliers by up to 50%. By 1986, this company was earning about 40 million
French francs (roughly million at that time). The name "Ubi Soft" was selected to represent "ubiquitous" software. Ubi Soft initially operated out of offices in
Paris, moving to
Créteil by June 1986. 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 its developers. Games published by Ubi Soft in 1986 include
Zombi,
Ciné Clap,
Fer et Flamme,
Masque, and Graphic City, a
sprite editing program. As its first game,
Zombi had sold 5,000 copies by January 1987. In 1988, Yves Guillemot was appointed as Ubi Soft's
chief executive officer. The costs of maintaining the chateau became more 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. The Guillemot brothers told Ancel to keep them abreast of anything he might come up with there.
Worldwide growth (1996–2003) In 1996, Ubi Soft listed its
initial public offering and raised over in funds to help it to expand the company. Ubisoft Montreal developed the
Prince of Persia title into
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time released in 2003. Until 2019, most games published by Ubisoft were reviewed through the editorial department overseen by Hascoët.
Continued expansion (2003–2015) On 9 September 2003, Ubi Soft announced that it would change its name to Ubisoft, and introduced a new logo known as "the swirl". In December 2004, gaming corporation
Electronic Arts purchased a 19.9% stake in the firm. Ubisoft referred to the purchase as "hostile" on EA's part. 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. On January 8, 2009, Square Enix signed an agreement with Ubisoft where the former would work to assist the latter in distributing its video games in Japan. Ubisoft established another 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
and instead transitioned to a story about Assassins and the Templar Knights. In July 2008, Ubisoft made the acquisition of Hybride Technologies, a Piedmont-based studio. In November 2008, Ubisoft acquired Massive Entertainment from Activision. 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 7 years. 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. In February 2013, it began offering games from third-party publisher including
Electronic Arts and
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment on Uplay and its own games to EA's
Origin. In July 2013, Ubisoft announced a breach in its network resulting in the potential exposure of up to 58 million accounts including usernames, email address, and encrypted passwords. The firm denied any credit/debit card information could have been compromised, issued directives to all registered users to change their account passwords, and recommended updating passwords on any other website or service where a same or similar password had been used. 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. 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 7 days a week.
Attempted takeover by Vivendi (2015–2018) 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. Vivendi, in two actions during October 2015, bought shares in Ubisoft stock, giving it a 10.4% stake in Ubisoft, an action that Yves Guillemot considered "unwelcome" and feared a
hostile takeover. 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. 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." 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." Vivendi acquired stake in mobile game publisher
Gameloft, owned by the Guillemots, and started acquiring Ubisoft shares. 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; by this point, Vivendi had increased its share in Ubisoft to 15%, exceeding the estimated 9% that the Guillemots owned. 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 its shareholdings. The Guillemots argued 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. Vivendi continued to buy shares in Ubisoft, approaching the 30% mark that could trigger a takeover; as of December 2016, Vivendi held a 25.15% stake in Ubisoft.
Reuters reported in April 2017 that Vivendi's takeover of Ubisoft would likely happen that year The Guillemot family has since raised its stake in Ubisoft; as of June 2017, the family held 13.6% of Ubisoft's share capital, and 20.02% of the company's voting rights. In October 2017, Ubisoft announced it reached a deal with an "investment services provider" to help it purchase back 4 million shares by the end of the year, preventing others, specifically Vivendi, from buying these. In the week before Vivendi would gain double-voting rights for previously purchased shares, the company, in quarterly results published in November 2017, announced that it had no plans to acquire Ubisoft for the next 6 months, nor would seek board positions due to the shares it 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 its investment in Ubisoft could represent a capital gain of over 1 billion euros. 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 5 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). The same day, Ubisoft announced a partnership with Tencent to help bring its games onto the Chinese market. Vivendi completely divested its shares in Ubisoft by March 2019.
Investment by Tencent (2018–2022) Since 2018, Ubisoft's studios have continued to focus on some franchises, including ''Assassin's Creed
, Tom Clancy's
, Far Cry
, and Watch Dogs
. 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 5 to 6 major AAA releases each year compared to the 2 or 3 from the others, the net revenue earned per employee was the lowest of the 4 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 3 of the 6 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. 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, too uniform and had contributed to weak sales. Stemming from a wave of sexual misconduct accusations of the
#MeToo movement in June and July 2020, Ubisoft had a number of employees accused of misconduct from both internal and external sources. Between Ubisoft's internal investigation and a study by the newspaper
Libération, employees had been found to have records of sexual misconduct and troubling behaviour, going back up to 10 years, which had been dismissed by the human resources departments. As a result, some Ubisoft staff either quit or were fired, including Hascoët, Maxime Béland, the co-founder of Ubisoft Toronto, and Yannis Mallat, the managing director of Ubisoft's Canadian studios. Ubisoft stated in its end of 2020 fiscal year investor call in February 2021 that the company will start to make AAA game releases less of a focus and put more focus on mobile and freemium games following fiscal year 2022. CFO Frederick Duguet stated to investors that "we see that we are progressively, continuously moving from a model that used to be only focused on AAA releases to a model where we have a combination of strong releases from AAA and strong back catalog dynamics, but also complimenting our program of new releases with free-to-play and other premium experiences." Later that year, the company announced it would start branding games developed by its first-party developers as "Ubisoft Originals". In 2021, it announced that it would be making an open world
Star Wars game. The deal marked an end to EA's exclusive rights to make
Star Wars titles. In October 2021, Ubisoft participated in a round of financing in
Animoca Brands. In November 2021, Ubisoft announced the development of its first Ubisoft Entertainment Center, created by experience design firm Storyland Studios and Alterface. The first location is set to open in Studios Occitanie Méditerranée by 2025. Ubisoft has been increasingly involved in blockchain-based video games since the later 2010s. The company is a co-founder of the
Blockchain Game Alliance, which was established in September 2018 and is a consortium of several companies active in the
blockchain space that seeks to explore the potential applications of this technology in the video game industry and publicly promotes the use of blockchain-based content in video games. According to
Yves Guillemot, one of Ubisoft's co-founders,
crypto-based content in video games will allow players to actually own digital content within it, while growing the video game industry in the process. The announcement was heavily criticized by audiences, with the Quartz announcement video attaining a dislike ratio of 96% on YouTube. Ubisoft subsequently unlisted the video from YouTube. The announcement was also criticized internally by Ubisoft developers. In July 2022, Ubisoft announced that it had cancelled
Splinter Cell VR and
Ghost Recon Frontline, along with two other unannounced titles. In September, Tencent invested another into Guillemot Brothers Limited, the company that holds part of the Guillemots' ownership of Ubisoft. This gave Tencent 49.9% ownership in this holding company and increased the Guillemots' share of voting rights within Ubisoft to about 30%. Yves Guillemot said that Tencent would be working closely with Ubisoft, helping to bring its games into China while assisting in paying off Ubisoft's debts and preventing the company from potential buyouts.
Financial concerns and major restructuring process (2023–present) Citing disappointing financial results in the previous quarter, Ubisoft cancelled another three previously unannounced games in January 2023. In an email to staff, Yves Guillemot told employees to take responsibility for the company's forthcoming projects, asking that "each of you be especially careful and strategic with your spending and initiatives, to ensure we're being as efficient and lean as possible", while also saying that "The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality, and show everyone what we are capable of achieving." Union workers at Ubisoft Paris took issue with this message, calling for a strike and demanding higher salaries and improved working conditions. In August 2023, Ubisoft announced that it had reached a 15-year agreement with
Microsoft to license the
cloud gaming rights to
Activision Blizzard titles; this came as part of efforts by Microsoft to receive approval from the UK
Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for its
acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The agreement would allow Activision Blizzard games to appear on
Ubisoft+, and allow Ubisoft to sublicense the cloud gaming rights for the games to third-parties. As part of a cost reduction plan, Ubisoft reduced its number of employees from 20,279 in 2022 to 19,410 in September 2023. In November 2023, Ubisoft laid off 124 employees from its VFX and IT teams. In March 2024, Ubisoft laid off 45 employees from its publishing teams. Another 45 employees were cut between its San Francisco and Cary, North Carolina offices in August 2024. By the end of September 2024, Ubisoft had reduced its number of employees to 18,666. In 2024, Ubisoft released multiple games that experienced underperforming sales and declining playerbases post-launch, which included
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora,
Skull and Bones,
XDefiant, and
Star Wars Outlaws, causing its stock to fall to nearly its lowest levels in the previous decade. As a result, the company announced it was launching an investigation of its development cycles to focus on a "player-centric approach", and opted to delay its next major flagship game, ''
Assassin's Creed Shadows'', from November 2024 to February 2025. On 16 October 2024, over 700 Ubisoft employees in France began a three-day strike, protesting the company's requirement to return to the office three days a week. The strike, organized by the STJV union, involved Ubisoft's offices in Paris, Montpellier,
Lyon, and Annecy. Workers expressed dissatisfaction over a lack of flexibility, salary increases, and profit-sharing, which they believe the company has ignored. Ubisoft has yet to address the union's concerns. In December 2024, Ubisoft announced that its free-to-play game
XDefiant would be shutting down in June 2025, less than a year after its initial release. They also announced that its lead development studio
Ubisoft San Francisco, and
Ubisoft Osaka, were to close, resulting in up to 277 employees being laid off. In January 2025, Ubisoft closed the
Ubisoft Leamington studio and downsized several other studios, resulting in up to 185 staff being laid off as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures. Around September 2024, one of Ubisoft's shareholders, AJ Investments, stated it was seeking to have the company purchased by a private equity firm and would push out the Guillemot family and Tencent from ownership of the company.
Bloomberg News reported in October 2024 that the Guillemots and Tencent were considering this and other alternatives to shift ownership of the company in light of the recent poor financial performance. Later reports in December 2024 suggested that Tencent was seeking to capture a majority stake in Ubisoft and take the company private, while still giving the Guillemot family control of Ubisoft. In January 2025, it was reported that the Guillemots had also considered carving out certain Ubisoft assets into a new subsidiary, which would allow Tencent to make targeted investments to increase the company's overall value. Ubisoft announced this subsidiary on 27 March 2025, devoted to its flagship ''Assassin's Creed
, Far Cry
, and Rainbow Six'' franchises; the subsidiary will consist of the franchises' assets and development teams, and have dedicated leadership. Tencent will make a €1.16 billion investment in the new subsidiary, giving it a 25% stake at a valuation of €4 billion; the value of this subsidiary is larger than the current valuation of Ubisoft, which is based on Tencent's belief that these properties are undervalued. Ubisoft stated that the subsidiary would "focus on building game ecosystems designed to become truly evergreen and multi-platform". The new subsidiary, Vantage Studios, was unveiled in October 2025, with Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot to be co-CEOs. With its financial quarterly report on July 2025, Ubisoft stated that it will reorganize into "creative houses" that will "enhance quality, focus, autonomy and accountability while fostering closer connections with players", with the previously announced Tencent-backed subsidiary as an example of such a division. At the end of August, Ubisoft sold the rights to five of its titles, including
Grow Home and
Cold Fear, to
Atari SA. During October 2025, Ubisoft said it was looking to cut about 60 positions at Ubisoft Redlynx, and pushed for voluntarily layoffs at Massive. Just prior to releasing its half-year financial report in November 2025, Ubisoft announced it was delaying the report, and further requested that
Euronext stop all trading of its shares, which was explained to employees as "to limit unnecessary speculation and market volatility during this short delay". On 21 November, Ubisoft released its half-year financial report, where it announced that it had reduced its number of employees to 17,097 by the end of September 2025. Ubisoft acquired
March of Giants, a free-to-play
MOBA developed by
Amazon Games's Montreal studio, in December 2025 in the wake of Amazon cutting back on internal game development. Ubisoft's acquisition included members of its development team, including senior production lead Alex Parizeau and creative director Xavier Marquis, formerly of
Rainbow Six Siege. In December 2025, approximately 60 workers at Ubisoft Halifax voted to unionize with
CWA Canada, forming the first union of Ubisoft workers in North America. On 7 January 2026, it was announced that Ubisoft was closing the studio, affecting 70 people; Ubisoft claimed that the decision to close the studio was made prior to their unionization. In January 2026, Ubisoft reported that it was undergoing a major restructuring, organizing the company into five creative houses, each "will be shaped by distinct creative 'genres' led by dedicated high-profile, incentivized teams with a unique set of expertise in those genres" and "have full financial ownership and account for economic performance." Yves Guillemot said that after COVID, Ubisoft had taken on several projects in anticipation of growing market demand that never materialized, and this change was needed to recoup around $200 million in costs. Following this, Ubisoft laid off about 100 staff at Red Storm Entertainment in March 2026 and terminated further game development at the studio. The company cancelled
Alterra, a game mashing up elements of
Animal Crossing and
Minecraft, that was never formally announced but rumored to be in development since 2024. No additional layoffs were planned around this. == Subsidiaries ==