The game manufacturer Ubisoft could be the next industry giant to be swallowed up by a large tech company. After the last failures, the shareholders are increasingly pushing the management to sell the company.
Ubisoft is currently in a difficult position. The French game developer is struggling with the comparatively disappointing success of Star Wars Outlaws. This is already having a direct impact on the release of other games: the start of the next part of the Assassin’s Creed series, Shadows, has been postponed by three months.
This is a direct consequence of the “lessons learned from the publication of Star Wars Outlaws,” the company said, according to a report in US magazine TechSpot. Ubisoft also officially confirmed that the start of sales of the Star Wars game was “weaker than expected”. In the first four weeks since release, around one million copies were sold, which seems disappointing compared to the five million sales of Assassin’s Creed Mirage in the first three months.
As a result, Ubisoft has now also adjusted its financial forecasts for the year. Sales are now expected to decline to around 1.95 billion euros, after originally forecasting increasing revenue. The delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and the weak sales start of Outlaws in particular led to this change.
The company’s financial situation has pushed its share price to a 10-year low. As a result, several shareholders have already come together to demand that Ubisoft either sell itself to private equity firms – or to Chinese gaming giant Tencent.
The investor AJ Investments has even announced that, if in doubt, they will demonstrate in front of Ubisoft’s headquarters in Montreuil, Paris. Ubisoft is now under significant pressure to make future releases successful, but analysts are already expressing concerns that Assassin’s Creed Shadows may not live up to expectations either.
