Ubisoft

Brief History

Ubisoft is a French video game company headquartered in Paris. They have several development studios across the world spanning multiple continents. They first came in to existence in 1986 when five people realized that buying computers and software from a French supplier was more expensive than buying the same materials in the United Kingdom and shipping them to France.

In 1996 Ubi Soft (now known as Ubisoft) went public on the stock market and raised over 80 million dollars in funds to help expand the company. In just two years, the company established studios in Annecy, Shanghai, Montreal, and Milan. In 2000 they purchased Red Storm Entertainment. This acquisition gave them the rights to the "Tom Clancey's" series which were highly popular in the United States and still are today. It was around this time when they created two of their most popular franchises; Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. Shortly after this, 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. On september 9th, 2003 Ubi Soft announced that they were changing their name to simply "Ubisoft". In 2007 Ubisoft released another major IP, Assassin's Creed.

Details

Ubisoft is both a game developer and publisher with games for all major platforms. They are mainly recognized for shooter games such as their eSports FPS (first person shooter) Rainbow Six Siege, and also some popular franchises like Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and The Division. At the time of writing this, most of the recent news stories are talking about Ubisoft making a game that is in a blockchain. Overall Ubisoft has been very succesful in the video gaming market and will continue to grow.

The company is involved in a multitude of different aspects in the game industry. When it comes to content creation, Ubisoft's popular game Rainbow Six Siege (R6S) is a very well known eSport title. It has many leagues from high school level teams, all the way to pro level teams that make millions of dollars. Ubisoft interacts with the content creation community of whom create many videos and stream the game for a living. They have multiple studios across the globe that are used for developing many games at the same time. Ubisoft funds their games by including a premium currency in each of their games that players can buy and spend on cosmetics for the characters in the games. They employ game testers that test the games for bugs and problems that would effect the playability and experience of the game. They also deploy many advertisements on social media platforms to spread the word of their new releases.

According to Daniel Ahmed on twitter, Ubisoft made 875 million dollars of earnings in the first half of the fiscal year (April-June of 2020-21). 13.1% from packaged software, 37.6% from digital game downloads, and a whopping 49.2% from add-on content/DLC. This is a pretty common theme in the game market with many companies making most of their revenue through microtransactions within their games.

What makes Ubisoft as a company competitive is their ability to release at least one game a year and constantly update and add content to their current games to keep players hooked. One of Ubisoft's biggest competitors is Electronic Arts (EA). EA is another massive game developer and publisher that has been in the market for years. In 2004 EA even tried a hostile takeover of Ubisoft by trying to buy a majority stock hold in the company. This clearly didn't work as Ubisoft is still around today. Ubisoft mainly advertises its games through the use of social media and content creators. When they release a trailer for their newest game hundreds if not thousands of creators on platforms such as Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook talk about it, pushing the word of their new game to more peoples minds. Ubisoft doesn't need to pay a dime to do this, it's a very effective strategy. Ubisoft is doing perfectly fine in the game industry, though recently the company had some allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct, and endemic problems of sexism and racism across the company. This controversy does not seem to have impacted their bottom line though.