‘Assassin’s Creed’ Creators Cling to Family Control at Ubisoft

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Every second Monday of the month for over three decades, the five Guillemot brothers — whose company gave the world such blockbuster video-game series as the Assassin's Creed, Rayman and Rabbids — have gotten on a call from their homes in London, New York, Paris and Brittany.

Often stretching into the wee hours of the Paris morning, the chats on everything from industry trends to threats from the metaverse have helped the brothers forge a common vision for Ubisoft SA, the company they founded in the 1980s in a sleepy northwestern French town, catapulting it into one of the largest, stand-alone studios in the $200 billion global video games industry. Now, that vision is being tested by a series of crises.

From a high-profile sexism and harassment case in the corporate suite, a pact with China's digital giant Tencent that has angered minority investors, delays in the release of new games, canceled titles that will result in the biggest loss in the company's history and its first-ever labor strike, Ubisoft seems to have lost the plot.

“The group's messaging is no longer reliable and the disappointments are following one another at too high a rate, which seems to testify that there's a truly structural problem within the group,” said Alban de Preaubert, a partner and fund manager at Sycomore Asset Management, which sold its shares in the company in January.

The string of setbacks has led to a more than 55% plunge in Ubisoft's shares since August, which could make it a prime takeover target in an industry that saw Microsoft Corp. last year offering $69 billion for Activision Blizzard Inc. But investors say the brothers' deal with Tencent, which makes any potential takeover harder, shows their determination to keep