There were always three big possibilities for why Ubisoft had cryptically delayed its latest earnings report just minutes after it was already supposed to go live. The first was a big injection of new cash, say from a sovereign wealth fund like Saudi Arabia’s. The second was an outright sale of a major portion of the company, maybe to its current backstop investor Tencent. The third was much more mundane: an accounting error. After a week of speculation, the Assassin’s Creed publisher confirmed that was indeed the reason for the delay.

Ubisoft explained on its conference call before markets opened in France this morning that the accounting issue had to do with new auditors brought in earlier this year to review the company’s books. They determined money from various business partnerships (one last year and one this year) needed to be recognized differently in the company’s accounting. As Reuters reports (via Game File), this mattered because the new math put the publisher in breach of its “leverage covenant ratio” for various loans, i.e. too much debt and not enough money coming in.

In its earnings press release, the company says it will use the recent $1.35 billion bailout from Tencent to pay off some of this debt and get more generous financing terms in order to “support its strategic ambitions, in line with the broader transformation currently underway.” Ubisoft doesn’t say what the business deals that led to the accounting snafu were for, but does claim that it out-performed estimates last quarter in part due to “stronger-than-expected partnerships.” It could be anything from TV and licensing deals to Game Pass revenue (Microsoft paid to add a bunch of the company’s old games to the service for its recent price hike). TL;DR: Ubisoft didn’t get sold, at least not yet.

The Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake could be coming in March

Reports of the Rabbids‘ maker’s demise would seem greatly exaggerated. Ubisoft won’t provide actual sales figures for this year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows but said the release was “overperforming.” It also pointed to Rainbow Six Siege, The Division 2, and a bunch of older games for why it beat revenue estimates by over $50 million, with bookings up 39 percent year-on-year.

Ubisoft has always been the Moneyball of the video game publishing world. It has no single mega hit like EA Sports FC or Call of Duty that can print mountains of cash on demand every year, but it does try to recreate those effects in the aggregate with a sprawling library of massive games—Far Cry 6, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, over a dozen Assassin’s Creed games in almost as many years—that regularly go on sale for up to 90 percent off.

Ubisoft also teased its upcoming slate of releases which include the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, Rainbow Six Mobile, The Division Resurgence, and an “unannounced title” coming out before April 2026. Insider Gaming reports the mystery release is the Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake we first reported on back in 2023. It will reportedly included some overhauled game systems and more of the open-world RPG feel of recent entries in the franchise. The company is probably looking at the recent monster success of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered and hoping for even a fraction of the same nostalgic hype.

But all of this is only filling a hole left by the fact that Ubisoft still can’t seem to get some of its biggest sequels out the door. That includes Far Cry 7, the new Ghost Recon, and the more-than-a-decade-in-the-making Beyond Good & Evil 2. Solving this development pipeline issue is seemingly at the heart of an operational overhaul Ubisoft promises to announce early next year. Long a spider-web of interoperable co-development studios scattered all over the world, the company is pledging to concentrate decision making in franchise-based “creative houses” for “stronger creative vision, greater focus, efficiency, autonomy and accountability.” Is that real change, or just a line from ChatGPT that some intern at McKinsey consulting thought sounded good?

Ubisoft embraces gen AI as gaming’s next ‘3D revolution’

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot wants investors to know he’s completely onboard with AI. Here’s what he said on today’s call per Game File:

We are making great strides in applying Gen AI to high-value use cases that bring tangible benefits to our players and teams…It’s as big as a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D. And we have everything to lead on this front.

He says the company is running full-tilt into the future of the controversial tech from two directions: “groundbreaking player-facing generative AI applications” like neo NPCs that fill bespoke game worlds with LLM chatbots and, on the development side, with teams “in our studios and offices embracing this new technology and constantly exploring new use cases in programming, art and overall game quality.”

There are also two ways to interpret these commitments. The first is that Ubisoft has traditionally lagged behind competitors in market-leading breakthroughs and doesn’t want to be once again playing catch-up if, say, AI-made and operated MMORPG slop-fests are the future. The other is that the company is still very vulnerable; its stock price, while better after today’s news, is still in the toilet, and it needs to stick to the shareholder-approved script, unlike certain companies whose CEOs may have more of a license to speak their minds with a Grand Theft Auto 6-sized trump card sitting in their pocket.

Either way, the AI stuff could all still be a dead end. Remember Scalar? It’s Ubisoft’s ambitious, cloud-based development technology meant to make game engines function like the internet. It threatened fans with even more massive game maps filled with even more quest icons. It has yet to materialize into anything big outside of the company, and one of the major projects utilizing it within Ubisoft has been continually rebooted. Some of the big names espousing Scalar’s virtues years ago? No longer with the company.

We’ll see if Assassin’s ChatGPT ends up having the same half-life.