{"id":308566,"date":"2025-11-23T07:53:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T07:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/308566\/"},"modified":"2025-11-23T07:53:36","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T07:53:36","slug":"bad-accounting-black-flag-remake-and-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/308566\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Accounting, Black Flag Remake And AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

There were always three big possibilities for why Ubisoft had cryptically delayed<\/a> 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\u2019s. 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\u2019s Creed publisher confirmed that was indeed the reason for the delay.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s books. They determined money from various business partnerships (one last year and one this year) needed to be recognized differently in the company\u2019s accounting. As Reuters reports<\/a> (via Game File<\/a>), this mattered because the new math put the publisher in breach of its \u201cleverage covenant ratio\u201d for various loans, i.e. too much debt and not enough money coming in.<\/p>\n

In its earnings press release<\/a>, 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 \u201csupport its strategic ambitions, in line with the broader transformation currently underway.\u201d Ubisoft doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cstronger-than-expected partnerships.\u201d It could be anything from TV and licensing deals to Game Pass revenue (Microsoft paid to add a bunch of the company\u2019s old games to the service for its recent price hike). TL;DR: Ubisoft didn\u2019t get sold, at least not yet.<\/p>\n

The Assassin\u2019s Creed: Black Flag remake could be coming in March <\/p>\n

Reports of the Rabbids\u2018 maker\u2019s demise would seem greatly exaggerated. Ubisoft won\u2019t provide actual sales figures for this year\u2019s Assassin\u2019s Creed Shadows<\/a> but said the release was \u201coverperforming.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Ubisoft has always been the Moneyball of the video game publishing world<\/a>. 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\u2014Far Cry 6, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, over a dozen Assassin\u2019s Creed games in almost as many years\u2014that regularly go on sale for up to 90 percent off.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cunannounced title\u201d coming out before April 2026. Insider Gaming reports<\/a> the mystery release is the Assassin\u2019s Creed: Black Flag remake we first reported on back in 2023<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

But all of this is only filling a hole left by the fact that Ubisoft still can\u2019t 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<\/a>. 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 \u201ccreative houses\u201d for \u201cstronger creative vision, greater focus, efficiency, autonomy and accountability.\u201d Is that real change, or just a line from ChatGPT that some intern at McKinsey consulting thought sounded good?<\/p>\n

Ubisoft embraces gen AI as gaming\u2019s next \u20183D revolution\u2019 <\/p>\n

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot wants investors to know he\u2019s completely onboard with AI<\/a>. Here\u2019s what he said on today\u2019s call per Game File<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We are making great strides in applying Gen AI to high-value use cases that bring tangible benefits to our players and teams\u2026It\u2019s as big as a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D. And we have everything to lead on this front.<\/p>\n

He says the company is running full-tilt into the future of the controversial tech from two directions: \u201cgroundbreaking player-facing generative AI applications\u201d like neo NPCs<\/a> that fill bespoke game worlds with LLM chatbots and, on the development side, with teams \u201cin our studios and offices embracing this new technology and constantly exploring new use cases in programming, art and overall game quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t want to be once again playing catch-up if, say, AI-made and operated MMORPG slop-fests<\/a> are the future. The other is that the company is still very vulnerable; its stock price, while better after today\u2019s news, is still in the toilet, and it needs to stick to the shareholder-approved script, unlike certain companies whose CEOs\u00a0may have more of a license to speak their minds<\/a> with a Grand Theft Auto 6-sized trump card sitting in their pocket.<\/p>\n

Either way, the AI stuff could all still be a dead end. Remember Scalar? It\u2019s Ubisoft\u2019s ambitious, cloud-based development technology<\/a> meant to make game engines function like the internet. It threatened fans<\/a> 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\u2019s virtues years ago? No longer with the company<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll see if Assassin\u2019s ChatGPT ends up having the same half-life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There were always three big possibilities for why Ubisoft had cryptically delayed its latest earnings report just minutes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,159662,74,15751],"class_list":["post-308566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-assassins-creed-iv-black-flag","tag-technology","tag-ubisoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}