For years, Ubisoft’s decline has been framed as denial, a lumbering giant too arrogant or complacent to see that the industry had moved on. That story is convenient. It casts Ubisoft as blind, stubborn, and asleep at the wheel.

It is also no longer accurate.

Ubisoft did see the cliff. It did pull the brake. Studios were closed. Thousands of jobs were cut. Projects were canceled. The organization was broken into smaller units after years of sprawl. By corporate standards, this was not hesitation. It was a reckoning.

And yet, the reckoning has not worked.

Not because it went too far, but because it did not go deep enough.

What Ubisoft dismantled was its cost structure, not its creative doctrine. The machine was made smaller. The logic that built it was left intact.

The Company That Optimized Everything Except Meaning

Ubisoft’s defining belief has never been subtle. Scale is value.

More map, more hours, more systems, more engagement, endlessly repeated.

This belief shaped its rise. It also shaped its decline.

By the time Ubisoft employed roughly 17,000 people worldwide, creativity had become something managed rather than pursued. Games were no longer built around ideas. Ideas were filtered through frameworks designed to minimize risk. Surprise was tolerated only if it could be systematized.

When the company finally acknowledged that this structure was unsustainable, it responded the only way large organizations know how, by shrinking.

Studios were closed. Teams were split into smaller units. The sprawl was reduced.

But the underlying assumption, that Ubisoft’s job is to produce large, long, monetizable experiences at predictable cadence, remained untouched.

A Financial Peak That Hid the Rot

The numbers once seemed to justify the approach.

In fiscal year 2023–24, Ubisoft reported roughly €2.3 billion in net bookings, a rebound year executives pointed to as proof that the strategy still worked. Operating income briefly returned to positive territory. Investors exhaled.

But the rebound was deceptive. It was driven less by creative momentum than by inertia, back catalog sales, franchise familiarity, and discount fueled engagement. Ubisoft was not convincing players of the future. It was monetizing the past.

The following year stripped away the illusion. Net bookings fell by around 20 percent, operating income turned negative again, and quarterly guidance slipped repeatedly. Even as costs were cut, confidence eroded.

This was not a company punished for one bad release. It was a company losing relevance one earnings call at a time.

Downsizing Without Redefining

To Ubisoft’s credit, it did what many companies delay until it is too late. It canceled games. It closed studios. It publicly acknowledged that it had taken on too much.

But the cuts were framed almost entirely in financial language, efficiency, focus, selectivity.

What was missing was a creative redefinition.

Smaller studios were created, but tasked with feeding the same franchises. Fewer projects were approved, but evaluated by the same engagement metrics. Risk was reduced, but only in financial terms, not artistic ones.

Ubisoft shrank the organization without asking the uncomfortable question, what kinds of games should we stop making entirely?

Live Service as a Failure of Conviction

Nowhere is this clearer than in Ubisoft’s pursuit of live service games.

Live service was not embraced because Ubisoft had a compelling vision for persistent worlds. It was embraced because markets demanded recurring revenue. The result was a decade of hesitation disguised as ambition.

Projects like Skull and Bones did not fail because they were delayed. They failed because no one was ever empowered to decide what the game was. Each reboot was an attempt to retrofit relevance rather than define purpose.

Live service requires obsession and clarity. Ubisoft offered compromise and caution.

Cutting teams did not fix that. Smaller studios did not fix that. The problem was not scale. It was conviction.

Culture Was Not an Isolated Crisis

When allegations of systemic harassment and abuse surfaced in 2020, Ubisoft treated them as a cultural failure in need of correction.

They were that, but they were also a structural signal.

A company that prioritizes output, scale, and delivery above all else will inevitably protect productivity over people. The same systems that flattened creative risk also flattened accountability.

The fallout, talent leaving, trust evaporating, recruitment suffering, was not incidental. It was the human cost of an organization optimized for throughput rather than care.

Downsizing addressed the symptom. It did not address the value system.

The Market’s Verdict

By early 2026, investors stopped waiting for proof that the changes mattered.

After another restructuring and bleak outlook, Ubisoft’s share price fell by roughly 33 percent in a single day, pushing its market capitalization below €1 billion. This was not panic. It was recognition.

Ubisoft still owns valuable intellectual property. Assassin’s Creed has sold more than 230 million copies. But franchises are only valuable if they feel alive. Lately, Ubisoft’s most famous worlds feel more maintained than imagined.

What a Real Transformation Would Require

A true reinvention would not start with spreadsheets. It would start with subtraction.

Fewer games, not just fewer teams. Smaller scopes, not just smaller budgets. Creative authority that can say no to franchises, not just optimize them.

Most importantly, it would require Ubisoft to abandon the idea that failure can be engineered away. Creative industries do not die because they fail too often. They die because they forget how to fail meaningfully.

Ubisoft didn’t refuse to change. It changed the parts that were easiest to change.

The harder work, the work of rethinking what the company exists to make, still lies ahead.

And until that happens, Ubisoft’s transformation will remain what it is today, a smaller version of the same machine that led it here.