With shares at 10-year lows, Assassin's Creed maker Ubisoft faces questions over its future
[Emphasis added]
- Ubisoft, which is behind the "Assassin's Creed" franchise, last week said it has postponed the release of the next title in the popular game series by three months to Feb. 14, 2025.
- Shares of Ubisoft, which also cut net bookings guidance for its full fiscal year and second quarter, have slumped to decade lows on the back of dismal investor expectations about the company's triple-A games pipeline and financial prospects.
- Last week, activist investor AJ Investments said it was working with other Ubisoft shareholders to push the company to sell itself to private equity firms or to Chinese gaming giant Tencent, which already holds a stake in the French game publisher.
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[Here's the clowncar.]
Still, some analysts were more sympathetic to Ubisoft's struggles.
Analysts at
Wedbush Securities suggested the
firm had become the
victim of coordinated "trolling" from people trying to force down user score averages for the company's Star Wars Outlaws game on review sites.
"We believe Star Wars Outlaws was impacted by
a coordinated effort that sought to troll Ubisoft games specifically and Star Wars content in general," Wedbush analysts Michael Pachter, Alicia Reese and Kade Bar wrote in the note last week.
"The game received
an unusual number of user reviews with a
clear negative bias (including a large percentage of "zero" reviews), despite seeing acceptable review scores from reputable review sites. This is a case of a rare incel victory that led to Ubisoft having to take down its numbers," they added.
Wedbush's analysts said that, despite delays to its upcoming Assassin's Creed title,
they expect the game to sell 7 million units in its launch quarter and think it has "potential to be one of Ubisoft's best sellers ever."
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James Lockyer, technology research analyst at U.K. investment bank Peel Hunt, said that
part of the problem for game publishers today is that gamers are devoting more of their time to older games than to newer titles.
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