Convention - Paris Games Week Restart : Discover the Ubisoft booth

By Mulder, Paris, Paris-Expo, Porte de Versailles, 01 november 2022

After 3 years of waiting, the time has come to meet the industry's major players who promise a more festive experience than ever. The PGW Restart offers a varied program of games and licenses to discover, test and share the passion of video games. Major publishers will be present at Paris Games Week 2022, including: Bandai Namco Entertainment, Capcom, Nintendo, PLAION and its partners SEGA and Koei Tecmo, PlayStation, Square Enix, Ubisoft and Xbox. 

Ubisoft Entertainment is a French video game company headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios around the world. Its video game franchises include Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, For Honor, Just Dance, Prince of Persia, Rabbids, Rayman, Tom Clancy's and Watch Dogs.

Since 2018, Ubisoft studios have continued to focus on certain franchises, including Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy's, Far Cry and Watch Dogs. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports, while Ubisoft as a whole had nearly 16,000 developers as of mid-2019, which is larger than some of its competitors, and produced 5-6 major AAA releases each year, compared to 2-3 for others, net revenue earned per employee was the lowest of the 4 due to generally lower sales of its games. Bloomberg Business attributes this result in part to the trend of video game consumers buying fewer long-lived games, as is the case with most of Ubisoft's major games. To counter this, in October 2019 Ubisoft postponed 3 of the 6 titles it had planned for 2019 to 2020 or later, as if to help place more effort on improving the quality of existing and released games. Due to the overall weak sales in 2019, Ubisoft said in January 2020 that it would revamp its editorial board to provide a more comprehensive look at its portfolio of games and design more variation in its games, which Ubisoft's management said had been stagnant, too consistent and contributed to weak sales.

Following the wave of sexual misconduct accusations from the #MeToo movement in June and July 2020, Ubisoft had a number of employees accused of misconduct from internal and external sources. Between Ubisoft's internal investigation and a review by the newspaper Liberation, it became apparent that employees had a history of sexual misconduct and troubling behavior, going back as far as 10 years, that had been dismissed by human resources departments. As a result, some Ubisoft staff resigned or were fired, including Hascoët, Maxime Béland, the co-founder of Ubisoft Toronto, and Yannis Mallat, the general manager of Ubisoft's Canadian studios Yves Guillemot implemented changes within the company to address these issues while further investigating the extent of the misconduct allegations. In 2020, they announced that they would make an open-world Star Wars game. The deal marked the end of EA's exclusive rights to Star Wars titles.

During its fiscal 2020 year-end investor conference call in February 2021, Ubisoft said the company would begin to focus less on AAA game releases and focus more on mobile and freemium games after fiscal 2022. CFO Frederick Duguet told investors that "we are seeing a gradual and continuous shift from a model that was solely focused on AAA game releases to one where we have a combination of solid AAA game releases and strong back-catalog momentum, but also complementing our new release program with free-to-play and other premium experiences."  Later that year, the company announced that it would begin branding games developed by its 1st-party developers as "Ubisoft Originals." In October 2021, Ubisoft participated in a funding round in Animoca Brands.

After earlier declaring its intention to explore blockchain games, Ubisoft announced its Ubisoft Quartz blockchain program in December 2021, allowing players to purchase uniquely identified customization items for games, then sell and trade them based on the Tezos currency, which Ubisoft says is an energy-efficient crypto-currency. This is the first "AAA" effort in blockchain-based games. In September 2022, Tencent invested an additional €300 million in Guillemot Brothers Limited, the company that holds part of the Guillemot ownership in Ubisoft. This gave Tencent a 49.9% stake in this holding company and increased the Guillemots' voting share in Ubisoft to about 30%. Yves Guillemot said that Tencent would work closely with Ubisoft, helping it bring its games to China while also helping to pay down Ubisoft's debts and prevent the company from being taken over.

Check out our photos from the Ubisoft booth on our Flickr page

PGW is a meeting place for all communities and all generations, and will feature a wide range of activities that reflect the diversity of the ecosystem. Young and old will be able to meet cosplayers on the Imagin'Con association's booth, which will offer many animations and activities, and travel with the family through the 50 years of video games on the MO5 association's retrogaming space. You can also visit the PGW Shop, which will offer a range of Paris Games Week collectors' products, and the FNAC store area to discover new products, animations and demonstrations. PGW, which takes place during the All Saints' Day vacations, is naturally a meeting place for all families. The PGW Junior area will offer activities and games to test for budding gamers and parents alike!

Key information :
-,Open to the general public from Wednesday 02 November to Sunday 06 November 2022 
- Opening hours : 8:30 am - 6:30 pm
- Paris Expo - Porte de Versailles, Hall 1
- Ticketing (only online) : https://www.parisgamesweek.com/Infos-pratiques/pgw2022-ouverture-de-la-billetterie

Photos and video : Boris Colletier / Mulderville

(Source : press release)