Investors Want Ubisoft to Make Changes. Among Demands Are Replacement of CEO Yves Guillemot and Layoffs
One of Ubisoft's investors has expressed his dissatisfaction with the French publisher's current situation. He calls for drastic steps to be taken.
Star Wars: Outlaws isn't a failure on the scale of Concord, but the game's results were somewhat disappointing to its developers and shareholders. Ubisoft shareholders are calling for the company to go private and for the current management to be replaced by new people.
As noted by The Wall Street Journal, Slovak hedge fund AJ Investments (which owns less than 1% of Ubisoft's shares) has expressed its dissatisfaction with the state and "strategic direction" of the French publisher in recent times. This isn't just about the results of the titles released.
Ubisoft has also delayed the launches of Rainbow Six Mobile and Tom Clancy's The Division Resurgence – both titles won't debut until the next fiscal year (i.e. after March 2025). The publisher had previously canceled The Division Heartland.
Adding the not-entirely-successful debuts in the last year and the decreasing number of XDefiant players, it's no wonder that the company's stock value has fallen by over 50% in the last 12 months. On the Paris stock exchange alone, Ubisoft has lost 9% since yesterday following the publication of the AJ Investment letter. The latter also mentioned that "Star Wars: Outlaws was not 100% ready to release," despite good reviews.
Juraj Krupa, the fund's founder, hopes this will serve as a warning to investors and motivate them to endorse AJ Investment's proposals. These include selling Ubisoft to "private hands" and appointing a new CEO to replace Yves Guillemot to "optimize the cost and studio structure" (consider selling some teams and implementing employee layoffs).
