People are playing fewer games and new releases are “struggling”, say Ubisoft UK, warning of falling revenues
Ubisoft’s UK publishing arm have filed a strategic report for the year ending March 2025 in which they warn that they expect yearly revenue to fall in the current fiscal year, ending March 2026. They attribute this partly to slumping sales of physical copies of games, and more broadly to the fact that people are fixating on a fistful of mega-popular games at the expense of all others, with subscription and streaming services like Microsoft’s Game Pass making us all feel less inclined to buy individual new games. Plus ça change.
“The traditional ‘full game’ model of selling a single £50-60 game to a consumer as a one-time purchase continues to become less ubiquitous, with Multi Game subscription services, long running Games As A Service titles, Free To Play games and Cloud Streaming offers all providing new and attractive ways for consumers to access gaming content,” reads the report, which was filed on 13th November last week and passed along by City AM.
“Consumers are playing fewer games, playing them for longer, and as a result, outside of a few notable exceptions, many new games are struggling to stand out and achieve the sales they may once have had, whilst the market is more volatile and the potential for any specific title less predictable as a result,” it continues.
“As a result of a smaller physical new releases schedules in the coming year, Ubisoft Limited expects revenue to fall in FY26.”
All this comes in the context of dramatic wider corporate musical chairs across Ubisoft’s international dominions. The company recently struck a deal with Tencent to carve out a new subsidiary, Vantage Studios, dedicated to the best-selling Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six series.
The remainder of the company’s development studios are being reorganised into “creative houses”, with a familiar and worrying emphasis on being “agile” and “focussed”. Ubisoft recently announced layoff plans at The Division developers Massive and Trials developers Redlynx, both of whom fall outside the new Tencent-backed subsidiary.
More Ubihappenings may be in the offing. A few days ago, the company postponed the release of their latest half-year earnings report while requesting that European exchange Euronext halt trading of Ubisoft shares and bonds until the report’s publication. According to rumour, the company’s founding Guillemot family are having a staring match with Tencent about whether they can retain their dominance. Yves Guillemot recently appointed his son Charlie Guillemot as co-chief of Vantage, which feels a bit, you know, Succession-y.
Investors appear cool on the new direction: as reported by Reuters, Ubisoft’s Paris-listed share price was down 49% year-to-date as of 13th November. Me am just humble dormouse guzzling crumbs under the banquet table, with no real understanding of the arcane financial phrases uttered by the courtiers above, but these seem like worrying numbers.
To return to the broader topic here, games industry bigwigs and assorted wonks have long warned that subscription models and a handful of enduringly popular games are sucking up all the oxygen. Back in 2024, Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn spoke to us at length about how “evergreen” games like Fortnite trample new releases that are still finding their legs. “There’s this incredibly thick line now of [yearly revenue], which is games that are five, even 10 years old, like GTA Online, and those games have done so good, and are so exceptional because of the just enormous amount of investment that’s been put into them, that they are evergreen,” he said.
More recently, market research company Circana shared a survey indicating that the majority of videogame players in the USA only buy one or two games a year.
Again, me am just brainless sheep pundit nuzzling at King Guillemot’s electric fences, but whenever I read reports about the industry being eaten alive by the Steam top 10 most-played, I find it helpful to browse, say, one of our weekend What Are We All Playing articles. I can only marvel at the range of things people say they’re playing in those comments threads.
That’s a small and purely anecdotal research sample, of course, but then, I imagine Ubisoft UK’s research criteria from the above report are quite selective as well: they need to release games that make many millions of pounds. The fortunes of games from much smaller teams and companies do not, I imagine, enter into their calculus.
