Let’s be honest here, Ubisoft hasn’t been making good headways this past year after a year of losses, fewer releases, and layoffs – but even with all that negativity from this past year, the French publisher is planning to put their chips back into its Assassin’s Creed investment. To help, Ubisoft is rearranging its workforce to increase headcount on Assassin’s Creed franchise development by 40 percent over the coming years as a part of a company restructuring, according to its latest earnings call.
“As part of our increased strategic focus on our biggest growth opportunities and progressive reallocation of resources, Ubisoft will notably increase the number of talents working on the Assassin’s Creed franchise by 40 percent over the coming years to fuel its ambitious expansion,” Ubisoft said in a press release.
The move to upscale development is partly questionable, especially after the company’s recent layoffs of employees. It sounds like Ubisoft is betting on what they already have while trying to move around resources to get more cooks in the Assassiin’s Creed kitchen, which currently has “around” 2,000 people working, so the 40 percent increase will blow up the team to nearly 3,000 people on the project by the end of this if it works out anyway.
It’s a risky move as far as putting more into one property that could hopefully bring them out of the negative hole in their profits, but this is Assassin’s Creed we’re talking about here, so it could also be a pretty safe bet. The projects these developers could be working on include the two next mainline titles (“Red” and “Hexe”), a mobile game (“Jade”), a multiplayer-focused game (“Invictus”), and the franchise’s hub project known as “Infinity.”
Ubisoft is already setting themselves up for a big release year as games on the docket to launch in their fiscal year (if delays aren’t an issue) include Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Rainbow Six Mobile, Skull and Bones, The Crew Motorfest, The Division Resurgence, XDefiant, and one other significant title (possibly Star Wars?).
These are a lot of titles, if not all we haven’t heard anything official from marketing; in response to when we’ll hear the dates for Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Skull and Bones – Ubisoft’s only response is to look forward to Ubisoft Forward’s next month.
