Das Spiel „Assassin’s Creed: Shadows“ erscheint erst im Februar 2025 statt im November 2024. Solche Verschiebungen sind in der Videospielbranche keine Seltenheit, gerade im Falle von Titeln mit großen Produktionsbudgets. Warum schickt die Ankündigung den Aktienkurs des französischen Verlegers und Herstellers Ubisoft dann um mehr als 21 Prozent ins Minus, was den größten Kurssturz der Unternehmensgeschichte markiert?
Mit der Ankündigung geht eine Senkung der Ziele für das Geschäftsjahr 2024/25 beginnend am 1. April einher. Statt wachsender Umsätze und operativem Gewinn erwartet Ubisoft nur noch 1,95 Milliarden Euro Umsatz und in etwa eine schwarze Null beim Gewinn. Für das zweite Quartal, das am 30. September endet, senkte Ubisoft seine Prognose von 500 Millionen Euro auf eine Spanne von 350 bis 370 Millionen Euro. Das schwache zweite Quartal ist vornehmlich im schlechten Verkaufsergebnis des Titels „Star Wars: Outlaws“ begründet, der Ende August erschien. Begleitet wurde das Spiel von der „größten Werbekampagne aller Zeiten“ für ein Ubisoft-Spiel, sagte der Vorstandsvorsitzende Yves Guillemot im Juli.
Die Papiere des Unternehmens sind auf das Kursniveau von vor elf Jahren zurückgefallen. Seit Jahresanfang steht ein Abschlag von 60 Prozent zu Buche, vom Abstand zum Höchstkurs von über 100 Euro im Jahr 2018 ganz zu schweigen. Was ist seither passiert?
Hoher Aktienkurs wegen Übernahmekampf
Dem Kursverfall geht ein Übernahmekampf der Gründerfamilie Guillemot mit dem französischen Medienunternehmen Vivendi voraus. 2015 fing Vivendi an, nach und nach Ubisoft-Aktien aufzukaufen. Die stets auf Unabhängigkeit bestehenden Guillemot-Brüder – von den eigentlichen fünf spielten vor allem der amtierende Vorstandsvorsitzende Yves und zudem Michel die tragenden Rollen – kauften Aktien von Ubisoft, bis der Kurs eine Übernahme für Vivendi unattraktiv machte. 2018 sagte Vivendi in einer Übereinkunft mit den Guillemots jegliche Übernahmeversuche ab und verkaufte seine Anteile. Momentan hält die Guillemot-Familie noch 14 Prozent der Aktien.
Ubisoft achieved its high share price and the title of Europe’s most valuable games company, with a market value of over 10 billion euros, primarily through capital market maneuvers. The underlying data from Ubisoft gave a mixed picture in 2018 and 2019 and still does. Measured by the ratio of sales to capital employed, Ubisoft fared poorly compared to other publishers playing in the same league. Ubisoft’s wide range of games with well-known brands – including “Assassin’s Creed,” “Far Cry” and “Watchdogs” – required an army of developers to produce them. At the same time, the games took potential customers away from each other because too many were released in a small space and often took up several dozen hours of playing time.
The following years were marked by staggered release plans, scrapped projects and layoffs. Lasting success was not forthcoming. At the beginning of 2022, rumors again arose that Ubisoft was about to be sold. This time it was said that the investment companies KKR and Blackstone were interested.
Control secured, but at what price?
The Guillemot brothers once again thwarted a takeover attempt with a capital market maneuver: they sold 49.9 percent of their holding company Guillemot Brothers to the Chinese technology giant Tencent, with the voting rights largely remaining with the Guillemots. Tencent was already the buyer of the Vivendi package in 2018.
With the money they won, the Guillemots secured the majority of voting rights in Ubisoft, thus securing their control over the company. Ubisoft also hoped that closer contact with its Chinese partner would give it better access to Tencent’s domestic growth market, especially in the mobile sector. Smartphone games account for just over half of the revenue in the video game market.
This year seems to be the peak of the chaos. “Skull and Bones,” which had been delayed six times, was released in February after eleven years of development. Interest in the game quickly waned; at least on the largest platform for PC games, “Steam,” only a few hundred players are currently playing in the game’s pirate world at the same time each day. According to reports, the game consumed more than 200 million dollars in production, which Ubisoft apparently does not expect to recoup.
Several failures since the beginning of the year
The multiplayer shooter “XDefiant”, which was released in the spring, had to contend with rumors after a strong start with 3 million players that the game would be shut down again due to a lack of active players. The game’s producer, Mark Rubin, felt compelled to to post a blog post last weekin which he denied the rumors and presented a plan for upcoming content for several months.
Following the weak start of “Star Wars: Outlaws,” activist investor AJ Investments spoke out from Slovakia on September 9. In an open letter he called for the sale of Ubisoft to venture capital firms and the removal of Yves Guillemot as CEO. The investor owns less than one percent of the shares. However, as the Reuters news agency reported on Thursday, citing another letter, AJ Investments has gathered ten percent of shareholders behind it and its plan.
Analysts demand future plans from Guillemot
Thanks to the Guillemot family’s voting shares, the plan is unlikely to be a success. Nevertheless, Yves Guillemot is under pressure to offer shareholders a plan to get out of the misery. In a spontaneous conference call on Wednesday evening, Guillemot not only announced that he would lower the forecasts and postpone “Assassin’s Creed: Shadows”. He also confirmed that the company wants to focus more on the two pillars of “games as a service”, which should guarantee steady cash flows, and premium games with open worlds. He also wants to further reduce the number of employees.
Capital market analysts who follow the company were fuming on Thursday after the announcements. As the financial agency Bloomberg reported, Doug Creutz of TD Cowen’s wrote that the supervisory board was not holding the management board accountable despite repeated failures. Analysts at Deutsche Bank lowered their recommendation from “buy” to “hold”. In total, ten analysts still recommend buying, nine recommend holding the stock and two recommend selling. The average price target is 22.42 euros.
Much will now depend on the success of “Assassin’s Creed: Shadow”. The series of games, which has been published since 2007 and is about the conflict between an order of assassins and the Knights Templar with the aim of world domination, is usually a guarantee of good sales figures. In addition, the background of feudal Japan, against which the game takes place, has long been demanded by fans.
Culture battle over “Assassin’s Creed: Shadows”
However, the game’s marketing campaign has been plagued by faux pas and doomsaying on social media. For example, Ubisoft had to apologize to a historical group of actors whose flag design was used without permission for concept art for the game. Most recently, a collector’s figure of the two protagonists was criticized by some Japanese users on social media. A torii broken in the middle, a gate like the ones at the entrance to Shinto shrines, forms an element of the figure. In Nagasaki, a torii broken in this way also reminds us of the dropping of the atomic bomb over the city at the end of the Second World War, which is why Japanese users took offense at the figure.
The supposedly biggest controversy, however, concerns one of the two protagonists of the game: Yasuke. The historical figure from the 16th century probably comes from the African Mozambique and came to Japan with Christian missionaries. The warlord Oda Nobunaga took him into his service as a weapon bearer. In the game, Yasuke is portrayed as part of the sword nobility (samurai), but there are no historical sources in which the title is clearly attributed to him.
A loose group of players now accuses Ubisoft of desperately trying to incorporate ethnic diversity into the game and bending historical facts to do so. They also argue that this is being done under the constraints of the social sustainability dimension (the ‘S’ in ‘ESG’). A game that depicts a very ethnically homogeneous population, such as that in 16th century Japan, does not fit into the concept, lowers Ubisoft’s ESG rating as a company and worsens the prospect of loans and financing.
The opposing side among the players accuses the critics of blatant racism, which means they cannot tolerate a protagonist with dark skin. Yasuke has also been portrayed as a samurai in other media, for example in the game “Nioh” by the Japanese developer Team Ninja – without causing any controversy.
After Ubisoft had already apologized in July for some aspects of the dispute, particularly to Japanese gamers, Yves Guillemot commented on the dispute in a conference call on Wednesday evening: “I would like to reiterate that we are a company that puts entertainment first. We create games for the widest possible audience and our aim is not to promote a specific agenda.” Whether the delay in polishing the game and the attempts to contain the dispute will help sales figures will become clear in February. If the game turns out to be a slow seller, the air around Yves Guillemot, who has headed the company since 1988, is likely to become very thin.
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