Ubisoft

This article is about the major french corporation. You may be looking for the Canadian Subsidiary, Ubisoft Montreal.

Ubisoft (2017-Present) Logo

Ubisoft Entertainment S.A. is a French multinational video game developer and publisher, headquartered in Montreuil, France. It is known for developing games for several acclaimed video game franchises including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, Just Dance, Rainbow Six, Prince of Persia, Rayman and Splinter Cell and Watch_Dogs

Overview

Ubisoft is the fourth-largest independent game publisher in the world, trailing Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts (EA). Ubisoft Entertainment S.A’s worldwide presence includes 29 studios in 19 countries. The company has subsidiaries in 26 countries. Ubisoft's largest development studio is Ubisoft Montreal in Canada, which employs about 2,100 people.

In Ubisoft’s 2008–2009 fiscal year, the company’s revenue was €1.256 billion, reaching the 1 billion euro milestone for the first time in the company’s history. Ubisoft created its own film division, called Ubisoft Motion Pictures, which creates shows and films based on the company’s games.

History

In March 1986, five brothers of the Guillemot family founded a computer game publisher, Ubisoft, in Carentoir, a small village located in the Morbihan department of the Brittany region, in France. Yves Guillemot soon made deals with Electronic Arts, Sierra On-Line, and MicroProse to distribute their games in France. By the end of the decade, Ubisoft began expanding to other markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They also entered the video game distribution and wholesale markets, and by 1993 they had become the largest distributor of video games in France. In the early 90s, Ubisoft initiated its in-house game development program, which led to the 1994 opening of a studio in Montreuil, France. It later became their administrative and commercial head office, even as the company continues to register its headquarters in Rennes. Ubisoft became a publicly traded company in 1996 and continued its expansion around the globe, opening locations in Annecy, Shanghai, Montreal and Milan.

In the late 1990s and early 2014s, Ubisoft committed itself to online games by supporting Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, The Matrix Online, and the European and Chinese operation of EverQuest. The publisher established an online division. However, in February 2004, Ubisoft cancelled the online portion of Uru and backed out of the publishing deal on The Matrix Online.

The company is noted for its teams of female game developers/testers, known as the Frag Dolls.