At a recent Ubisoft shareholder meeting, Yves Guillemot and Frederick Duguet, CEO and CFO, respectively, fielded questions from a less-than-impressed audience. If nothing else, the session was a glaring indictment of how much the shareholders know about the company they’ve invested in.
At one point, a ’20-year’ individual shareholder slammed the company’s leadership and stressed his disappointment at the ‘catastrophic’ share price. After that, he demanded to know what Ubisoft is doing about VALORANT, a game that ‘a lot of people have been talking about’ that could steal sales from Ubisoft.
I was confused as well.
‘VALORANT is a Top Five Game’
During the question-and-answer segment of the recent general shareholder meeting, an investor stood up and unleashed an almighty fury upon Yves Guillemot and Frederick Duguet:
I’m unhappy with catastrophic share price, -40% over ten years, I’m very disappointed with everything we’ve been seeing of late. I’ve got real concerns. I don’t recognise Ubisoft that I once knew in the past. How is it that the head of HR saw nothing – we operate in these buildings, so how is it they didn’t stop it? How is it that nothing was seen and nothing was done? How can we tackle increasing prices, the fact that we have gamers that are becoming more demanding?
He was talking about the recent allegations and internal concerns that came to light concerning abuse and volatile working conditions. This question was answered by Yves Guillemot:
The company was not found liable for any of the claims made against the company for misconduct. We are extremely sorry for what occurred and we put in place, the second we heard, additional systems and additional mechanism to ensure that information could be reported more effectively for such cases, and we are keeping a very close eye on this to make sure it won’t happen again.
Placated, the shareholder moved on to his next topic, perhaps revealing a chink in his armor when it came to the depth of his knowledge of games:
About competition, there’s a game that a lot of people have been talking about, VALORANT. A lot of people have said good things about it, and I would just like to know what you think of it. Is there anything good that Ubisoft could learn from that? Really, what’s your opinion on this game? It seems like all gamers love it. If they love it, that means it’s going to be a drop in sales for Ubisoft, so what’s your take?
I don’t know why, but when I read that, my internal voice takes on a Donald Trump-esque persona.
Firstly, VALORANT has been around for five years, so it seems bizarre that it’s now being discussed by this shareholder as what sounds like a new entry to the market. Second, it might seem odd that a free-to-play first-person shooter from Riot Games could threaten the sales of a company more focused on single-player or co-operative titles with premium price tags.
Perhaps it might threaten Rainbow Six Siege as it’s closely aligned there, but Siege has been around for more than a decade and recently went (kind of) free-to-play with the launch of Siege X. In any case, the recent state of Siege is what’s threatening Siege, not VALORANT’s existence.
Frederick Duguet, Chief Financial Officer, was on hand to lend his two cents to the question:
What we’re doing is we’re looking at all the different operators on the market for multiplayer games, for first-person shooter games… If you look at Rainbow Six and other games of that same ilk, it’s exactly what we’re trying to do. VALORANT is a top five game, Rainbow Six is a top fifteen game, what we want to do is have that in the top ten and the top five eventually. Something that we can learn from VALORANT is that we’ve enhanced the overall offering for our game.
Duguet explained that boosting the content pipeline for Rainbow Six Siege and the recent free-to-play pivot ensures the game’s survival in this increasingly competitive world.
Do you think it was a strange question for someone invested in Ubisoft for 20 years? Let me know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming forum.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out Yves Guillemot’s impressions of why Outlaws failed
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
These are the people to blame for Ubisoft and CD projekt being in business still. Let them burn their riches.