Ubisoft's Sales Down Nearly 50%, More Layoffs & Studio Closures Likely

With 2024 being the worst year in Ubisoft's history – due to a series of blunders and a lineup of sloppily made games that failed to gain any attention – it has been widely believed for some time now that should the upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows underperform financially, it would spell the end for the once-beloved developer. Proving this belief to be true is Ubisoft's latest financial report, which puts into numbers the magnitude of the company's fall from grace and hints that 2025 will likely bring even more studio closures and layoffs.

According to Ubisoft's report for the third quarter of the fiscal year 2024-25, ending December 31, 2024, IFRS 15 sales – revenue from contracts with customers – amounted to €318.1 million, a sharp 47.5% drop compared to the same period last year. For the first nine months of FY25, IFRS 15 sales totaled €990.0 million, down 31.4% from the same timeframe in FY24. Ubisoft's net bookings took an even bigger hit, reaching just €301.8 million in Q3 2024-25, a whopping 51.8% year-on-year decline. For the first nine months of 2024-25, total net bookings stood at €944.0 million, down 34.8%.

With results like this, it's no surprise that a separate section in the report was dedicated entirely to Ubisoft's Cost Reduction Plan – essentially, saving money by shutting down ongoing projects, closing studios, and laying off developers left and right, when translated from corporate speak into plain English.

Thanks to the cancelation of XDefiant and the closure of four production studios, Ubisoft boasts, they are "ahead of schedule" and now expect to exceed €200 million in fixed cost reductions by the end of FY25. Even more alarming is the final line of the section, stating that Ubisoft "plans to pursue these efforts in FY26, going beyond the initial target by a significant margin," strongly suggesting that even more studios will be eliminated and more employees terminated this year.

As for how the company plans to recover, the report states that Ubisoft anticipates net bookings to grow in Q4 FY25 compared to last year, largely thanks to the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows on March 20.

The most interesting part is that the company "expects net bookings of around €1.9 billion" in this fiscal year, and considering they only accumulated €944.0 million in the first 9 months, that expectation definitely seems like wishful thinking. Of course, despite all the controversy surrounding it, Shadows is unlikely to flop financially by virtue of being an Assassin's Creed title, but it raking in one billion sure seems hard to imagine right now.

As for Shadows itself, the report claims its pre-orders are comparable to those of Assassin's Creed Odyssey – the second most successful entry in the franchise – and boasts that critics have praised the game's "immersive world, stunning graphics and variety of gameplay brought by the dual-protagonist approach," seemingly forgetting once again that the opinions of gaming journalists and mainstream reviewers often don't align with those of regular gamers – the audience that actually pays for the games.

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