Clover HolmesUbisoft has announced their new earnings report for the first half of the 2025-2026 financial year. The focus of this coverage is the €1.6 billion investment from Tencent to help Ubisoft grow its new studio, Vantage Studios.
Vantage Studios was announced back in October of 2025 with promises that this would usher new change at Ubisoft in the form a new kind of studio called “Creative Houses” that promise to give these new “houses” more autonomy over the games and IPs that they manage while promising to also somehow increase player outreach and inclusion in decision making. What this means is yet to be seen as Ubisoft’s earnings report claims that this will be elaborated on in January. More news to come then.
Vantage Studios, the first of these “Creative Houses”. It is intended to be a new home for Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and the Tom Clancy franchise. These are Ubisoft’s flagship titles and generally seen as the driving force behind the company.
Much of the claim about this new investment from Tencent is that it will help grow Vantage Studios and assumedly the rest of the new Creative Houses when they are announced in January 2026. However, Yves Guillemot himself mentions that this financing from their new minority shareholder is largely a measure to deleverage their existing €1.5 million debt obligations.
Tencent’s investment is higher than these debts being currently faced by Ubisoft. This would seem to be a match made in heaven and that the Tencent deal is an exceptional business deal for CEO Yves Guillemot.
But if we look into the report more, we see an issue which is Ubisoft’s repeated mentions of needs to cut operating costs and its year-on-year reduction in liquidity; the actual spending money that Ubisoft has. This Tencent deal is clearly a shot in the arm for Ubisoft and a much needed injection to help stave off the issues that the company is currently facing. The question is whether or not Ubisoft can either continue receiving this level of investment, or use this new opportunity to turn around the issues that they have been facing.
What can be seen elsewhere in the report is more of this storytelling. We can see it in the earnings reports claims of exciting new increases in player counts for both Rainbow Six Siege X and The Division 2. Steam’s player count, available in publicly available statistics, does shows some amount of spike in player count around new content updates. But the current player count and year start player count being roughly between 30 to 40,000 players shows stagnation rather than growth. PlayStation and Xbox’s statistics are not as easy to find, but their chart positions on their respective store fronts show a similar placement to Steam. This is a fine player count for a game like Siege, but I do not know if the player base is actually growing.
Similar claims have been made about The Division 2 with its new DLC. But The Division 2’s player count on Steam spiked during a free weekend in 2023 with 14,858 players with player counts recently averaging between 2 and 5,000 with very little increase or retention in players at all.
In terms of Ubisoft’s single player offerings, Ubisoft themselves are guarded in their reports about giving any exact sales figures or revenue for their specific franchises. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is reporting to continue to have good player counts as is Mirage. Though an IGN article during this financial period in July 2025 suggests the total users/sales to be “only” five million.
While there is certainly evidence of some titles in Ubisoft’s catalogue falling below expectations, we are seeing a video game industry that describes millions of copies of a video game and 10s of thousands of active engaged players in one of the most successful multiplayer live service games as stagnant or failing. We’ve seen similar trends in the last couple of years at PlayStation, Xbox, and many other companies that are reporting success and yet continuing to lay off record numbers of employees.
We won’t know if Ubisoft will weather this storm until the results of this new Creative House experiment come to fruition. We can only wait for January 2026 for more answers.
Do you think that Ubisoft’s new direction will improve the quality of their games and outreach to players? Do you think we have realistic expectations for video games? Let us know in the comments below.