Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
The most recent release is probably Anno 117 which came out yesterday. While decently looking it’s lacking features of the previous title (like coop mode and mod browser) with the promise they will be added later and is priced at around 60€ or 90€ if you want to gamble on the quality of the promised to be released DLC. They also relied on AI generated images in some of the assets used in the game instead of paying their artists. Optimisation for the game seems to be ok, but not great but it might be too early to judge that fully yet.
That seems like way too recent to have any impact, though. It wouldn’t even have made it into their report data
They tried to build a lot of hype around the game and get people to preorder. Maybe those numbers were (far) below expectations?
I don’t think that alone would justify this move, even if they didn’t sell a single pre-order.
I don‘t get why they’d cheap out on artists, a couple people drawing illustrations is surely not gonna balloon development cost - and arguably one of the easiest places to spot when it‘s AI slop. It‘s as if they think there must be gen AI stuff in the game somewhere or the game‘s worse or something.
If you look at the older titles, there’s so much love and passion that went into the artworks. 1404 is 16 years old and has aged incredibly well, because of the high quality of the work that went into it. This is missing in 117.