Former 'World Of Warcraft' Team Lead Speculates "Huge Change" Coming To Ubisoft With Executives Having A Plan B
Mark Kern aka Grummz, the former World of Warcraft Team Lead speculates that Ubisoft executives and top investors including the Guillemot family have a Plan B under their hats that will allow them to take more control of the company while also escaping the debt and bloat that has accumulated under their management.
In a post to X, Kern shared, “Ubisoft has a plan B. With dismal launch numbers on Steam for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, what will Ubisoft do? I believe they anticipated the soft sales and have been working on a Plan B.”
“Ubisoft will likely spin out their most valuable IP’s to this new company they have been seeking investors for,” he explained. “The Guillemot family are shrewd, and will likely gain even more control and shares in the new entity, dumping the debt and bloat of Ubisoft.”
He concluded, “But a huge change is coming.”
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This speculation comes in the wake of a report from Dong Cao, Vinicy Chan, and Benoit Berthelot at Bloomberg that claims Ubisoft “is looking to bring in investors to a new entity that will include some of its core video-gaming intellectual property, including Assassin’s Creed, according to people familiar with the situation.”
The report goes on to detail that this new entity “may seek a valuation for the yet-to-be formed IP unit that is higher than the size of the main company’s.”
Kern’s analysis also arrives after Assassin’s Creed Shadows only hit a peak concurrent player count of just 41,412 on its release day.
The game has surpassed that peak in its second day with a peak concurrent player count of 47,616.
READ: Former Embracer Group COO Reveals 'Saints Row' Team "Didn't Know What They Were Building."
Ubisoft claims the game was played by over a million people on its first day.
What do you make of this speculation from Mark Kern? What do you think Ubisoft plans to do?
Again, we don't know the details, but based on this simple description, it would be tunneling. Even Wikipedia has a decent intro to this topic:
"Tunneling or tunnelling is financial fraud committed by "the transfer of assets and profits out of firms for the benefit of those who control them". In legal terms, this is known as a fraudulent transfer, such as when a group of major shareholders or the management of a publicly-traded company orders that company to sell off its assets to a second company at unreasonably low prices."
The thing is, they are not facing just any random gamers here, they are up against 4/5 of their shareholders and those groups tend to have very deep pockets. So deep, they could very well sustain a massive legal counterattack and criminal charges. This is not a random forced arbitration with an individual gamer that Ubisoft is provoking here.
Now, have the Ubisoft top managers been deliberately sabotaging the company and its stock value in order to claim it's the market price (although ridiculously low) and transfer valuable IPs out of the dying company for virtually zero costs? Hard to prove, but as the saying goes: I can't say you've deliberately tanked your stock, but if I wanted to do that, I would not have done it any other way...
Why yes, I’m sure investors will line up to give them more money to burn!
“They managed to run the company in the ground… Let’s give them another chance!”