Ubisoft is investing even more into Assassin’s Creed

Ubisoft is going to significantly increase the number of people it has working on the already-massive Assassin’s Creed franchise, the company said as part of its latest earnings report on Tuesday. The company is upping its investment in the series because it sees a big opportunity for growth.

“As part of our increased strategic focus on our biggest growth opportunities and progressive reallocation of resources, Ubisoft will notably increase the number of talents working on the Assassin’s Creed franchise by 40 percent over the coming years to fuel its ambitious expansion,” the company wrote in a press release. Currently, the company has “around” 2,000 people working on the franchise, CEO Yves Guillemot said on an earnings call.

Based on the numbers for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest game in the series, that’s not exactly a surprising decision. “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla now has 44 percent more players life-to-date than Assassin’s Creed Origins and 19 percent more than Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on a comparable basis, with materially higher revenue per player, leading to life-to-date net bookings up respectively +82 percent and +61 percent,” Ubisoft said. TL;DR: Valhalla has been really popular and earns more money per player than those other two games.

And we already know that Ubisoft is working on a huge slate of Assassin’s Creed games, so it makes sense that it needs an increased amount of staff to be able to make them all. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is expected sometime this year, and the company is already working on two more mainline games (codenamed “Red” and “Hexe”), a mobile game (codenamed “Jade”), a multiplayer-focused game (codenamed “Invictus”), and an entire Assassin’s Creed hub project dubbed “Infinity.”

Ubisoft is also excited about its free-to-play games. Its closed beta of the shooter game XDefiant had more than 1 million players, according to the press release, and the company is prepping tests for Rainbow Six Mobile, The Division Resurgence, and The Division Heartland. And Ubisoft says you can look forward to games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (which it delayed in July), pirate game Skull and Bones (which was delayed yet again in January), and an unspecified “another large game” in 2023 and 2024. It seems likely the company will share more details on many of these projects at its Ubisoft Forward event on June 12th.

Unfortunately, the company is still also experimenting with NFTs — new Assassin’s Creed NFTs have been announced in spite of the poor reception to the Digits NFTs for Ghost Recon Breakpoint.