Ubisoft postponed the release of the next title in its popular “Assassin’s Creed” game franchise — called “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” — by three months to Feb. 14, 2025.
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French video game publisher Ubisoft is facing questions over its future, as it grapples with a lackluster games pipeline and pressure from investors to seek a sale.
The company, which produces the “Assassin’s Creed” franchise, said in updated guidance last week that it has postponed the release of the next title in the popular game series — called “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” — by three months to Feb. 14, 2025.
Ubisoft also cut its guidance for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, saying it now expects net bookings to fall to around 1.95 billion euros. Ubisoft said it expects net bookings for its fiscal second quarter to come in at 350 million to 370 million euros, down from 500 million euros anticipated previously.
“The revised targets are mainly a reflection of decisions taken for Assassin’s Creed Shadows and the softer than expected launch for Star Wars Outlaws,” Ubisoft said.
It comes after the company’s “Star Wars Outlaws” game — an action-adventure title based on the iconic sci-fi movie series, which was released this summer — was met with disappointing sales performance and a mixed reception from gamers. Ubisoft said that its learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release pushed it to give more time to polish Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
The company said it was also scrapping plans to release its new Assassin’s Creed game with a “Season Pass,” which was a paid add-on providing access to a bonus quest and additional downloadable content at launch.
Ubisoft added that it now plans to release Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Valve Corporation’s online games store Steam on the day of its launch, ending its track record of exclusively distributing PC versions of its games on Epic Games’ digital storefront.
Yves Guillemot, CEO and co-founder of Ubisoft, speaks at the Ubisoft Forward livestream event in Los Angeles, California, on June 12, 2023.
Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images
“In the light of recent challenges, we acknowledge the need for greater efficiency while delighting players,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in the statement last week, adding that the company’s executive committee is launching a review to further improve its execution.
Ubisoft shares have slumped to decade-lows against this backdrop of dismal investor expectations about its triple-A games pipeline and financial prospects.
To further compound the business’ woes, the company is facing possible strike action in France after the country’s STJV video game workers’ union called for three days of industrial action on Oct. 15-17 over the company’s bid to get workers back in the office three days a week.
Pressure from activist investor
Following the decision to delay its upcoming Assassin’s Creed game, AJ Investments, an activist investor with a less than 1% stake in Ubisoft, said that it was working with other shareholders in the company to push the French firm to sell itself to private equity firms or to Chinese gaming giant Tencent.
In an open letter last week, AJ Investments said it had gathered the support of 10% of Ubisoft shareholders for its pressure campaign, adding that it intends to cooperate with proxy advisory firms in preparation for voting at the company’s next general meeting. CNBC could not independently verify this figure.
“We have talked to industry experts as potential boards members and executives to replace current management and realise our strategy targets, we will propose our candidates due time,” AJ Investments said.
AJ Investments noted it is due to speak with Ubisoft management on Tuesday to discuss its proposals. The firm added it would demonstrate in front of Ubisoft’s headquarters in Montreuil, Paris, if needed.
Several bank analysts slashed their price targets for Ubisoft after news of the delays to its upcoming game, although many kept their ratings unchanged.
Deutsche Bank, which downgrade the stock to “hold” from “buy,” said that Ubisoft’s guidance cut was “bigger than we expected” and that the postponement to Assassin’s Creed Shadows “pushes a substantial amount of revenue” out into the next fiscal year.
Deutsche Bank’s George Brown also said he anticipated Assassin’s Creed Shadows will perform worse than he expected initially, forecasting unit sales of 7 million in the 12-month period following release. That’s down from a projection of 8 million, previously.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan said in a note last week that they now expect lower unit sales of Ubisoft’s triple-A game releases and see a slower cadence of releases moving forward. JPMorgan maintained its “neutral” rating on Ubisoft stock, but cut its price target to 11 euros from 21 euros.
“Mid-size developers continue to be squeezed by development cost inflation which has not been matched by sufficient volume/ monetization improvement to sustain attractive returns,” JPMorgan analysts Daniel Kerven and David W Peat said in the note.
“UBI’s capital structure and lack of cash generation in recent years have left it under increasing pressure to cut investments/costs.”
Backlash
Still, some analysts were more sympathetic to Ubisoft’s struggles.
Analysts at Wedbush Securities suggested the firm had become the victim of coordinated “trolling” from people trying to force down user score averages for the company’s Star Wars Outlaws game on review sites.
“We believe Star Wars Outlaws was impacted by a coordinated effort that sought to troll Ubisoft games specifically and Star Wars content in general,” Wedbush analysts Michael Pachter, Alicia Reese and Kade Bar wrote in the note last week.
“The game received an unusual number of user reviews with a clear negative bias (including a large percentage of “zero” reviews), despite seeing acceptable review scores from reputable review sites. This is a case of a rare incel victory that led to Ubisoft having to take down its numbers,” they added.
Wedbush’s analysts said that, despite delays to its upcoming Assassin’s Creed title, they expect the game to sell 7 million units in its launch quarter and think it has “potential to be one of Ubisoft’s best sellers ever.”
Industry slump
Ubisoft’s woes comes as the broader video games space is facing an industry-wide slump.
James Lockyer, technology research analyst at U.K. investment bank Peel Hunt, said that part of the problem for game publishers today is that gamers are devoting more of their time to older games than to newer titles.
“In the years that followed Covid, the number of games released per year has grown substantially,” Lockyer told CNBC via email. “Consequently, consumers have had more choice over the last couple of years.”
“However, more choice plus a cost-of-living squeezed wallet has meant consumers’ cash has been spread more thinly, leading to revenues and ROIs [return on investment] of those games often coming out below expectations,” he added.
SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship booster returns to the launch pad during a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025.
Eric Gay | AP
As SpaceX awaits the results of a critical election that would turn the location of its Starbase launch site into an incorporated Texas city, lawmakers have declined to give Elon Musk’s aerospace company greater control over a main highway and public beach.
Starbase, where the Musk-led company builds and launches its rockets, is located in Boca Chica, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. Residents of the area are voting on whether to turn the small community into a city, with the election scheduled to conclude on Saturday.
On Monday, the Texas House State Affairs Committee voted against a bill that would have given SpaceX greater control over a highway and public beach access in the likely event the company is victorious in its effort to make Starbase into Texas’ newest city. Around 500 people live in the community today, including SpaceX employees and about 120 children, according to the Texas Tribune.
SpaceX has historically needed to close roads and beaches around Starbase in order to conduct test flights and launches, including for its massive Starship rockets, which Musk sees as a prelude to an eventual Mars mission. Closing off access to beaches in the area has required SpaceX to inform and attain permission from authorities in Cameron County, the southernmost county in Texas.
The frequent closures have contributed to legal complaints against SpaceX, and have drawn protests from local residents and activists, including the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network and Border Workers United.
Activists in the Rio Grande Valley area, where Starbase is located, protested and formally lobbied against the bills for weeks. Related proposals could be introduced before the legislature meets again next month.
As CNBC has previously reported, SpaceX has conducted test flights or launches that have resulted in fires and harm to sensitive habitat essential to some endangered species in the area.
In one example, SpaceX was fined by the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting waters in Texas in violation of the Clean Water Act. After those fines, Musk threatened to sue the FAA for “regulatory overreach” but never filed a complaint.
Following a front-page New York Times story in July about the damages to local wildlife, including bird habitat, caused by SpaceX, Musk wrote in a post on his social media site X, “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week.”
That was a week before Musk formally endorsed Donald Trump for president after an assassination attempt on the then-presumptive Republican nominee at a rally in Pennsylvania. Musk then went on to spend nearly $300 million to propel Trump back the White House, and now serves as an advisor to the president with influence over spaceflight and environmental regulations.
In leading the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has helped gut the ranks of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration. Under Trump’s EPA, the U.S. has promised to “reconsider” or target dozens of rules for elimination that currently limit air pollution and wastewater from energy, autos and manufacturing sectors.
Tim Hughes, SpaceX’s head of government affairs, didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did the offices of Republican State Representatives Gina Hinojosa and Janie Lopez, who introduced the bills to give SpaceX local beach control.
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images
Amazon is considering showing a tariff surcharge on items sold via its site for ultra-low-price items, called Haul, the company confirmed to CNBC.
“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”
Punchbowl News reported earlier on Tuesday that Amazon would “soon” begin displaying the cost of tariffs alongside the price of each product, citing a source familiar with the company’s plans.
The report drew the ire of the White House, which called Amazon’s reported plans a “hostile and political act.”
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Qwen3 is Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
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Alibaba released the next generation of its open-sourced large language models, Qwen3, on Tuesday — and experts are calling it yet another breakthrough in China’s booming open-source artificial intelligence space.
In a blog post, the Chinese tech giant said Qwen3 promises improvements in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual tasks, rivaling other top-tier models such as DeepSeek’s R1 in several industry benchmarks.
The LLM series includes eight variations that span a range of architectures and sizes, offering developers flexibility when using Qwen to build AI applications for edge devices like mobile phones.
Qwen3 is also Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a “thinking mode” for complex tasks such as coding and a “non-thinking mode” for faster, general-purpose responses.
“Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI,” Alibaba said.
The new models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s web interface. Qwen3 is also being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant, Quark.
China’s AI advancement
AI analysts told CNBC that the Qwen3 represents a serious challenge to Alibaba’s counterparts in China, as well as industry leaders in the U.S.
In a statement to CNBC, Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said the Qwen3 series is a “significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance” but also for several features that point to the “application potential of the models.”
Those features include Qwen3’s hybrid thinking mode, its multilingual support covering 119 languages and dialects and its open-source availability, Sun added.
Open-source software generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. At the start of this year, DeepSeek’s open-sourced R1 model rocked the AI world and quickly became a catalyst for China’s AI space and open-source model adoption.
“Alibaba’s release of the Qwen 3 series further underscores the strong capabilities of Chinese labs to develop highly competitive, innovative, and open-source models, despite mounting pressure from tightened U.S. export controls,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focusing on U.S.-China economic and technology competition.
According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.
Wang said that this adoption could continue with Qwen3, adding that its performance claims may make it the best open-source model globally — though still behind the world’s most cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.
Chinese competitors like Baidu have also rushed to release new AI models after the emergence of DeepSeek, including making plans to shift toward a more open-source business model.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek is accelerating the launch of its successor to its R1, citing anonymous sources.
“In the broader context of the U.S.-China AI race, the gap between American and Chinese labs has narrowed—likely to a few months, and some might argue, even to just weeks,” Wang said.
“With the latest release of Qwen 3 and the upcoming launch of DeepSeek’s R2, this gap is unlikely to widen—and may even continue to shrink.”