Why Ubisoft needs 12,000 game developers

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
June 21, 2018
Updated June 20, 2025
13 min

If Vivendi had succeeded in its hostile takeover of Ubisoft, you can bet the French video game publisher wouldn’t still have 14,000 employees, including 12,000 game developers. Tencent came in as a white knight investor and bought out Vivendi’s shares, relieving Ubisoft of the looming threat.

Ubisoft is using those developers to work on a very ambitious slate of games, including Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and the pirate game Skull & Bones. The latter is coming from the relatively young Ubisoft Singapore studio, but no less than six studios are contributing to that game, which arrives in 2019.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.