| Hi everyone. Today we're talking about the woes of Ubisoft Entertainment SA but first... This week's top gaming news: This week, Ubisoft announced that it plans to delay the new game Assassin's Creed Shadows from November to February, moving it out of the holiday season. That news was surprising enough on its own, but even stranger was what came with it. Ubisoft said the move was made because its most recent game, Star Wars Outlaws, had not hit sales expectations. "While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," the company said in a statement. Rather than ship the next Assassin's Creed with some bugs and fix them later, as the company did with Star Wars Outlaws, it is looking to release the new game in tip-top shape. On top of that, the company said it will release Assassin's Creed Shadows on Steam rather than keeping it on its dedicated Ubisoft PC store, and it will offer the first expansion for free to anyone who pre-orders. Taken together, this all adds up to a clear conclusion: Ubisoft needs Assassin's Creed Shadows to be a hit. If not, the consequences could be dire. Ubisoft, founded by five brothers in 1986 who still run it today, has always been a stalwart of the industry. But following this week's news, shares of the French gaming conglomerate fell to their lowest level since December 2013. The company's share price, which closed at €10.46 on Friday in Paris, is down roughly 60% since the first Assassin's Creed was released in November 2007. Analysts are railing against the company, and a few shareholders are talking about rebellion. The downturn is the result of a number of factors including widespread stagnation in the video-game industry. More people are playing video games than ever before, but many of them are playing the same old games, such as Grand Theft Auto Online and Fortnite, which makes it more difficult for new games to break through and become a hit. But Ubisoft has also faced unique challenges. It bet big on Star Wars and a game based on the Avatar films only to see them both miss, and it spent nearly a decade developing an online pirate game called Skull & Bones that failed to attract much of an audience. The company dedicated countless resources to chasing trends that went nowhere, such as a push for NFTs (remember NFTs?) that players simply laughed at. Doug Creutz, an analyst for TD Cowen, described it as "an almost non-stop parade of game delays, followed by game launches that are still undercooked, as well as misallocation of capital to games that probably never should have been green-lit in the first place." Will Yves Guillemot, the company's chief executive officer, survive the turbulence? He's fended off emergencies before — most notably a hostile takeover attempt from French rival Vivendi SE. This week, the board of directors announced that it will launch "a review aimed at further improving our execution," but five of those directors just happen to be Guillemot brothers. That said, there's reason to believe that investors won't have much more patience for failure. One analyst recently told me that Ubisoft reminds him of THQ Inc., the video-game publisher that collapsed in 2013 after a string of flops and bad bets. Now, all eyes are on Assassin's Creed Shadows, which simply must be a hit. If it isn't, prepare to see a Ubisoft that looks very different than it did in the past. I will of course be diving into the new Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom, which came out Thursday. It's the first proper game in the series to let you play as the eponymous princess herself, and it seems like it will blend the 2D feel of older games with the innovation of the newer ones thanks to an ability that allows Zelda to conjure objects into thin air. I can't wait to play more. | 
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