Even as new data shows increased interest in single-player games, it seems Ubisoft is still all-in on free-to-play and live service titles.

It’s been obvious for many years that Ubisoft is desperate to break into the live service games business with a bona fide success. So far, though, the only game to have any staying power is Rainbow Six Siege, with other attempts, like XDefiant, proving not so popular.

‘If at first you don’t succeed’ seems to be the company motto, since prior comments by CEO Yves Guillemot have pointed to the next Ghost Recon and Far Cry games featuring at least some live service elements.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Ubisoft will stop releasing traditional single-player games (such as the still MIA Prince Of Persia and Splinter Cell remakes), but new comments by the company’s UK division further highlight how it thinks such projects are growing increasingly irrelevant.

As spotted by City A.M., Ubisoft recently published new filings with the UK government’s Companies House agency, which includes an annual report on Ubisoft’s financials for the fiscal year ending in March 2025.

The report can be freely viewed by the public, but the main takeaway is that Ubisoft fully expects its revenue to fall throughout the 2026 fiscal year thanks to a decline in sales of physical software in the UK.

Physical sales of games have dropped more and more each year, as customers turn to the convenience of digital purchases, but Ubisoft also sees this as a sign that players are losing interest in both ‘full’ games and new ones in general.

‘The traditional ‘full game’ model of selling a single £50 to £60 game to a consumer as a one-time purchase continues to become less ubiquitous, with multi-game subscription services, long running games as a service titles, free-to-play games, and cloud streaming offerings all providing new and attractive ways for consumers to access gaming content,’ reads the report.

‘Consumers are playing fewer games, playing them for longer, and as a result, outside of a few notable exceptions, many new games are struggling to stand out and achieve the sales they may once have had, whilst the market is more volatile and the potential for any specific title less predictable as a result.’

There’s no mention of how individual games Ubisoft has released in the past year or so have performed, but its last major single-player release – Assassin’s Creed Shadows – was said to have sold ‘in line with expectations’.

Even so, Ubisoft had a rough enough 2024, with Star Wars: Outlaws singled out for its ‘soft sales’, that it needed Tencent to bail it out via a new subsidiary partially controlled by the Chinese conglomerate and focused on Ubisoft’s three biggest IPs: Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry.

Coincidentally, Ubisoft’s comments come at the same time as a new survey which discovered that the majority of players actually still care a great deal about traditional single-player games, particularly in the West.

It depends on a player’s age, but even those between 16 to 24 only preferred multiplayer games by a tiny majority of 51%; so it’s not as if Gen Z is emphatically rejecting the traditional model in favour of Fortnite and its ilk.

In related news, there are suspicions that things are far worse at Ubisoft than it lets on, as the company last week delayed releasing its quarterly earnings right before a call with investors and temporarily halted the trading of its shares (via Reuters).

This suspension was done to ‘limit unnecessary speculation and market volatility during this short delay’ according to an internal memo shared with employees, but that hasn’t stopped internet speculation that Ubisoft is planning to do what EA did and go private via a corporate buyout.

EA will come under new ownership in 2026 (EA/Metro)

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