Just a few years ago, Ubisoft was competing with EA for the title of worst games publisher on the planet. They were in the throes of a hostile takeover and had ridden the Assassin’s Creed franchise into the ground.  Now, they’re dragging themselves back in the good graces of gamers and the hostile takeover from Vivendi that once seemed imminent appears to have been stymied.

Things really started to turn around for them with Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin’s Creed, not the games themselves necessarily, but how Ubisoft decided to deal with them.

We’ll start with the Assassin’s Creed franchise. What started as a new an innovative series soon turned into an annual rehash. Syndicate debuted in 2015 to middling reviews and sales and Ubisoft decided it was time for a change.

2016 was the first year in almost a decade that didn’t feature a new Assassin’s Creed game. Ubisoft had decided to take a step back and give the next game in the franchise some extra love. The result was Assassin’s Creed Origins, one of the best game’s in the franchise.

Even though Origins has its flaws, at least it never felt like an incomplete or rushed game. Things that had been long overdo for a change, were finally changed. The combat system was revamped, the world felt better as you moved through it and the game just felt like it was more than a new skin on an old game.

Just as important, skipping a year help relieve some of the fatigue over the franchise. The Call of Duty series isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world, but it’s been around so long that many gamers are just sick of it in general. Assassin’s Creed was surging headlong down that same worn out path. 

Even though holding back Origins for a year likely hurt Ubisoft’s immediate bottom-line, it was no doubt the right decision in the long run for both the company and its community.  

Rainbow Six Siege first debuted in 2015. Now, three years later, the game is experiencing an all-time high player count according to SteamCharts.

Siege has had a particularly mediocre rise to the top. It received a lukewarm reception at launch and didn’t see a significant rise in player count until well after its first year. But instead of abandoning the game and leaving its playerbase to dwindle and die, Ubisoft kept working on it and provided more and more patches and DLC. Now the game is doing better than ever and is one of the best titles in Ubisoft’s vast library. 

Nurturing a game like Siege has helped build a new confidence in the company and has proven that they’re willing to do right by their fans. Both Siege and Origins are, at the very least, signals that Ubisoft is getting back onto the right path.

All that being said, Ubisoft is far from perfect. There are more than a few bad things that you could still say about them, but that’s not the point. The point is, they’re getting better. If you told me that EA would be significantly better in 2020 than they were in 2017, I’d be happy with that. Seismic shifts are most impactful when they happen overtime. 

Gamers are a hard bunch to please and few companies, if any, are universally adored in the gaming community. All that we can really hope for is that Ubisoft continues to better themselves and that EA might someday do the same.