Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products
Isn’t this how the gaming boom and bust cycle always worked?
Indie(ish) games boom, AAA studios buy them and make them bust.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
Don’t forget AA, doing pretty good too.