What goes up, must come down. Most devs still have WAY more people than pre-CoVid. It is only natural that they have to downscale because those delusions of a permanent growth haven't played out.
UbiSoft is crazy. They have had 20K+ employees until recently which is completely insane for the little output they generate and for the relatively little revenue they are making. Like, EA has roughly 14K employees at $7.5bn revenue and Ubi has just under 19K employees now at "only" about $2bn revenue (2024 forecast).
Ubi are in need of massive streamlining and restructuring. They need to shut down some studios and fire literally a dozen thousand people or so to get their shit back together.
The main reason no one has wanted to acquire UbiSoft yet is because they are such an unmanageable mess. Tencent has already been invested for a long time but even they do not want to actually buy out UbiSoft.
According to the recent rumors (that make sense) they (Ubi + Tencent) seem to be looking at a deal where they basically split up UbiSoft into a good bank (the valuable IP etc.) and a bad bank.
That said, Ubi's issues are often times exaggerated as if they are about to croak. They're not. Star Wars Oulaws has underperformed, XDefiant was a flop and AssCreed Shadows had to be delayed but they are expected to still reach a break-even result for the financial year.
They are not making substantial losses yet. It's just a bit of a messy company that could get in serious trouble if they continue producing flops while not cutting down on costs/staff but they are nowhere near an existential crisis YET.
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