Ubisoft has announced the co-CEO's who will lead its new subsidiary

Earlier this year, Ubisoft announced that they were creating a new company, one which would operate outside of its umbrella of studios and this new group would have complete control over Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Since then, there has been no word on the studios efforts, but now we know who will lead it, another Guillemot.

So, Ubisoft was founded in the 1980s by the Guillemot family, five brothers who all worked together. Since then, Yves Guillemot, one of the five brothers has been the CEO and steered the company through all their ups and downs. With all the talk about the company selling, splitting up and everything else between, the news of a new separate company was welcomed with cautious optimism, because the company has made lofty promises in the past and then never delivered and it seems folks were right to be concerned as the new Co-CEOs that have been announced are Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot; the latter is the son of Yves.

For Christophe Derennes, he has a long history with Ubisoft, he was the co-founder of the Montreal office, which many consider to be the home of the best games from the studio. It will also be one of the studios that will be owned by the new subsidiary. Derennes has worked on dozens and dozens of games over the years from Far Cry to For Honor, Splinter Cell to Shaun White Skateboarding and just about everything else. Given the man has been with the company for more than 35 years, placing him in charge seems like a smart decision, Charlie is where the issue lies.

Charlie on the other hand has one single game to his credit from his time as the studio manager of Owlient, a company Ubisoft bought in 2011. He left the studio in early 2021, just a few months before Ubisoft would kill off his only game credit, which was Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, a game with some questionable history. Since then he went and co-founded a studio called Unagi and while you might think that it was all about games, nope it was a fleecing studio of Web3, AI and NFT.

So those are the two leaders of the new group, now Ubisoft published a brief interview with them, where it outlines that Derennes is the how of the pair, as in “how will we make this game”; Guillemot is the why, as in “why should be make this game.” For a studio to have two leaders is not uncommon, Disney for the longest time had multiple leaders, Rare Ltd out of the UK had the Stamper Bros for the longest time as well. My issue here and I am sure the same many others will raise, why is someone who made a bad game, left the company before it was killed off and then tried selling scams in the form of NFTs allowed to take control of some of the biggest brands in the Ubisoft portfolio.

Now Charlie Guillemot could be the nicest person around, my issue is not with the man himself, but his track record. He barely has one and what he does have, does not paint a great picture. There is of course a lot of discussion around him being given the role simply because his dad the CEO of Ubisoft and that likely plays a part, but I doubt we will ever know.

For now, it seems that we will need to wait a while longer for details about the new group, even their name is unknown and because of that, any new games from them are likely going to be held back until they are ready to reveal.