In an unusual video in Paris, Ubisoft documents Assassin's Creed: Shadows' messy culture war saga

Exclusive: A transcript of Ubisoft’s official company video about battling the backlash to its biggest game in years. A key line: "We had to stop focusing on those who hated us."

“We’ve been asked a lot to explain what happened,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told an audience of video game industry insiders at an event last Thursday during Paris Games Week, “which is why we’re showing you the video today.”

The “what happened” that Guillemot was referring to was the mid-2024 online backlash to Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

Last spring, the franchise’s long-awaited venture to feudal Japan, got its first full trailer and quickly became a target for Elon Musk and others, who slammed it for featuring a Black man as its samurai co-protagonist.

The video Guillemot showed to his audience on Thursday was a remarkable 184-second professionally-narrated feature about what Ubisoft did about it. It’s the kind of fiasco that game companies are typically loath to discuss.

“What happens when a legendary franchise reveals one of its most anticipated experiences?” the video begins ... “Only to become the game everyone loves to hate?”

The gist of the video—and of remarks from Guillemot that followed—is that Ubisoft was initially thrown off by the backlash, pivoted by delaying the game, polished it, and focused on appealing to Assassin’s Creed fans who would in turn defend the game.

The narrator explains: “We had to stop focusing on those who hated us. We had to start firing up our allies.”

In remarks on stage in Paris following the video, Guillemot said the company worked last year to present Shadows as a game rather than an expression of an ideology.

“We were initially surprised by the extent of the attacks,” he said. “And we quickly realized that it was a battle, a battle with our fans, to demonstrate that we were, in fact, more of a video game than a message.”¹

(Note: Guillemot gave these remarks in French. I ran a machine translation of his comments by a fluent bilingual speaker and by Ubisoft. You can read the original French via footnotes to this article).

Guillemot’s presentation in Paris was unexpected.

Even the official event description vaguely described plans for the CEO to discuss “bouleversements technologiques” (technological upheavals) and nothing about addressing Shadows and its backlash. During his session, Guillemot would eventually talk about evolving, live game worlds, AI-driven NPCs and the immersive potential of VR if it could get past requirements for heavy headsets, all topics he and Ubisoft have hit before. But prior to all that, the topic was AC Shadows backlash.

Press coverage of Guillemot’s talk, as best I can tell, has been non-existent. But Game File obtained an audio recording of the Ubisoft video and was privy to Guillemot’s remarks. Both help fill out more of the picture of what has happened to one of the world’s biggest and most embattled game companies in recent years and how upper management views those events.

While the video was shown in Paris, it is almost entirely in English. A Ubisoft rep told me that’s because the company may also air it internally for members of its global workforce, though there don’t seem to be plans to post it to public-facing Ubisoft channels.

Here a transcript of the pretty corporate but also very dramatic 184-second video: