Ubisims

## Ubisims Experiences SA

* **Rating:**A
* **Headquarters:**28 Rue Armand Carrel, 93100 Montreuil, France
* **President:**Esmée Guillemot
* **Business Type:**Game development and distribution, custom software creation, simsense recording and editing services

Founded in Brittany  in 1984 by the Guillemot family as Guillemot Infomatique (renamed 'Ubi Soft Entertainment' in 1986, 'Ubisoft Simulations' in 2030 and Ubisims Experiances in 2057) as a general software company, Ubi Soft entered into the games market in 1986 with *Zombi*, which was a critical and commercial success, presaging the future direction of the corporation.

For the next ten years, the company made its niche not only developing its own games, but licensing and distributing foreign games (from the US, Germany, Japan and Spain among other countries) in France, and setting up overseas distribution for their own products. Ubi Soft came to international attention with the release of the game *Rayman*. On the strength of their success with *Rayman*, their Initial Public offering in 1996 funded their global expansion, founding studios in Annacy, Shanghai, Montreal and Milan. Entering the 21st Century, the company cemented its place in the first tier of global gaming companies with franchises like *Myst, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy's*and *Far Cry*. As it grew, it became an increasingly tempting target for the rising megacorps and fended off several takeover bids in the chaos  of the years around the Awakening, including one from Vivendi  in 2015 and another from Fuchi Industrial Electronics in 2023. They were facing another takeover in 2029 by Keruba International, which was only interrupted by the Matrix Crash of '29, which ravaged Ubisoft, but destroyed Keruba (which would be reborn as Renraku Computer Systems). Most of Ubisoft's digital assets were destroyed, and their systems wiped clean. All except Winnipeg. Their Winnipeg Ubisoft branch had been offline for a full upgrade when the Crash Virus had begun and when it ended, Ubisoft had all the data stored at Winnipeg to rebuild from.

With the creation of the new Matrix, Ubisoft (now rebranded as Ubisoft Simulations), the UbiHub was established in the Matrix as a central gaming space for all Ubisoft’s products, based on the post-crash SnowStorm engine, a direct descendant of the original Snowdrop engine, retooled for ASIST-compatibility.

Remaining popular through the 2040’s and ‘50’s, the SnowStorm and the later SnowFall engines increasingly became integrated into the backbone of the gaming and sims Matrix, forming the core of such popular offerings as *Dragonstorm* and *CanadiaOnline*. Starting in 2055, SnowFall 3.6 began integrating semi-autonomous knowbots into its architecture to manage updating, maintenance, opponent AI and other functions (part of a general overhaul leading up to the 2057 rebranding as Ubisims).

The big change, of course, came when everything changed, the Second Crash . Like most Matrix-based businesses, Ubisims systems were entirely crashed and most of their Sysadmins and a lot of their devs died in the crash. But when the surviving members of Ubisims IT department logged back in a few days later, they discovered that the system, while buggy as drek, was back up. And it shouldn’t have been. A further investigation revealed that the system had, well, started rebooting and defragging itself. And was very polite about inviting them to help.

Of course, this was late 2064, so everybody was entirely terrified of AI and in their terror there were two courses of action Ubisims could have taken: scorched earth or folding like origami. Ubisims chose the second course and immediately gave the newly self-named ‘Snowdrop’ (to honor its ancestors), whatever system resources it asked for, along with a massive bribe of stock options.

Since Snowdrop, Ubisims has succeeded in spawning several other AI: Anvil, Scimitar and Dunia Cry. Their early adoption of a collaborative attitude towards AI has helped them maintain their market position, and their independence, leading to them becoming one of the largest independent game distributers outside the AAA-Primes, with offices on every continent. Ubisims' offerings in the 2070's are a mix of old classics (*Assassin's Creed: Mars Base, Far Cry 22* are both scheduled for early 2077 releases), licensed properties (such as the recent *Neil the Ork Barbarian: Earthdawn* tie-in) and new flagships, such as the popular *Shadowlink* series of games (*Shadowlink: Boston* and *Shadowlink: Caracas,* with *Shadowlink: Cairo* expected out later this year).

Which is not to say that its been smooth sailing forever. Recent allegations of the exploitation of SINless Technomancer labor, including keeping them in poor working conditions and forcing them to work in 'crunch' conditions for extended periods of time, sometimes even paying them in room and board, with the threat of reporting them to even MORE exploitative corps, has made them a target for many, ah, more tech-savvy operators...

Return to: Snowdrop