Identity Crisis at Ubisoft generates two of the biggest indie hits of 2025

The year 2025 was marked by expected successes such as Death Stranding 2, Split Fiction, and Donkey Kong Bananza. However, the gaming industry was shaken by two notable debuts, Dispatch and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which are, ironically, the result of failed strategic decisions by Ubisoft. Both titles were created by talented former employees who left the French giant out of frustration with the focus on games as a service.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the game with the most nominations in the history of The Game Awards (TGA) (with 12 categories, including Game of the Year), emerged from the ignored ambition of Guillaume Broche. In 2020, he left Ubisoft because he felt "bored with the work and wanting to do something different", as he told the BBC. Broche founded Sandfall Interactive with screenwriter Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, and the JRPG-inspired demo from childhood became reality five years later, driven by a team of 30 passionate people.

In the case of Dispatch, success came from abandoning a failed games as a service project. Nick Herman, co-founder of AdHoc Studio, had left Telltale Games (winner of the 2012 GOTY with The Walking Dead) for Ubisoft San Francisco to work on a new Splinter Cell. Under management orders, the stealth project was turned into a game of service to compete with Call of Duty, which became xDefiant.

Herman described the disillusionment to Bloomberg: “You realize that all the things you cared about, they cease to matter. It's common in the world of games,” he said.

In 2018, Herman and his former colleagues from Telltale left Ubisoft and founded AdHoc Studio. After a difficult start, Dispatch evolved into a narrative animation that sold a million copies in 10 days. The game garnered the involvement of stars like Aaron Paul and Jeffrey Wright (Breaking Bad and Westworld), Laura Bailey, and the casting director of Invincible and BoJack Horseman.

While Ubisoft is bitter about the failure of two games as a service (xDefiant and Skull and Bones) and faces a crisis, former developers of the company brought to life masterpieces made with passion and focus, which are now competing at the TGA: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for Game of the Year and Dispatch for Best Debut Indie Game.

With Ubisoft in an identity crisis and its former talents reaping record successes at Sandfall Interactive and AdHoc Studio, when will the leadership of the French giant reverse its strategy of focus on games as a service to value individual creative vision?