Ubisoft

The Guillemot brothers started out distributing other people's games before making their own. Rayman (1995) gave the company a mascot, the Tom Clancy licence brought Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six, and Assassin's Creed (2007) from the Montreal studio became the template for a generation of open-world games. Climb the tower, reveal the map, tick off the icons — copied so widely it became known as "the Ubisoft formula".

Ubisoft has also tended to lead with copy protection its customers hate: in 2010 some PC releases demanded a permanent connection and paused the game if it dropped. The DRM platform Uplay is now called Ubisoft Connect. The family fended off a hostile takeover attempt by Vivendi between 2015 and 2018, and in 2025 brought in Tencent as a minority owner of a new subsidiary.