Ubisoft Quebec
Ubisoft Quebec was announced on 11 April 2005, and was effectively opened 2 June 2005. In June 2008, Ubisoft Quebec ramped up its computer-generated imagery business to work on movies in conjunction with Guillemot. The unit was closed down again with the foundation of Ubisoft Motion Pictures in May 2011. On 3 November 2011, Ubisoft acquired a Quebec City-based development division of Longtail Studios, of which 48 employees were merged into Ubisoft Quebec, while 6–7, including the division's manager, departed.
Ubisoft
While they established operating offices in Paris, the brothers used the chateau in Carentoir as the primary space for development, hoping the setting would lure developers, as well as to have a better way to manage expectations of their developers. However, after about two years, the costs of maintaining the chateau were too expensive, and the developers, about a half-dozen at the time, were given the option to relocate to Paris. One of Ubi Soft's first hires was Michel Ancel who was only a teenager at the time, but had been noticed by the brothers for his animation skills, and he and his family relocated to Carentoir. However, with the chateau's closure, Ancel's family could not afford the cost of living in Paris, and returned to Montpellier in southern France, while the Guillemot brothers told Ancel to keep them abreast of anything he might come up with there. Ancel came back later with Frédéric Houde with a prototype of a game with highly-animated features which caught the brothers' interest. Michel Guillemot decided to make the project a key one for the company, establishing a studio in Montreuil to house over 100 developers in 1994, and targeting the new line of fifth generation consoles like the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation. Their game, "Rayman", was released in 1995 to critical success, and is considered the game that put Ubi Soft in the worldwide spotlight. Alongside this, Yves managed Guillemot Informatique, making deals with Electronic Arts, Sierra On-Line and MicroProse to distribute their games in France. By the end of the decade, Guillemot Informatique began expanding to other markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. They entered the video game distribution and wholesale markets, and by 1993 they had become the largest distributor of video games in France.