Ubisoft Montreal
The establishment of Ubisoft Montreal is considered to have significant impact on Montreal. The Mile End area over the next several years transformed from a low-rent area to a commercial hub with new businesses, stores, restaurants and other attractions for the young workforce. For the city overall, Ubisoft Montreal was the first major video game studio and helped to establish its position as a creative city. Several other publishers, including Electronic Arts, Eidos Interactive, THQ and Warner Bros., established studios in Montreal following Ubisoft, with the Quebec and federal governments continuity to offer subsidiary programs to support high-tech job creation. In exchange, the studio has spent up to in the province of Quebec, and with their parent publisher, helped to open Ubisoft Quebec in Quebec City in 2005 and Ubisoft Saguenay in Saguenay in 2018 to help support Ubisoft Montreal's efforts, using similar tax incentives from the providence to help found these.
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.