List of Ubisoft subsidiaries
Ubisoft Quebec was founded by Ubisoft in 2005 in Quebec City, Quebec. The studio was set out to provide assistance to Ubisoft's main studios, and it also participated in the development of downloadable content for the "Assassin's Creed" series, such as "Tyranny of King Washington" for "Assassin's Creed III", and "Freedom Cry" for "". On 3 November 2010, Ubisoft announced that it had acquired Longtail Studios Quebec, a studio of New York City-based Longtail Studios, itself founded in 2003 by Ubisoft co-founder Gérard Guillemot. As a result, 48 of the studio's staff were moved to Ubisoft's existing Ubisoft Quebec operations. The division's director, Andreas Mollman, resigned, and 5–6 employees were laid off. The Quebec studio worked on "", a Kinect title released in 2012, and became the lead developer for "Assassin's Creed Syndicate" in 2015, replacing the Montreal studio. It would be the first time the Quebec studio changed its role from a support studio to a lead developer of a AAA game. The studio has 500 employees.
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.