Its video game franchises include Assassin's Creed, Driver, Far Cry, Just Dance, Prince of Persia, Rabbids, Rayman, Tom Clancy's, and Watch Dogs.

The five sons of the family – Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel, and Yves – helped with the company's sales, distribution, accounting, and management with their parents before university.

[13] Games published by Ubi Soft in 1986 include Zombi, Ciné Clap, Fer et Flamme, Masque, and Graphic City, a sprite editing program.

[17] Ubi Soft started importing products from abroad for distribution in France, with 1987 releases including Elite Software's Commando and Ikari Warriors, the former of which sold 15,000 copies by January 1987.

These included Michel Ancel, a teenager at the time noted for his animation skills,[6] and Serge Hascoët, who applied to be a video game tester for the company.

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 a line of 5th generation consoles such as the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation.

[6] Yves managed Guillemot Informatique, making deals with Electronic Arts, Sierra On-Line and MicroProse to distribute their games in France.

With the extra infusion of €170 million, they were able to then purchase Red Storm Entertainment in 2000, giving them access to the Tom Clancy's series of stealth and spy games.

[6] The company got a foothold in the United States when it worked with Microsoft to develop Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, an Xbox-exclusive title released in 2002 to challenge the PlayStation-exclusive Metal Gear Solid series, by combining elements of Tom Clancy's series with elements of an in-house developed game called The Drift.

[6] In March 2001, Gores Technology Group sold The Learning Company's entertainment division (which included games originally published by Broderbund, Mattel Interactive, Mindscape and Strategic Simulations) to them.

Within 2008, Ubisoft made a deal with Tom Clancy for perpetual use of his name and intellectual property for video games and other auxiliary media.

[34] In July 2013, Ubisoft announced a breach in its network resulting in the potential exposure of up to 58 million accounts including usernames, email address, and encrypted passwords.

In addition to advertising firm Havas, Ubisoft was one of the first target properties identified by Vivendi, which as of September 2017 has an estimated valuation of $6.4 billion.

[40] In a presentation during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, Yves Guillemot stressed the importance that Ubisoft remain an independent company to maintain its creative freedom.

"[42] Vice-president of Live Operations, Anne Blondel-Jouin, expressed similar sentiment in an interview with PCGamesN, stating that Ubisoft's success was partly due to "...being super independent, being very autonomous.

[56] In October 2017, Ubisoft announced it reached a deal with an "investment services provider" to help them purchase back 4 million shares by the end of the year, preventing others, specifically Vivendi, from buying these.

[57] In the week before Vivendi would gain double-voting rights for previously purchased shares, the company, in quarterly results published in November 2017, announced that it had no plans to acquire Ubisoft for the next 6 months, nor would seek board positions due to the shares they held during that time, and that it "would ensure that its interest in Ubisoft would not exceed the threshold of 30% through the doubling of its voting rights."

Vivendi remained committed to expanding in the video game sector, identifying that their investment in Ubisoft could represent a capital gain of over 1 billion euros.

[61][62] Since 2018, Ubisoft's studios have continued to focus on some franchises, including Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy's, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs.

As reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, while Ubisoft as a whole had nearly 16,000 developers by mid-2019, larger than some of its competitors, and producing 5 to 6 major AAA releases each year compared to the 2 or 3 from the others, the net revenue earned per employee was the lowest of the 4 due to generally lower sales of its games.

To counter this, Ubisoft in October 2019 postponed 3 of the 6 titles it had planned in 2019 to 2020 or later, as to help place more effort on improving the quality of the existing and released games.

Between Ubisoft's internal investigation and a study by the newspaper Libération, employees had been found to have records of sexual misconduct and troubling behaviour, going back up to 10 years, which had been dismissed by the human resources departments.

[82] In an email to staff, Yves Guillemot told employees to take responsibility for the company's forthcoming projects, asking that "each of you be especially careful and strategic with your spending and initiatives, to ensure we're being as efficient and lean as possible", while also saying that "The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality, and show everyone what we are capable of achieving.

"[83][84] Union workers at Ubisoft Paris took issue with this message, calling for a strike and demanding higher salaries and improved working conditions.

[91] In 2024, Ubisoft released multiple games that experienced underperforming sales and declining playerbases post-launch, which included Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, XDefiant, and Star Wars Outlaws, causing its stock to fall to nearly its lowest levels in the previous decade.

[92] As a result, the company announced they were launching an investigation of their development cycles to focus on a "player-centric approach", and opted to delay its next major flagship game, Assassin's Creed Shadows, from November 2024 to February 2025.

[94] Bloomberg News reported in October 2024 that the Guillemots and Tencent were considering this and other alternatives to shift ownership of the company in light of the recent poor financial performance.

[97] On October 16, 2024, over 700 Ubisoft employees in France began a three-day strike, protesting the company's requirement to return to the office three days a week.

[168] That year, Electronic Arts established a deal with Crytek to build a wholly different title with an improved version of the CryEngine, leaving them unable to continue work on Far Cry.

[173][174] Ubisoft introduced the Dunia 2 engine first in Far Cry 3 in 2012,[175] which was made to improve the performance of Dunia-based games on consoles and to add more complex rendering features such as global illumination.