Former Assassin's Creed Lead Sues Ubisoft for $1.3 Million - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 19 January 2026 / 2,128 Views
Marc-Alexis Côté, the former lead for the Assassin's Creed franchise, is suing Ubisoft for $1.3 million, according to CBC Radio Canada.
He was put in charge of the franchise in 2022 with the goal to shape the future of the popular franchise from Ubisoft.
However, after the company launched a new new subsidiary Vantage Studios that now oversees the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six franchises, he left the studio after declining a leadership position. This is according to Ubisoft co-CEOs Charlie Guillemot and Christophe Derennes.
Côté would later put how his own statement saying he didn't resign and was "Asked to step aside" as Ubisoft "decided to transfer the leadership of the Assassin’s Creed franchise to someone closer to its organizational structure."
The new position Ubisoft offered him "did not carry the same scope, mandate, or continuity with the work I had been entrusted with in recent years."
The lawsuit states Côté was offered the role of Head of Production that would have served under Head of Franchise, which was a new role created at Vantage to oversee the three major IPs. It also claims that CEO Yves Guillemot would have opposed his application as the position was going to be based in France.
Ubisoft in September would offer him a director job of a Creative House, which would have overseen second tier series at the company. Côté saw himself as the "guardian of the Assassin's Creed franchise" and considered these proposals as a demotion.
He saw this as an "unacceptable demotion" "constituting constructive dismissal," he put Ubisoft on notice requesting to pay him a severance.
The following day Ubisoft announced his departure and he was leaving voluntarily. The lawsuit claims this was to avoid paying him compensation and to maintain the non-competition clause.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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So basically to me this whole situation reads like:
Ubisoft was negotiating with Tencent for a much needed bailout because Ubisoft has been struggling financially for many years now. Tencent was willing to give them the bailout if they would spinoff their 3 main franchises (AC, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six) under a new label that Tencent could have partial control over as minority stakeholder (Tencent holds 25% of the stock for Vantage Studios); however Tencent had seen the pre-release backlash against AC Shadows and then the launch underperformance of AC Shadows, and found out that Ubisoft had promised the manager of the AC series from 2022-2025 (during the years of AC Shadows backlash) the position of heading up Vantage Studios, and Tencent wasn't having it, they wanted somebody not mired in controversy to run Vantage. Ubisoft caved in to Tencent's demands because they needed this Tencent bailout, and now the jilted director is suing over it.
If this guy is the one who came up with Valhalla (and I believe he is); then I understand why Ubisoft went in another direction for a franchise director. The fucking blue dots... (and so many things were so bad after coming from Odyssey).
No matter if you like the old AS style or the more RPG/Open world style, Valhalla was such a pain compared to other games.
He was actually an Executive Producer on Valhalla I believe, smaller decisions like that would likely have been made by the Game Director (Eric Baptizat) and the Creative Director (Ashraf Ismail). Before that Marc-Alexis Cote was the Senior Producer and Game Director of AC Odyssey, the Creative Director of AC Syndicate and the Freedom Cry and Tyranny of King Washington DLC's, co-Game Director on AC3, and Lead Level Designer on AC Brotherhood.
