Three days ago Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed head honcho Marc-Alexis Côté was leaving the company. “Marc-Alexis Côté has chosen to pursue a new path elsewhere outside of Ubisoft,” said a spokesperson at the time. Except, now Côté is insisting that’s not how it went down, and that he was in fact “asked to step aside.”
Marc-Alexis Côté has been running everything Assassin’s Creed for almost two decades, overseeing a vast number of games in the enormous franchise. But it’s also been a tumultuous time of change for the cash-strapped Ubisoft, leading to March’s announcement of a major business relationship with Tencent, in which the French company took a $1.25 billion bailout from the Chinese firm. This led to the announcement of a new co-owned subsidiary that would take over the production of Assassin’s Creed, eventually announced a couple of weeks back as Vantage Studios. The joint-owned venture was created to take over the running of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, its name revealed just a couple of weeks ago. This week, according to VGC, an internal memo was sent to staff from Vantage’s co-CEOs Charlie Guillemot and Christophe Derennes stating that Côté was “offered a role as part of Vantage Studios’ leadership, but declined.”
“Following the organizational restructuring announced in March 2025,” Ubisoft told IGN in a statement, “Marc-Alexis Côté has chosen to pursue a new path elsewhere outside of Ubisoft. While we are saddened to see him go, we’re confident that our talented teams will carry forward the strong foundation he helped build.”
But Côté has now taken to his LinkedIn page to claim a very different version of events. “The past 24 hours have been deeply emotional,” his statement begins, sharing that people’s messages sent to him have meant a great deal. However, he noted that a recurring theme in those messages was people’s surprise that he had “chosen” to leave Assassin’s Creed, “especially given the passion I still hold for it.” Except, he says, that’s not what happened. “The truth is simple: I did not make that choice.”
Reading between the lines of Côté’s post, it seems that the role he was offered by Ubisoft was far more like a demotion. “Ubisoft decided to transfer the leadership of the Assassin’s Creed franchise to someone closer to its new organizational structure,” said the former boss. “A different position was mentioned, but it did not carry the same scope, mandate, or continuity with the work I had been entrusted with in recent years.”
Insisting he holds no resentment, and still greatly values his time at Ubisoft, Côté is unequivocal in his position:
“I also owe it to my teams, past and present, to say this plainly:
I did not walk away.
I stayed at my post until Ubisoft asked me to step aside.”
Often when long-term leadership are let go companies will issue statements suggesting it was all amicable, not just to save face, but to offer the person leaving the dignity of not looking like they were fired. And it seems technically true that as staff were told, he was offered a leadership role, just one that wasn’t the job he’d had for 20 years and wanted to continue.
Similarly, Ubisoft’s statement to IGN isn’t an outright lie, but just ambiguous enough to suggest the decision was Côté’s rather than its own. It’s true that after not wanting to take a likely demotion he did “chose to pursue a new path elsewhere,” but it’s clearly designed to make everything seem a lot more amicable and positive than it seems it really was. And the consequence of that certainly didn’t work out in Côté’s favor.
