A gameplay programmer for Ubisoft has elaborated upon potential reasons for Assassin's Creed Unity's multitude of issues slipping past the company's game testing process.
"But to answer your question: ‘Do they not have retail units to test on?’ – Yes, we do have retail units, but you can’t test anything on them, because they can only run signed code. Which means that the only time when we can actually run a game we worked on on a retail console is when we get the actual discs with it in the studio, a couple of weeks before the release.
And yes, there are bugs that appear only on retail consoles which do not happen on dev kits because of hardware or firmware differences, those are usually fixed in time for day 1 patch or slightly later, but I honestly don’t see how you could do anything about them beforehand, since like I have said – we can’t run games in development on retail kits."
Insider Gaming - "Ubisoft has cancelled yet another game, this time ending development on the Animal Crossing-inspired title Alterra."
HALIFAX (April 14, 2026) – Laid-off Ubisoft workers in Halifax have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a settlement with the video-game giant. The terms of the settlement, including the compensation employees will receive, is confidential.
I can't sit here and act like I know these workers financial situations. And I'm sure nobody wakes up WANTING to go to court. But for the sake of the industry, I wish some of these types of cases made it to trial.
Settlements allow companies to continue to do whatever abusive practices they do. While the trials (should the company lose) would actually force real changes for the better.
But again, I'm not in these workers shoes and I can understand them not wanting to risk it.
Two-day event includes exclusive reveals, trailers and playable games on show floor.
Excuses and more excuses EA err I mean Ubisoft.
The real excuse is that they didn't have the time to test it. They are already working on the next Assassins Creed because it's a yearly released game series now.
I think the real reason was to make the Holiday Season.
It's way too obvious that Ubi rushed this out to the new consoles before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.
It was a hack job and a schedule to not only release this game yearly but probably controlled by marketing PM's.
It's always good to see people on sites reaction to games after the first or second wave of conspiracy, outrage and placing blame on a certain company and console. Then people start to realize just how foolish the thought of a company purposely gimping a game just to please another company was.
Sometimes the most obvious answer is the well..the answer...AC: Unity was a rushed and sh*tt*job.
I say this every time and I'll say it again. It comes down to release managers and keeping healthy 3rd party relationships. If you are a major publisher, you can have issues "waved". Platform QA gets gold disks(release disks) at LEAST a month before the targeted launch date(its usually a couple months, for revision time). Here's the deal though, if you are Ubisoft, EA, or Activision, and your "final" release build has any major flaws, they will get waved to be fixed post launch. There is entirely too much money riding on the ad campaigns to just postpone a release that close to launch. Sony, MS, and Nintendo have to maintain healthy relationships with major 3rd party publishers. Denying their build because of any bugs found by QA literally would cost millions. Don't blame QA, they found all of these issues and many more, I'm willing to bet. These are executive decisions.