Ubisoft Staff Reportedly Raised Concerns About Saudi Arabia Deal for Assassin’s Creed Mirage DLC, as Company Insists it Maintains Creative Control

Ubisoft employees have raised concerns around the company’s partnership with Saudi Arabia to create new Assassin’s Creed Mirage DLC, a fresh report has revealed.

The upcoming content was first reported on back in January by a French financial newspaper, Les Echoes, which stated that the DLC had received funding from Saudi Arabia’s controversial Public Investment Fund (PIF). Ubisoft did not respond to me when asked for comment on that report at the time.

Months later, Ubisoft quietly announced the DLC itself in late August, in a social media post sent out early one Saturday morning. The brief reveal confirmed that the add-on would see Mirage hero Basim visiting AlUla, an ancient site that’s now one of Saudi Arabia’s cultural highlights.

In an internal Q&A shared with Ubisoft staff and published by GameFile, an employee asked if management believed partnering with Saudi Arabia, specifically following the killing and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, would tarnish the company’s image.

Management responded by addressing the fact that Guillemot had recently visited Saudi Arabia as part of a delegation alongside French president Emmanual Macron, but dismissed this as a “classic diplomatic tool for expanding France’s influence and reach around the world” that would help disseminate the country’s values.

As for the origins of the DLC, the management response to the query simply stated Ubisoft did “not comment on rumors.”

https://twitter.com/assassinscreed/status/1959169826619875735?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Ubisoft management also attempted to draw a distinction between the country’s leader and chairman of the PIF, Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and the PIF itself. “The latter’s money is not MBS’s, and talking with partners who do not share our democratic values ​​does not mean abandoning them,” the company’s response reads.

GameFile reports that Guillemot visited Saudi Arabia again last month to speak at the New Global Sport Conference and announce Mirage’s AlUla DLC at the event (something which also explains the unusual timing of the news being made public at the same time, albeit with no mention of Guillemot’s speech).

“We are working with AlUla, which is a UNESCO site, which is not known yet very much,” Guillemote said, announcing the DLC at the Saudi event. “But we are creating content that will be given for free to players that play Mirage, and they will be able to go in that site.

“As you can see, they will be able to play there, to have a story in this environment. I am sure they will love this region, just also because it has been done with specialists [of] archaeology, really people that know what happened then and why it was so important.”

IGN recently asked Ubisoft for more detail on the matter and was told that, as with every Assassin’s Creed game, it had creative control on the proposed content. This title update to Assassin’s Creed Mirage was “made possible thanks to the support of local and international organisations,” Ubisoft added, “through access to experts, historians and resources to ensure the creation of an authentic and accurate setting.”

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social