Ubisoft has hired Christoph Hartmann, until recently vice president of Amazon Games, to run the division that controls its Tom Clancy properties. He takes over as general manager of Creative House 2, the unit built around The Division, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell, according to Ubisoft’s own statement.
The appointment lands at a delicate moment for Ubisoft, a company that lost co-founder Claude Guillemot in a plane crash last year and spent the months since restructuring around three Creative Houses.
Creative House 2 also absorbs March of Giants, a multiplayer battle arena title Ubisoft acquired in December, giving Hartmann a portfolio that spans established shooters and an unproven live-service bet.
The wider games industry has been going through a similar reckoning over the past year, with publishers restructuring divisions and, in some cases, negotiating studio spin-offs rather than outright closures.
Ubisoft’s own answer has been to split its portfolio into semi-autonomous Creative Houses, each with a general manager accountable for a distinct slate of franchises, rather than running the whole publisher as one unit.
Hartmann’s résumé reads like a highlight reel of the last twenty years of publishing. He spent two decades at Take-Two Interactive, where he co-founded 2K Games and served as its president until 2017, overseeing Borderlands, BioShock, Civilization, NBA 2K and XCOM.
He joined Amazon Games in 2018 as vice president, a role that put him in charge of the studios behind New World and the North American publishing of Lost Ark. In 2023, he secured the rights from Embracer Group to build a Lord of the Rings MMO, a project whose fate under Ubisoft’s roof is now unclear.
Chief executive Yves Guillemot, one of five Guillemot brothers who founded the company together in 1986, framed the hire in franchise-building terms rather than turnaround language.
“Christoph has an exceptional track record of shaping strong creative teams and bringing together the best development and publishing expertise to build long-lasting franchises,” said Yves Guillemot, co-founder and CEO, Ubisoft.
Hartmann’s own statement leaned harder into sentiment than strategy. “Some of the strongest memories in games come from overcoming something together, the mission you barely survive, the comeback you did not expect, the moment a team clicks,” he said.
“The talented teams at March of Giants, Massive, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Paris, and Ubisoft Toronto are creating game worlds filled with those kinds of moments for millions of dedicated players. With Creative House 2, our goal is to respect their passion, listen closely to what they love, and create intense, high-quality experiences they want to keep coming back to.”
The restructuring that created Creative House 2 is itself the product of a bigger, costlier deal. Ubisoft carved out its three biggest franchises, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six, into a separate subsidiary called Vantage Studios, in which Tencent took a stake worth €1.16 billion in a deal that closed last November.
That left the Tom Clancy shooters and other titles organised into the remaining Creative Houses, of which Hartmann’s is one.
Ubisoft’s broader restructuring has not been painless, either, and the same publisher-versus-studio tension has flared elsewhere in the industry, including in the bonus dispute that just cost Krafton its Unknown Worlds chief executive.
What Hartmann inherits, beyond the org chart, is a set of franchises that have had uneven fortunes. The Division and Ghost Recon have not shipped a major new mainline entry in years, while Splinter Cell has been dormant as a AAA series since a remake was put into development.
None of that is new information, but it is the practical brief facing a general manager whose track record at 2K and Amazon was built on publishing and franchise stewardship rather than turnarounds. Ubisoft has not said when Hartmann starts or whether any of Creative House 2’s franchises have release dates attached.
The company’s next scheduled financial update should offer the first indication of how the new structure, and its new hire, are performing.
