1. Yves Guillemot

Ubisoft

Corporate leadership par excellence.

It’s no secret that in 2008, many game publishers struggled to hit financial targets. Certain previously bankable genres fell away while new IP scrambled to grab a foothold. A worldwide recession threw the spreadsheet-jockeys a surprise hurdle. Through all this Ubisoft appeared to glide, buoyed by diversity of operations and of product-lines. Ubi’s president and CEO Yves Guillemot is one of the few senior execs who has survived through three decades of game industry turbulence. Ubi is never going to be one of those publishers with an across-the-board review average above 80%. But it does know how to make good games that sell well.  Its product-line for ’08 included Prince of Persia, Far Cry 2, Tom Clancy games and Brothers in Arms, but also a panoply of opportunistic titles for kids, the casual market or edutainment, demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit required for survival in these harsh times and an ability to reach into new markets, like the female sector.

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