Of course they are. “The shareholders” doesn’t have to mean the long term owners - it can mean the people who have invested, saw line go up, and sold. They are happy, the CEO is happily off to a new job sailing down on a golden parachute, and the customers after being shown the middle finger…

…preorder the next big title. Shit.

People that say this haven't played the older games and the new games. Ubisoft makes consistently good games. They're all fairly derivative of each other and have a lot of feature and mechanic crossover, but the writing and game design is, on the whole, quite good. They suck for selling "cosnetics" that have unique features or abilities that youv cannot otherwise get in the game. And Valhalla and Odyssey were padded with content to encourage buying the boosters, and upgrading your ship took entirely too many resources. But if you're getting level gated then you're just plain not engaging with the content because the issue is overleveling, not underleveling. If you're trying to sprint through the main story, I'm sorry but you're playing the game wrong. But the new games have far less jank than the old ones. The stealth is different but works more or less the same. I think people have very rose tinted glasses when it comes to assassin's creed. The old games are barely playable, you're constantly jumping to your death because of the shitty controls, desynchronizing for getting caught during the shitty eavesdrop and stalk sections. Like the only thing they did better was social stealth which Valhalla had. If you don't like health bars and upgrade paths that's fine but the new AC games are legitimately just better games. And this discounts Prince of Persia, Frontiers of Pandora and star wars outlaws which were all recent fantastic games. Fuckin Rayman. Ubisoft makes good games they just have shitty business practices and treat their customers poorly. But they make good games.

things like Star Wars Outlaws are off limits

That's a bit too far in the other direction, innit?
Games (or anything really) don't get immunity from criticism just because they take risks

I have no criticisms myself for Star Wars Outlaws, as I didn't play it, but the market didn't want it, and Star Wars is for sure not underserved. I have been inundated with so much Star Wars since Disney bought it that I'm sick of it, and I'm not even seeking it out. The other thing I'm sick of is the Ubisoft Open World Game. I've played a lot of those. They built an efficient machine for churning those out. The market seems to be sick of them, too, at least relative to its former appetite. It's not surprising that people are tired of both Ubisoft's formula and Star Wars. You take a risk with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a moderately budgeted game. You don't take a risk with $200M+; that's lunacy. Even with The Lost Crown, they reminded me via their Ubisoft launcher and additional DRM why I haven't missed purchasing Ubisoft games for so many years.

The CEO makes $1.5M per year in cash, so I very much doubt they're spending hundreds of millions on executive salaries.

I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren't free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that's still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn't mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they're generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.