Despite Success of New 'Assassin's Creed' Game, Ubisoft Stock Tumbles 18% (france24.com) 29
"Shares of Ubisoft sank 18% on Thursday," reports CNBC, "after the French video game firm reported full-year earnings that disappointed investors... The company's shares have lost almost 60% of their value in the past 12 months, as the firm faced financial struggles, development hurdles, and underperformance of some of its key titles."
Ubisoft said its latest Assassin's Creed game "delivered the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in franchise history and set a new record for Ubisoft's Day 1 performance on the PlayStation digital store," according to Reuters. And AFP notes that according to data from consultancy Circana, that game become the second-best-selling game of the year so far in the U.S. But... [A] string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year. Over the past 12 months, Ubisoft's would-be blockbuster "Star Wars Outlaws" fell short of sales expectations on release, while it cancelled multiplayer first-person shooter "XDefiant" for lack of players. "This year has been a challenging one for Ubisoft, with mixed dynamics across our portfolio, amid intense industry competition," chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement. But a string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year.
The group expects the measure to hold steady in the coming 2025-26 financial year, during which it will release a new "Prince of Persia" game, strategy title "Anno 117: Pax Romana" and mobile versions of shooters "Rainbow Six" and "The Division"... Moving to address its business woes, Ubisoft said in late March that it would create a new subsidiary to manage its three top franchises: "Assassin's Creed", "Far Cry" and "Rainbow Six".
"Since January, the shares have lost more than 12 percent, touching their lowest price in over a decade in April."
Ubisoft said its latest Assassin's Creed game "delivered the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in franchise history and set a new record for Ubisoft's Day 1 performance on the PlayStation digital store," according to Reuters. And AFP notes that according to data from consultancy Circana, that game become the second-best-selling game of the year so far in the U.S. But... [A] string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year. Over the past 12 months, Ubisoft's would-be blockbuster "Star Wars Outlaws" fell short of sales expectations on release, while it cancelled multiplayer first-person shooter "XDefiant" for lack of players. "This year has been a challenging one for Ubisoft, with mixed dynamics across our portfolio, amid intense industry competition," chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement. But a string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year.
The group expects the measure to hold steady in the coming 2025-26 financial year, during which it will release a new "Prince of Persia" game, strategy title "Anno 117: Pax Romana" and mobile versions of shooters "Rainbow Six" and "The Division"... Moving to address its business woes, Ubisoft said in late March that it would create a new subsidiary to manage its three top franchises: "Assassin's Creed", "Far Cry" and "Rainbow Six".
"Since January, the shares have lost more than 12 percent, touching their lowest price in over a decade in April."
Odyssey (Score:5, Informative)
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Mario Kart-ification (Score:2)
I'm not interested in playing this year's / this console's version of Mario Kart because it is 98% like playing the prior two versions.
Same goes for Assassin's Creed. Once you played the one or two of the better ones, Black Flag, for example; successive release are just derivatives.
$60 to play this year's version of last year's game....
Try Dishonored instead (Score:3)
During Covid lockdowns I discovered the Dishonored series. Incredibly good stealth games in a steampunk setting. It's what I thought Assassin's Creed would be like, and the type of game I was looking for.
Disclaimer: I never played more than an hour of one of the Assassin's Creed games, but what I did play seemed more like what they used to call a "beat-em-up", rather than a stealth game.
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AC is Tomb Raider mixed with Double Dragon.
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Sadly, Dishonored 1 and 2 are the only ones you'll get (the Billy Lurk DLC isn't as good). Arkane has undergone many changes and isn't the studio that brought you Dishonored 2, that's for sure.
DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
I've avoided all Ubisoft games after the DRM on one of them nearly broke my PC about 10-12 years ago.
Of course I don't assume that my drop missing in their ocean made any difference at all, but maybe I'm not the only one.
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You are not the only one.
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Re: DRM (Score:1)
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Though in my case it was more about their mandatory account creation and online checking with the mother ship at the game launch. There where bugs in it or problems with the server availability or whatever. It did not work well. I uninstalled the one game I had and decided not to buy anything Ubisoft related any more.
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Hmmmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't think " success" means what they think it means. This game isn't even going to break even unless I'm missing something.
You are not. It was estimated that AC: Shadows had to sell at least 7M copies to break-even and it's a safe bet that it didn't even sell half of that. Latest estimates were around 2.5M units sold IIRC.
Ubisoft of course doesn't want to admit that kind of failure so they mud the water with irrelevant "achievements", but the financial failure is undeniable.
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And we only have estimates because Ubisoft refuses to release sales numbers.
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I don't think " success" means what they think it means. This game isn't even going to break even unless I'm missing something.
You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.
AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese
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I wonder who will remain naive enough to give them money. At this point it is pretty easy to predict that big layoffs are ahead for Ubisoft, and Tencent will sooner or later own what is left of their once glorious franchises.
When all else fails, Blame Trump (Score:1)
No thanks UBI (Score:4, Insightful)
If you going to charge premium price for your games, ask me to buy expensive hardware, then I want white glove treatment - no inconveniences or limitations on my use, complete product on release, stable on a day one. You can't treat me as pirate-in-waiting AND cash bag AND under-deliver unstable ship-now-fix-later mess.
Meh (Score:3)
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Star Wars: Outlaws is really, really good (Score:2)
It's a real shame that Star Wars: Outlaws did not sell better... it's an AMAZING game for a Star Wars fan, especially for fans of the original trilogy.
But those original trilogy fans are the same ones that dump on any new Star Wars projects no matter what. And compounding that, the PC version had a lot of bugs at launch, angering all of the online reviewers who then absolutely slammed the game into oblivion.
Meanwhile in console land the game was really good and pretty stable from launch.
I really wish ther