UBIsoft in potential financial trouble

Honestly I wouldn't say the numbers represent a "successful launch". It got 64K concurrent players the first week, which probably going to be the best week. Assassin's Creed Odessey had a very similar number more than 6 years ago. Dragon Age Veilguard had more concurrent players (~89K), and was not seen by EA as a success. I mean, even Dragon's Dogma 2, which again was not seen as a very successful launch by Capcom, had more than 228K concurrent players on Steam. KCD 2 had more than 256K. Maybe they really have a lot of U-play subscribers playing, but I think with all these it probably can only be qualified as an "OK launch".
 
Mod mode: a number of posts got deleted because they were replying to individuals preferences of society.

If you want to talk about societal norms, find a different forum or social media outlet. B3D's religion, politics, and socio-economic climate (RPSC) subforum is permanently closed and related topics aren't allowed to bleed into other discussions.

At the moment there is no verifiable data to support claims of "wokeisms" as a meaningful source of financial trouble for Ubisoft. The data we do have points to late releases, poor quality software, DRM, and generally bad execution.

Want to have an argument about woke? Post it on Twitter/X.
 
pcchen said:
Honestly I wouldn't say the numbers represent a "successful launch". It got 64K concurrent players the first week
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As our only reference, Odyssey sold 10 million units. It depends what one counts as successful. Few games sell that many, so that would be a success in terms of sales, but maybe not in terms of recuperating a huge investment. Perhaps Ubi spent larger thinking a proportional return and will be disappointed?

I'm not sure what people expect in terms of games sales numbers these days. Seems a notable degree of inflation in expectations to coincide with the inflation of development costs.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
As our only reference, Odyssey sold 10 million units. It depends what one counts as successful. Few games sell that many, so that would be a success in terms of sales, but maybe not in terms of recuperating a huge investment. Perhaps Ubi spent larger thinking a proportional return and will be disappointed?

I'm not sure what people expect in terms of games sales numbers these days. Seems a notable degree of inflation in expectations to coincide with the inflation of development costs.
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I don't doubt this game will sell a lot of copies, but I was talking specifically about the launch. I don't know how many people playing AC games for very long, but I logged more than 90 hours on AC Odessey so they are not short games, and they do have the potential of long tail sales.

If we look at the concurrent players chart of AC Odessey over its history ( https://steamdb.info/app/812140/charts/#max ), it retained around 50% of players for about 3 months and then went into around 25% afterwards except a few free-to-play weekends. Concurrent players do not mean new sales, but they are related and especially so if a game is short. Since AC Odessey is a long game, I'd suspect the actual sales probably drop a bit more than 25% afterwards.

So to be better understand how the game will perform I guess we'll have to wait for a few more weeks and see how the player count drops. If it looks similar to (or better than) AC Odessey then I guess it's safe to assume that this could sold for around the same amount (or better) over its lifetime.
 
i think i'm going to buy it today, and t i've read Ubisoft is planning an update to get RT reflections in the balanced mode, and may switch to PSSR. I don't know if i'll resist waiting for the update.
 
pcchen said:
I don't doubt this game will sell a lot of copies, but I was talking specifically about the launch. I don't know how many people playing AC games for very long, but I logged more than 90 hours on AC Odessey so they are not short games, and they do have the potential of long tail sales.

If we look at the concurrent players chart of AC Odessey over its history ( https://steamdb.info/app/812140/charts/#max ), it retained around 50% of players for about 3 months and then went into around 25% afterwards except a few free-to-play weekends. Concurrent players do not mean new sales, but they are related and especially so if a game is short. Since AC Odessey is a long game, I'd suspect the actual sales probably drop a bit more than 25% afterwards.

So to be better understand how the game will perform I guess we'll have to wait for a few more weeks and see how the player count drops. If it looks similar to (or better than) AC Odessey then I guess it's safe to assume that this could sold for around the same amount (or better) over its lifetime.
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But that would only indicate popularity on Steam which we can't assume is representative.

If you look at Steam stats you'd think popularity wise both Rainbow Six Siege and Apex Legends are more popular than Call of Duty.
 
Steam stats can be borked.

The devil's in the details as always.

I'm tired about trying to convince people of obvious things like Assassin's Creed stats from 15 years ago are almost meaningless.

I hope we can at least agree that AC Shadows isn't a total flop at least.
 
arandomguy said:
But that would only indicate popularity on Steam which we can't assume is representative.

If you look at Steam stats you'd think popularity wise both Rainbow Six Siege and Apex Legends are more popular than Call of Duty.
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So what I said is we should look at the trend. For example, if a game is losing users fast on Steam, it's more likely to also lose users on other platforms.
This is of course not 100%, as players on different platforms are different, such as distrbution of ages, countries, etc. but except some very extreme specific examples I think this is good data.
 
pcchen said:
So what I said is we should look at the trend. For example, if a game is losing users fast on Steam, it's more likely to also lose users on other platforms.
This is of course not 100%, as players on different platforms are different, such as distrbution of ages, countries, etc. but except some very extreme specific examples I think this is good data.
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There are other factors, though. Ubisoft+ has only been available on consoles since 2023. I believe Mirage was the only Assassins Creed game to launch day 1 into the service since then, and it was marketed as a smaller title, when it was marketed at all. The Steam data may not be representative at all, because the game is much more available at a much lower up front price. This also means that the player counts can't be directly correlated with sales, either. And comparisons to titles launched before they had an on console subscription service are going to be skewed as well.
 
see colon said:
There are other factors, though. Ubisoft+ has only been available on consoles since 2023. I believe Mirage was the only Assassins Creed game to launch day 1 into the service since then, and it was marketed as a smaller title, when it was marketed at all. The Steam data may not be representative at all, because the game is much more available at a much lower up front price. This also means that the player counts can't be directly correlated with sales, either. And comparisons to titles launched before they had an on console subscription service are going to be skewed as well.
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I think with more than 60K concurrent players that's statistically representative enough, with regarding to trend. It's of course possible (or even likely) that players who choose to play the game through Ubisoft's subscription service is more loyal to the series, but on the other hand the players on Steam also paid real money to play it (except those who received the game for free as marketing campaign, such as from buying some hardware). My point is that even if it's possible that those Steam players are more likely to dislike the game after purchase than subscription players, the effect shouldn't be so large to be compeltely different.
 
Source
In an internal memo obtained by IGN from a "source within Ubisoft," it confirms Assassin's Creed Shadows is the second-highest day-one sales revenue in franchise history, only trailing behind AC Valhalla, which launched on current-gen and last-gen consoles. AC Shadows didn't benefit from launching on last-gen platforms with millions of players waiting for a new game.

While there's no breakdown of the sales per platform, the memo also confirms that Assassin's Creed Shadows is Ubisoft's best-ever day-one launch on the PlayStation Store. Regarding PC sales, the internal memo reveals that 27% of "total activations" were on PC, with Ubisoft telling employees that Steam "played a major role" in the game's performance on the platform.

In the same email, Ubisoft noted that they shouldn't compare Shadows to Valhalla, given that the global pandemic helped a lot in pushing sales in what Ubisoft calls a "perfect storm" where players were forced to stay at home and the launch of the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S.
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Bolds are mine. Can we call it a successful launch now?
 
Also, isn't it normal for the concurrent user numbers to go down for a single player game? I don't know about everyone else, but the excitement when a game first comes out means I'll play it for several days in a row and then maybe I only play it once every couple days, then once a week, and .... I'm still playing it, but you get what I'm saying ...
 
Johnny Awesome said:
Also, isn't it normal for the concurrent user numbers to go down for a single player game? I don't know about everyone else, but the excitement when a game first comes out means I'll play it for several days in a row and then maybe I only play it once every couple days, then once a week, and .... I'm still playing it, but you get what I'm saying ...
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Yes. All these games have an initial spike and then numbers decrease over time - their biggest peak is always in the first few days of launch.
 
I think the game will do well, the word of mouth (from people that actually play the game), is quite good.
To me, (playing it right now) it's one of the best AC games.
Needs more RT, but, can't have it all...
 
Flappy Pannus said:
"This will bomb because of woke"

<successful launch>

"Well the other aspects of the game are good enough that people are probably just suffering through the woke"

You know, there's a third option: Maybe the majority are just playing a game and are not ensconced in youtube grifter culture war bullshit on a daily basis?
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I think the choice of Yasuke was odd to say the least, but apart from that his design suits action games. Its not like we´re dealing with Mrs Freeze from kill the justice league or concord character design.

Its not like there arent examples where woke stuff have not been good for buisness.
 
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