UBIsoft in potential financial trouble

Very clearly, if someone wants to present the case that Ubi's choice of themes is detrimental to their business, they need to present the data at this point. The argument has been dependent on rhetoric and reference to arbitrary voices as a representation of some form of consensus. Shadows is a good test of that theory and so far invalidates it. Ergo there's no reason to point the blame for Ubi's troubles squarely on political themes unless someone can categorically produce cause/effect evidence.

In the absence of that, the more conventional arguments will be other business choices and operations. How have their profits related to their game quality? Are we seeing lower revenues for Ubi titles versus similar? Did they chase the wrong genres, or fumble key developments? Or has the market shifted and they haven't kept up?

Even better, how do they compare in broad strategy versus other publishers? What are successful publishers doing differently?
 
Last edited:
The terms just seem like a setup for Tencent to end up owning a controlling majority of the new "subsidiary" within a few years. Though I'm far from an expert in these dealings.

The subsidiary itself has to be a vast majority of Ubisofts actually worth.
 
techuse said:
Famitsu has just reported all time low sales in Japan. 17000~. Far under prior entries and other similar titles.
Click to expand...
I don’t know if I recall correctly, but Famitsu doesn’t do digital sales right? So this is physical only ?

I think every game has been on physical decline year over year. You can already see Assassins creed charting down.
 
iroboto said:
I don’t know if I recall correctly, but Famitsu doesn’t do digital sales right? So this is physical only ?

I think every game has been on physical decline year over year. You can already see Assassins creed charting down.
Click to expand...
Yes Physical only. These numbers are still quite low given that caveat.
 
techuse said:
Famitsu has just reported all time low sales in Japan. 17000~. Far under prior entries and other similar titles.
Click to expand...
I feel your summary fails to call out some of the surrounding nuance. Here's Famitsu's direct sales number reporting: https://www.gematsu.com/2025/03/famitsu-sales-3-17-25-3-23-25

Notice AC is the fifth highest selling physical media in their list, and is the third highest in terms of physical media they sold for the PS5. Further, sale of AC on PS5 started on the 20th, and again their sales reporting week ended on the 23rd, which is a grand total of four days of sales contributing to the 17,700 (which is closer to 18,000 than your rounded-down 17,000) number.

The two PS5 titles ahead of it are:
  • Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land (what even is this game?) which sold 27,810 copies from the 21st, which is a pretty solid number to be sure.
  • Monster Hunter Wilds which sold 20,621 across the entire week (thus had it only been four days of sales like AC, the average sales/day means their numbers would've been 12,355 when compared to a four-day sale week like AC.)

Context matters.

By the way, before it's somehow dragged out of context, I don't own a PS5 and do not own nor have I played any of the AC franchise of games. I have no dog in this specific fight, other than to call out my perception of the mistreatment of the underlying data.
 
Last edited:
Albuquerque said:
I feel your summary fails to call out some of the surrounding nuance. Here's Famitsu's direct sales number reporting: https://www.gematsu.com/2025/03/famitsu-sales-3-17-25-3-23-25

Notice AC is the fifth highest selling physical media in their list, and is the third highest in terms of physical media they sold for the PS5. Further, sale of AC on PS5 started on the 20th, and again their sales reporting week ended on the 23rd, which is a grand total of four days of sales contributing to the 17,700 (which is closer to 18,000 than your rounded-down 17,000) number.

The two PS5 titles ahead of it are:
  • Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land (what even is this game?) which sold 27,810 copies from the 21st, which is a pretty solid number to be sure.
  • Monster Hunter Wilds which sold 20,621 across the entire week (thus had it only been four days of sales like AC, the average sales/day means their numbers would've been 12,355 when compared to a four-day sale week like AC.)

Context matters.

By the way, before it's somehow dragged out of context, I don't own a PS5 and do not own nor have I played any of the AC franchise of games. I have no dog in this specific fight, other than to call out my perception of the mistreatment of the underlying data.
Click to expand...
Presumably the older AC titles would have the same 4/7 day sales window. I didn’t round up numbers for any of the other games either.

Monster hunter has already been out for a month.
 
Really sad to see this happen to ubisoft.
more conglomeration in the industry can't be a good thing.

Not to mention the recent examples of Chinese based game companies just dumping Non Chinese based studios,
even on successful games.
 
techuse said:
Presumably the older AC titles would have the same 4/7 day sales window. I didn’t round up numbers for any of the other games either.
Click to expand...
As time goes on, less and less physical copies are sold -- this isn't specific to AC or PS5, it's just a fact of life. And as such, games sold in prior years should statistically have higher physical copy sales due to the physical medium falling further out of favor in later years and titles. I really don't care to do the math and the release dates, but I'm not really sure this whole physical medium thing is uber helpful in modern times.

techuse said:
Monster hunter has already been out for a month.
Click to expand...
Great, and AC was only out for four days for that reporting cycle. Gee, if someone asked me, I would say it sounds like we aren't comparing equivalent things... Right?
 
Albuquerque said:
As time goes on, less and less physical copies are sold -- this isn't specific to AC or PS5, it's just a fact of life. And as such, games sold in prior years should statistically have higher physical copy sales due to the physical medium falling further out of favor in later years and titles. I really don't care to do the math and the release dates, but I'm not really sure this whole physical medium thing is uber helpful in modern times.


Great, and AC was only out for four days for that reporting cycle. Gee, if someone asked me, I would say it sounds like we aren't comparing equivalent things... Right?
Click to expand...
Monster Hunter sold 601k. It launched on a Friday meaning it had one day less to sell than Shadows. There is still a large enough market for physical games.
 
Last edited:
The Atelier game has three versions (PS5, Switch, and PS4) on the list and totaled 61K on the launch week. As a reference, its number on Steam was 14K peak concurrent players 5 days ago.
 
Albuquerque said:
As time goes on, less and less physical copies are sold -- this isn't specific to AC or PS5, it's just a fact of life.
Click to expand...
That's true, but we can still look at numbers to try to determine how. Otherwise, as conditions keep changing, we can conclude history has nothing to tell us and we should ignore all past data. ;)

I don't expect anyone here to do a proper investigation, but if someone wanted to and pulled up the sales numbers for other franchises, we'd see if Shadows fit the same general trend of decreasing sales or if it's trending lower/higher.

Albuquerque said:
Great, and AC was only out for four days for that reporting cycle. Gee, if someone asked me, I would say it sounds like we aren't comparing equivalent things... Right?
Click to expand...
We're not really going to though because there are too many variables out of our control. We can only accumulate different metrics and try to compare them fairly to accommodate variations in an attempt to determine general relative performance. Either people are free to present a piece of the puzzle and, pulling them all together from different pieces, draw up a picture, or we wait until someone somewhere investigates properly and present a full analysis.

AFAICS, Shadows definitely sold less than other titles, and notably different to the big sellers Odyssey and Valhalla. A decline of physical sales could account somewhat for that, which should be reflected across other titles. If digital was to account, given Shadows sales are less than half Valhalla's that launched in 2020, we should see a similar halving of sales numbers for other recent, comparable franchise releases.
 
techuse said:
Monster Hunter sold 601k. It launched on a Friday meaning it had one day less to sell than Shadows. There is still a large enough market for physical games.
Click to expand...
Great. Then it's also worth noting AC was the 2nd highest selling PS5 title on launch day, when viewed on a daily sales basis.

Still seems fine to me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top