UBIsoft in potential financial trouble

Johnny Awesome said:
I said "change Ubi's fortunes". I didn't say "salvage the entirety of Ubisoft". Let's not get crazy here.
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Little confused here - you're quoting my reply to Cappuccino who's been saying AC Shadows should have turned Ubi's fortunes around completely, as a measure of its failure because it didn't single-handed save the company...

Cappuccino said:
a single release doing well could absolutely reverse a company’s fortunes. If there’s no feasible way Shadows pulls them out of looming bankruptcy then what is the point of developing it?
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The rest of us are looking at Shadow's as being a decent title by the metric of most games - AAA games and AC games - which would indicate to business folk that there's still something of merit to Ubi and it's not ready to be taken out back and shot just yet. Particularly in light of the recent changes, the new subsidiary whose value comes from key IPs, and Shadows sales are the latest indicator of the value of the AC (and by association Far Cry and R6), Shadow performance is essential in making that subsidiary worth taking seriously.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
The rest of us are looking at Shadow's as being a decent title by the metric of most games - AAA games and AC games - which would indicate to business folk that there's still something of merit to Ubi and it's not ready to be taken out back and shot just yet.
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Clearly business folk don’t agree. It’s a fine title but let’s be honest here: it’s just another mediocre post-2017 AC title. This is the exact same type of game that’s gotten them into this mess.
Shifty Geezer said:
you're quoting my reply to Cappuccino who's been saying AC Shadows should have turned Ubi's fortunes around completely, as a measure of its failure because it didn't single-handed save the company...
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i didn’t say this lol
 
Albuquerque said:
Given the actual data we are able to find (feel free to find more if you feel it supports your claims) the current AC title is selling quite well, at least better than two of the prior three titles in the series.
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The fact that the most anticipated AC game is selling worse than their 2020 iteration (5 years ago btw) is not ‘quite well’.


Albuquerque said:
yet you then counter by suggesting their decrease in stock price is directly linked to bad sales.
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I’m saying if Shadows was successful they likely wouldn’t be down a third of their market cap within the past 30 days.

Dominik D said:
You're shifting the goalposts. It was your metric for a flop, now it's just a metric for lack of popularity. So selling less than previous installment makes you a flop or not?
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Flop=lack of popularity.

And yes, generally. Sales should generally go up with a new installment. When sales are lower than a previous game, we call that a ‘decline’.


Shifty Geezer said:
Is your definition of a successful game "one that increases share price"?
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You’ve got causality revered: Ubisoft literally just sells video games. A game selling well generally means it will be priced into their market valuation (aka, the share price). Clearly Wall Street thinks it didn’t sell very well, or at least not enough to upgrade the value of Ubisoft for whatever vulture ends up eating it.


Shifty Geezer said:
What is your measure of success - units sold relative to previous iterations? Relative to world's best selling games? Revenue? Relative to what? Affect on share price?
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All of those? A successful game is one that generally speaking outsells the previous games, and also sells enough to make up for its budget. Ubisoft makes hugely expensive games that might sell a large volume of copies, but don’t actually make enough to make a decent profit. That’s not successful. If a company sells enough good games, its valuation improves.

I don’t think any of this is controversial, you guys are getting into the weeds on “what is success” and all this extraneous shit when the answer is literally just “all of the above”. Shadows needed to be a smash success for Ubisoft here and it’s not going to hit that mark, it’s likely not even going to outsell their game from 2020!
 
Cappuccino said:
The fact that the most anticipated AC game is selling worse than their 2020 iteration (5 years ago btw) is not ‘quite well’.
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SHow me numbers. Until you can actually show me hard numbers, you have nothing to stand on.

That's the entire crux of your argument -- you continue to make these statements without data. Find data, present data, use data to defend your stance. Show me the sales data, and let's discuss it. So far, you've only ever posted a single datapoint and it was easly disputed.

Until you have hard data on actual sales, you have no way to claim anything about those sales. Which, again, demonstrates that stock prices are driven far more by feelings than actual data, because you're not the only one without hard sales data...
 
Albuquerque said:
That's the entire crux of your argument -- you continue to make these statements without data. Find data, present data, use data to defend your stance. Show me the sales data, and let's discuss it. So far, you've only ever posted a single datapoint and it was easly disputed.
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Do we have any sales data at all? Will we ever? This entire forum is just speculation on things, you know I don't have hard data to support this, it's all just speculation.
 
Cappuccino said:
Do we have any sales data at all? Will we ever? This entire forum is just speculation on things, you know I don't have hard data to support this, it's all just speculation.
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What is data anyway, right? Can we know if data is data? Who decides on the data being factual or not? Can we trust them?

Don't stir your tea, the vortex will pull you in.
 
"Data is that which supports what I want, not objective reality!" /ModernThinking.
 
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Cappuccino said:
The fact that the most anticipated AC game is selling worse than their 2020 iteration (5 years ago btw) is not ‘quite well’.
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Didn’t you previously acknowledge that sales of that 2020 release were skewed by COVID just like everything gaming related at the time? Yet you dishonestly continue to quote it as a relevant baseline for comparison. That makes me think you’re not serious and are just taking ppl for a ride.
 
It wasn't just COVID. AC:Valhalla (released Nov 10th, 2020) was also also a day-1 release title for both new consoles: the XSX (launched on Nov 10th, 2020) and the PS5 (launched just two days later on Nov 12th, 2020). This also drops the game's release right into the Christmas buying season, so a metric butt-load of them showed up under the tree or in a stocking alongside a fancy new console for kids of all ages that year.

Data has a way of clarifying things.
 
Albuquerque said:
It wasn't just COVID. AC:Valhalla (released Nov 10th, 2020) was also also a day-1 release title for both new consoles: the XSX (launched on Nov 10th, 2020) and the PS5 (launched just two days later on Nov 12th, 2020). This also drops the game's release right into the Christmas buying season, so a metric butt-load of them showed up under the tree or in a stocking alongside a fancy new console for kids of all ages that year.

Data has a way of clarifying things.
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ac valhalla was generally seen as a disappointment vs. Odyssey/Origin
 
And yet somehow it's become the benchmark for passable sales?

I don't actually know either way, it just seems like the goalposts flail about aimlessly during this conversation about whether AC Shadows is anything but utter failure. Not saying you're on any one side or the other, but it would be great it we could get some solid and unwavering consensus.
 
trinibwoy said:
Didn’t you previously acknowledge that sales of that 2020 release were skewed by COVID just like everything gaming related at the time? Yet you dishonestly continue to quote it as a relevant baseline for comparison. That makes me think you’re not serious and are just taking ppl for a ride.
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And that skew is made up for by 5 years of population growth.

Albuquerque said:
And yet somehow it's become the benchmark for passable sales?

I don't actually know either way, it just seems like the goalposts flail about aimlessly during this conversation about whether AC Shadows is anything but utter failure. Not saying you're on any one side or the other, but it would be great it we could get some solid and unwavering consensus.
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Valhalla sold well but was also considered pretty bad by fans. It's the benchmark because it's their previous best. You generally want your future games to sell more than your previous games.
 
Cappuccino said:
are you asking for documentation that there are more humans on earth now than 5 years ago?
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Obviously not. It needs quantifying how many more people are there now than 5 years ago, and how that correlates to the sales of video games. It shouldn't be at all hard to pull up the population of NA and EU etc. and show that the population increase the last five years tallies with your argument.

US +1% increase, EU, +1%. JPN -0.25%, etc

That's gross population. I'm not seeing any meaningful correlation. Feel free to look up the growth rate of demographics for those buying these games if your argument requires that. But it does need actual data to prove the correlations you suggest.
 
Cappuccino said:
are you asking for documentation that there are more humans on earth now than 5 years ago?
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Now you’re just being silly. You claimed that population growth has offset the spike in demand for video games during COVID. And have provided zero evidence to support this claim.

For the record the US population grew about 2% in the last 5 years. Let’s assume population growth is perfectly correlated with demand for video games. Are you suggesting that Covid increased demand for games by less than 2%?
 
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Cappuccino said:
AC Valhalla came out on PC as well.
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Yeah, but not mobile. A growth in PC with stagnation in the console space, but.... install base matters. Valhalla was a cross gen title that launched at the end of Xbox One/PS4 and the begginning of Series/PS5. The amount of gamers who already had access to hardware that could play the game was much higher than Shadows. People being able to play the game is important for potential sales.
Cappuccino said:
are you asking for documentation that there are more humans on earth now than 5 years ago?
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I think we need to recognize the fact that the amount of adults who died from Covid outweighs the amount of kids. The was a culling of the population in certain age ranges, so just because births outweighed deaths, leading to a population growth, doesn't mean that the population that would be Assassin's Creed aged would have increased. By that, I mean they would be too young to play any games, or too young for the subject matter, or just want to play phone/tablet games because that's what kids do, or not financially able to purchase the game. Hell, there is probably a case where some 13 year old's grandparents passed away and they were the ones they could ask to buy M rated games because their parents wouldn't.

So, yeah, there are a plurality of factors that would point to the population of gamers who would have the means or interest to purchase an Assassin's Creed game when compared to 2020, before most Covid deaths and during shutdowns in the largest video game markets, being not larger or at best the same, and therefore not able to offset the demand for a game that launched during that time. Also, as pointed out above, there are less Series and PS5 consoles now than there were Xbox One/Series/PS5/PS4 consoles when Valhalla launched. So the population that could access Shadows is definitively smaller than Valhalla.
 
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