NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Ubisoft struggled through first half of 2015 due to a lack of major releases
Ubisoft Entertainment SA revealed its earnings for the fiscal year ending on September 30, 2015, and things do not seem to have gone well for the French game publisher in the first half of the year.
According to Ubisoft’s numbers, the publisher saw a 57 percent drop in game sales with an estimated net loss (non-IFRS) of $71 million. Ubisoft appears to have been expecting the slump, however, as it had no major game releases planned for the first half of the year.
“The quality of our back-catalog and the growing digitization of our business enabled us to deliver a solid performance in the first half of the year, even though – as planned – we did not release any major titles during the period,” said Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot (via Gamesindustry.biz). “The fact that more than 80 percent of our annual sales are expected to be generated in the second half of the year mechanically weighed on our earnings for the first six months.”
He added, “The outlook for our industry continues to be very promising, with a return to growth, a healthier competitive environment, and the favorable impact of digital. Against this backdrop, Ubisoft has unique value-creating potential. We are ideally positioned in open-world games, whose market share is increasing. We also own our brands and have the in-house skills and expertise to create them. These two significant characteristics offer our shareholders an unrivaled level of long term visibility and security.”
Ubisoft is probably best known for the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which until recently had not seen a major release since Assassin’s Creed Unity toward the end of 2014. The latest game, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, released less than two weeks ago.
So far, Syndicate’s sales have been solid, but it failed to match Unity’s sales figures in its first week. Its sales did pick up for the second week, however, likely as a result of fans learning that it does not suffer from the same atrocious performance problems that Unity did at launch.
Image credit: Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate | Ubisoft Entertainment
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