Ubisoft Financial Report Details

Financial reports are appearing left, right and centre this week with Ubisoft becoming the latest publisher to throw their statistics onto the pile.

Unfortunately, however, it’s a bit of a dreary piece of writing. The main figure to report is that the company suffered a Q3 loss of around 2.7%. Sounds like an alright figure to shake a stick at, but when you work out that this equates to around 13 million euros, you suddenly need a bigger stick.

To combat this drop and bring everything back into line, something Ubisoft predict will happen for the 2010-2011 fiscal year, they’ll be cutting down on casual games, taking less risks on new IPs and stepping up the releases of established brands.

It’s a shame to hear that such backward steps are being taken, but unless we can convince Joe Bloggs to buy an original title instead of just the new Assassin’s Creed, there’s not much we can do about it.

The cut back on casual games comes from a prediction that the genre will receive a drop in sales over the year. Yet despite this, they are continuing work on games for Natal and the Motion Controller.

This also indicates that Ubisoft are not yet prepared to take on the new controllers as peripherals for the “hardcore” gamer and are most likely only developing casual, family, Wii-style games for them which is a bit of a disappointment really.

Finally, however, things start to look up, at least for PS3 owners, in the console sales breakdown. The PS3 saw an 8% improvement on its sales awarding it 30% of the overall figure, placing it right alongside the Xbox 360 and pushing both consoles 9% ahead of the Wii.

So overall sales are down, but the PS3 is up, there won’t be as many new IPs, but there will be more existing franchise releases, the Arc and Natal will be getting more games, but they’ll be of the casual variety and I’m thirsty, put the kettle is on.

Source: PS3 Attitude