A lot of games found the end of last year pretty tricky, as they failed to perform on their debut. Watch Dogs 2 was one of them, but Ubisoft remained fairly bullish on its potential, and indeed, as they report on their third quarter 2016-17, that’s exactly what they say.
“Launch not as dynamic as expected, but momentum now positive,” suggesting that the regular discounts over the last two months have helped. Steep also didn’t initially seem to grab many people’s attention, but Ubisoft cite “slightly higher-than-expected performance.”
Not barnstorming successes, perhaps, but other parts of Ubi’s year are looking up. For example, they’ve seen record numbers of digital sales, which made up 47.2% of their total revenue, up from just 27% last year.
There’s also much higher player engagement, with The Division daily active users bumped to 150% and over 15 million registered Rainbow Six Siege players, also with a growing number of daily active users.
Oh, and the Assassin’s Creed movie has taken $213 million at the box office worldwide – before releasing in China – making it the seventh most successful video game adaptation.
Overall, though, revenue projections for the year have been reduced from €1.6 billion to €1.45 billion, partly because of South Park being pushed back further to the next fiscal year.
Source: press release
bunimomike
Watch Dogs (the franchise) is a huge lesson in managing expectations as the franchise was tarnished to a pretty nasty degree with the first outing. Watch Dogs 2 sales reflect that.