Despite the recently released Assassin’s Creed Shadows being a massive success for Ubisoft, the company still continues to struggle. The French company fell back into the red for the 2024-25 financial year thanks to disappointing sales reception for Star Wars Outlaws and the cancellation of XDefiant which was due to lack of players. Ubisoft said back in March that it is creating a brand new subsidiary to help manage the company’s three top video game franchises: Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six. As France24 points out “It will not own the games brands, instead paying royalties to the parent company to use them” Meanwhile Tencent has a 24% stake in the subsidiary.
“If Ubisoft is unable to use the money Tencent invested in a meaningful way, it is certainly possible that Tencent pursues buying the firm outright” even in the face of fierce resistance from the founding Guillemot brothers, Szumski suggested.
?Assassin’s Creed Shadows being a massive success”?
Sold fairly well despite the controversies
One of the biggest selling games of the year.
Yeah, was no.1 for the last month in US and second best selling game of the year https://www.ign.com/articles/assassins-creed-shadows-was-the-best-selling-game-in-the-us-for-march
It’s not even made a profit yet based on the numbers I’m seeing. Doesn’t sound like a massive success to me.
“Success” and “profitability” don’t necessarily go hand in hand. A game can sell very well, but if its production costs are too high, it won’t necessarily be profitable, and vice versa.
It’s not for nothing that major productions are multi-platform.
If AC Shadows doesn’t make a profit, then it is a literal financial loss which is NOT success for Ubisoft.
Nuance exist.
Financial success/ Critical acclaim/ units sold are all ways of measuring success and are simultaneously interdependent and independent at the same time.
If you make a 10 billion dollars movie and only make 5 billion back, then you’re still the highest grossing movie ever despite taking a 5 billion dollar hit.
Ubisoft is a business with investors and shareholders. They are only going to measure success by profits.
Audiences, critics, etc… they can come up with whatever metrics they want but the video game company actually releasing the product wants profit from their products.
If AC Shadows doesn’t make a profit with the sales it’s had, then it’s not just a Ubisoft problem but a games industry problem.
It’s not new… it’s been over 20 years that publishers have been complaining that production costs have increased while at the same time the price of games has hardly changed… But now it’s even more serious because even with DLCs it’s no longer enough.One should not be surprised that after this, they prefer digital for several reasons: to recover the profit margin of retailers and eliminate the second-hand market, which is, for them, a lost profit (even though Nintendo’s key cards, among others, do not go in that direction…)
No, Ben is right. Budgets are getting too inflated. Ubisoft was way too bloated for this one.
And then you got an ex-Ubisoft dev making a hit game on a much smaller budget with a smaller team.
What most AAA game studios do now is just not sustainable anymore.
Not just that the market is too small what can be top 10 now is much smaller than before and these devs want more benefits and voice actors which will cause more rise in costs also the strike is holding up games and no one talks about that and pushed for devs to strike next and unionize which will lead to a massive shift.
Every studio has been in this position, I hope ubisoft get back on their feet because despite everything they made some good games and could again.
If Ubislop didn’t cater to the non-existent modern audience their games would fair better. Also, 3 million players for AC Shadows is not indicative of how many units sold and the only reason why they went that route is because it sold poorly.
Lol at “despite being a massive success”.
The game flopped. Plain and simple. Most of the so-called “sales” come actually from Ubisoft+ subscribers having access to it from day one. The game isn’t even reaching Veilguard’s player numbers on Steam and it’s not reacing 100k players online period.
The biggest proof is that people continue to be laid off and Tencent is now aggressively pushing to buy Ubisoft outright. Don’t believe when people say the game was a success. It was not. People are confusing “success” with “cult classic”.
Was the username SigmaZx taken?
No, I wrote it wrong. It is supposed to be SigmaZX.
The chuds win this round. And that’s a good thing. Nothing of value was lost.
No surprise same way shills lie claiming Final Fantasy 16 and rebirth weren’t flops they were. MK1 is the same the market is much smaller they dont mention numbers or sales that were discounts how much of the sales were at discount. And ubisoft is lying there are investors calling for investigation. All these companies are full of it.