Ubisoft Casual Sales Dry Up, New Hardcore Focus With Multiplayer Assassin’s Creed
Ubisoft have today revised their financial targets for the year, in light of poor sales of casual games. The makers of Imagine: Babies say their sales in the casual market have fallen by around 50%, down to ‘‚¬160 million compared to last year.
A newly announced Assassin’s Creed game featuring online multiplayer is among a number of titles designed to boost the company’s earnings, which are expected to hit ‘‚¬860 million for 2009-10, a drop from the previously predicted ‘‚¬1,040 million.
Poor DS sales are the main culprit, as casual Wii sales remain strong. “Lower-than-expected” sales of Avatar also hit Ubisoft’s bottom line, with the film’s billion dollar success failing to rub off on the poorly-received game.
All this means Ubisoft will make an operating loss of around ‘‚¬50 million, a significant drop from its expected profits of at least ‘‚¬70 million. In light of these figures, CEO Yves Guillemot announced a new focus on “games for gamers”. These include a “new episode” of Assassin’s Creed, the first to feature multiplayer, along with the latest versions of the Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and Prince of Persia franchises.
It’s clear that by shoe-horning multiplayer in to Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft hopes to cut down on rentals and used game sales by keeping players engaged online. The mechanics of Assassin’s Creed seem ill-suited to multiple players though, and until more details are announced it’s hard to see this as anything more than a cynical attempt at money-grabbing.
The multi-player from splinter cell chaos theory is one of the best experiences I have ever had with a game. But if you had asked me if bringing multi-player to splinter cell Pandora tomorrow would be worth anything, I would probably have spit if your face thinking that multi-player would just be some bullshit bullet point that Ubisoft wanted to put on the box. But looking at the way that the Shanghai and Montreal teams where able to develop then perfect a balanced multi-player based around the merc and spy mechanic shows that Ubisoft should be able to do this.
I do understand that Ubisoft has shown that they don’t give a fuck about the community, but hopefully now that they are crawling back to the hardcore gamers, we will be willing to show them that if they make good games we will buy them and be much more devoted to them then any casual gamer.
I’m skeptical, but then again I didn’t think that Uncharted 2 should have MP either, and I ended up enjoying it quite a lot.
@Synthetic: I count Chaos Theory as one of my top 5 games, and co-op added to that. I never really liked the multiplayer, mainly because of the steep learning curve, but co-op, actually requires you to work together.