The latest call to investors highlighted that the period of severe difficulty of ubisoft it’s continuing, and now the company is looking for new ways to stay afloat.
It is by no means an easy time for the French giant, once among the most prominent names in the video game industry and today seriously endangered by some important commercial flops in a row. Ubisoft has canceled numerous in-development games (many of which were battle royales, a genre now on the wane), and today the company is facing an unprecedented crisis.
In discussing the closure of the 2023 fiscal year, which ended on March 31, CEO Yves Guillemot could not help but note huge losses, which continue a very complex negative trend. We talk about well $585 million in the redwhich are forcing the company to heavily review its plans for the future.
The figure is quite sensational if one thinks of the previous fiscal year, in which Ubisoft obtained 241 million dollars in profits: in a nutshell, it is a gap of almost 830 million, the result of wrong investments, a 14.6% of sales less than in the year 2022, and above all to the lack of video games of weight placed on the market.
In the last twelve months, data in hand, the only major titles published by Ubisoft have been Just Dance 2023 And Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, both unable to meet expectations. The postponements of Skull and Bones, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the absence of Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, for which we will still have to wait, weigh enormously.
However, there is one fact that makes Ubisoft smile, and from which the new corporate strategy starts again. While pre-orders of games have dropped, bookings relating to in-game purchases, DLCs and digital content in general have increased, reaching one billion euros (+23.3%).
It is therefore not strange to understand why the company is moving in precise directions: in addition to the total relaunch of Assassin’s Creed (even ten video games of the franchise would be in development), Ubisoft is in fact moving to the formula of free to play video games, also introducing Artificial Intelligence for the development of its products.
The company then announced that it intends to launch 8 video games during the 2024 fiscal year, one of which, described as a major project, has not yet been announced.
NEWS: Ubisoft says it will increase the number of developers on the Assassin’s Creed franchise by 40% “to fuel its ambitious expansion”
But company headcount is down from 20,700 in September to below 20,000 thanks to office closures, layoffs and “tight controls on recruitments”
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) May 16, 2023
