Ubisoft have held an investors call which revealed some inside info about upcoming targets for games, as well as admitting that some previous games missed their sales targets.
The investors call revealed that the sales targets for the recently delayed The Crew have been set at 2.5 million, whereas the also recently delayed Watch Dogs is aiming for 6.2 million.
“We generally have spoken to about over 2.5 million units,” said Ubisoft’s chief financial officer Alain Martinez, “We’ll see where we go and we believe that we have a nice potential for the future.”
Additionally Martinez revealed that some games underperformed in terms of sales:
“We have had games that were released for which we anticipate today lower sales than we anticipated when we gave our first targets, already released games such as, of course, Splinter Cell, Rayman, and others.”
Due to this and the fact that Watch Dogs and The Crew have been delayed, Ubisoft have adjusted their financial targets for the fiscal 2014, it now expects sales of between €995 million and €1.045 billion, instead of the previously targeted €1.420 billion and €1.450 billion.
It is not looking good for Ubisoft recently, with there previous two games under-performing and the announcement of two game delays it seems that Ubisoft are going through a difficult period. I’m sure once Assassin’s Creed 4 makes a lot of money they will be happy again, but personally I think the Watch Dogs delay is embarrassing, not only was it extremely last minute but it messed up a lot of people’s PS4 pre-orders, causing some people to cancel the system all together. Surely they knew that it wasn’t a good idea to release at the same time as AC4 months ago?
Hopefully the game does receive more polish as they have promised, maybe give the game a break and don’t release a new trailer every week, the general feeling is that they have shown too much of the game and people were getting tired of it.
Let me know in the comments how you feel about Ubisoft’s current predicament, I’m sure they’ll recover soon enough.
