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Ubisoft First Half Financials Reflect Importance Of Digital Sales
Today Ubisoft revealed the financials for the company's first half of its 2016-2017 fiscal year, and things are better than the company was expecting.
Sales of €281.4 million during the period were ahead of the company's targets, up 35.7 percent from €207.3 during the same period last year. This helps cushion a €61.8 million operating loss versus the €107.8 million operating loss in the first half of 2015-16.
While the company expects a slightly downward-revised, conservative sales target of €1.61 to €1.67 billion (down from €1.70 billion), its full-year operating income target is being raised slightly to €230 to €250 million.
Digital revenues – comprising 72 percent of sales – were up €202.6 million, and the company says it expects digital revenue for the full year to be about 40 percent of overall sales.
The Crew, Division, and Rainbow Six Siege each have more than 10 million "unique registered players," and monthly active users were up 43.9 percent compared with last year. These games generated "recurring player investment" (such as sales of digital items, season passes, and DLC) of €95 million (up 132 percent). As such, the company stressed the importance of multiplayer titles, which it also said influenced sales of older titles. Back catalog sales were a big success for the company up 45.5 percent, reaching €256.4 million.
Ubisoft president and CEO Yves Guillemot, touched on Vivendi's continuing, aggressive attempts at a takeover of the company, noting that shareholders and employees overwhelmingly backed Ubisoft.
Nintendo's Switch console was briefly mentioned, but the company simply reiterated that it's excited by the console and its potential.
Finally, the executives also addressed the Assassin's Creed franchise, but had no update on the next title only to say it will be launched "when ready."
[Source: Ubisoft]
Our Take
With Ubisoft seeing the monetary benefit of its multiplayer games, and directly stating as such, it will be interesting to see if this affects the company's approach to single-player in future titles at all.
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