Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has revived the talk about Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ profitability.
As reported by TweakTown, Yves made this statement in a recent shareholders meeting:
We don’t disclose production costs, it did cost over 100 million euros, we’ll say that. We don’t give any final costs. We also invested heavily in the engine.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is rumored to be the second biggest launch in the franchise’s history. And internally, Ubisoft seems to see the game as the more organic success, as they believe the less popular Assassin’s Creed Valhalla sold as well as it did because it came out in the middle of the pandemic.
While fans will tell you that it was a given that any Assassin’s Creed would be a huge success because of its huge brand, Ubisoft has to balance that out with the game’s budget in mind. Certainly, to make a lot of money, you have to spend a lot of money, but in the past few years Ubisoft has demonstrated an inability to fully capitalize on the potential of their games and projects.
One could say the culmination of this was Ubisoft’s cancellation of XDefiant, less than a year in after its official launch. While fans would want to argue that Ubisoft could have given it more of a chance, that may not have been possible at a time when the company had to reorganize to stay financially viable.
Of course, this also stands in contrast to Star Wars Outlaws, which is one of the reasons for Ubisoft’s reorganization. Yves said this about that game’s performance in the market:
For Star Wars Outlaws, we didn’t reach our sales targets. The game suffered from a number of items. First, it suffered from the fact that it was released at a time when the brand that it belonged to was in a bit of choppy waters, and the game [needed polish]. It was debugged in the weeks after release but it did affect sales volumes.
We did heavily improve the game by troubleshooting and debugging in those early weeks. When it will be released on upcoming consoles such as the Switch 2 it will be a new version of the game. Improvements on the game have not finished and we will continue improving it for future releases.
In any case, it’s now clear that all that FUD that surrounded Assassin’s Creed Shadows before its launch was bogus and out of line with what gamers were thinking. Its success has enabled Ubisoft to smooth out their ongoing reorganization, and possibly ensure its future.
