Ubisoft stock is tanking hard after disastrous earning report

It's the official data shared by the company to their shareholders. So real one.

And yes, in a report about their fiscal year to mention how many active players had the IP is a metric.

Highlighting it had the 2nd best release day in the franchise in terms of revenue, when the franchise has games that sold over 15M copies is a great metric.

Same goes announcing that the game had the best release day that any game of the company ever had in the store where the company sells the most. Knowing the company had many super successful game, that's great news.

When a company recaps their data for the shareholders they choose the ones that sound better for that period to highlight that the company, this or that IP or this or that game did a great job here or there.

And then they list all the financial data they are legally forced to show to their shareholders, plus a few extra bits more.

All of this only for the shares to continue to fall in to oblivion.

So what does that tell you?
 
Now that it's an official flop, cue the same people who said it was really good to start saying it was just not a good game and that's why it underperformed.
 
The game is almost unplayable on PC, I keep getting the DX12 Error, thinking it was a simple issue. Turns out it's a massive issue for a lot of PC players and Ubisoft still hasn't fixed it which is why I dropped the game.
Star Wars Outlaws had a similar problem with windows 11 24/H2 where the game would just randomly crash, It made the game unplayable for me, it wasn't fixed until February this year.

Glad i never picked up Shadows.
 
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All of this only for the shares to continue to fall in to oblivion.

So what does that tell you?
That since some years ago somebody is butthurted with the Guillemots not wanting to sell them Ubisoft and try to put pressure by artificially lowering their market value with the help of their friends.

Maybe the same ones who bought the largest 3rd party publisher just after their stocks were tanking due to some controversies that magically dissapeared just after the acquisition was done.

Same ones who would kill their mothers to do the same Tencent did with investing in that Ubisoft subsidiary with some IPs and studios. And may do it with a similar potential future subsidiary Ubisoft could do with other known IPs and studios.

Now that it's an official flop, cue the same people who said it was really good to start saying it was just not a good game and that's why it underperformed.
To have the best release in the PSN store in Ubisoft's history and the top 2 top grossing launch day in AC franchise history isn't to flop or underperform at all. It's the opposite.
 
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We don't know how much the game has sold up till now, because the sales data is made up and even leaves out sales of AC:S on Ubisoft's own store where the bulk of AC:S PC sales probably are.
They literally declared it in their quarterly earnings yesterday.
 
Coming from someone who wasn't trying to pay attention, seems there was def a social campaign to make this sound like a big success now that this news is out.

It happens, people. It's happened for a long time. And just as importantly, some companies are worse than others. You can't always write it off as "they all do it".
 
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When you put your teams to work on Avatar, SW Outlaws and Skulls and Bones instead of División 3, New Splinter Cell and a new Rayman ot at least Ghost Rekon like Breakpoint.

well You get those results

Hope this does not changes División 3 devloping ....one of the last good IPs from UBI.
 
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2.4 million in two months?? Can someone on GAF help me out here. I was promised 3 million players in a week for AC and that it proved certain mindsets of gamers.

Can someone out there explain the 0.6 million people who played but didn't buy the game? And did it stop selling immediate after?

Someone helps!
 
2.4 million in two months?? Can someone on GAF help me out here. I was promised 3 million players in a week for AC and that it proved certain mindsets of gamers.

Can someone out there explain the 0.6 million people who played but didn't buy the game? And did it stop selling immediate after?

Someone helps!

FYI.....those are not official numbers. Just some guy on reddit posting stuff from other sources.
 
When you put your teams to work on Avatar, SW Outlaws and Skulls and Bones instead of División 3, New Splinter Cell and a new Rayman ot at least Ghost Rekon like Breakpoint.

well You get those results

Hope this does not changes División 3 devloping ....one of the last good IPs from UBI.
Went to play The division on XSX, I didn't realize this game had FPS boost and Res boost. Game looks amazing like this. I hope part 3 makes it!
 
From limited looks at thet OT it seemed like those on GAF that actually played Shadows enjoyed it, and it was starting to look like the PR disaster was a curse that didn't quite fit the product from post-release feedback. But it was never going to recover after Japanese officials joined in on the drama, the game was basically dead and buried. It all got a bit out of hand. And I'm saying that as someone who won't buy anything new from Ubi because of their stupid shitcunt launcher. Ubi, abandon that waste of hard drive space and resources and watch your stock rise from good faith and PC sales alone.
 
All of this only for the shares to continue to fall in to oblivion.

So what does that tell you?
That Ubisoft's issues run much deeper than a single game release and they were never getting saved by Shadows no matter how well it did, I thought that was pretty clear before launch. The game probably did well enough when compared to previous AC games, but not amazing either and it's not touching Valhalla numbers in terms of sales.
 
That since some years ago somebody is butthurted with the Guillemots not wanting to sell them Ubisoft and try to put pressure by artificially lowering their market value with the help of their friends.

Maybe the same ones who bought the largest 3rd party publisher just after their stocks were tanking due to some controversies that magically dissapeared just after the acquisition was done.

Same ones who would kill their mothers to do the same Tencent did with investing in that Ubisoft subsidiary with some IPs and studios. And may do it with a similar potential future subsidiary Ubisoft could do with other known IPs and studios.


To have the best release in the PSN store in Ubisoft's history and the top 2 top grossing launch day in AC franchise history isn't to flop or underperform at all. It's the opposite.
Even if what you're speculating is true, the point still stands though, if their games were actually performing well then those "bad actors" you're speaking of wouldn't be able to put Ubisoft in such a dire situation.
 
That Ubisoft's issues run much deeper than a single game release and they were never getting saved by Shadows no matter how well it did, I thought that was pretty clear before launch. The game probably did well enough when compared to previous AC games, but not amazing either and it's not touching Valhalla numbers in terms of sales.

The game outperformed AC Odyssey. That's all we know for certain at this point.
 
Even if what you're speculating is true, the point still stands though, if their games were actually performing well then those "bad actors" you're speaking of wouldn't be able to put Ubisoft in such a dire situation.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Far Cry or Rainbow Six Six were performing better than ever. They always had a very strong back catalog making a steady revenue. Several other games were doing ok. A few other projects flopped, a few others got cancelled, some got delayed (business as usual in gaming companies, happens everywhere).

Due to an unfortunate combo of these games that had to be delayed, flopped, cancelled etc. had a weak period and had to get huge debt, that will reduce to basically zero later this year. The company was bloated and are doing a good job cutting the fat.

Once they went back to release these delayed big games, as expected they are recovering from that bad temporary moment.

I mean, it's normal stuff in gaming. Nothing dramatic. The share price drop they have been suffering -just a coincidence- since when around when ABK had the controversies and MS agreed to acquire Activision Blizzard is nonsensical and unproportional with their performance.

Ubisoft bankruptcy any% speedrun going clean.
Instead of this what Ubisoft announced is that by the end of the year the huge debt they had will be reduced to 'around zero'.

When do they become Tencent France?
As I remember Tencent signed that during a certain amount of years wouldn't buy more Ubisoft stocks, and Ubisoft signed to them that wouldn't sell the company to anybody in at least certain amount of years.
 
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The game outperformed AC Odyssey. That's all we know for certain at this point.
I know Valhalla got the covid boost and all but I still think the Japan setting was their silver bullet for whenever they were in a troublesome situation like this and they fucked it up.
If they had simply followed a more "traditional and safer" path, avoided all the controversy and simply made a badass looking AC game set in Japan, the game would sell at least as much if not more than Valhalla.
But they decided to go for whatever Shadows was and instead in the following months after the reveal the game was drowning in so many different controversies and political shitstorms that it wasn't even funny...

But then again, the game probably began being conceptualized way before shit hit the fan, by the time Ubisoft got in really bad trouble it was already in production and was way too late to change it.
 
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I know Valhalla got the covid boost and all but I still think the Japan setting was their silver bullet for whenever they were in a troublesome situation like this and they fucked it up.
If they had simply followed a more "traditional and safer" path, avoided all the controversy and simply made a badass looking AC game set in Japan, the game would sell at least as much if not more than Valhalla.
But they decided to go for whatever Shadows was and instead in the following months after the reveal the game was drowning in so many different controversies and political shitstorms that it wasn't even funny...

But then again, the game probably began being conceptualized way before shit hit the fan, by the time Ubisoft got in really bad trouble it was already in production and was way too late to change it.

I think Ubisoft probably gave a master class on how NOT to develop, market or release based in Japan. The contrast with Ghost of Tsushima is incredibly stark. So yeah.....I think a lot of the negativity could have been avoided.

And ultimately, I thought the game was completely average. I finished it and platinumed it but it just did so much wrong and I complained about it quite loudly in the OT. Others loved it, but as a fan of the AC franchise, I was a bit disappointed.
 
I know Valhalla got the covid boost and all but I still think the Japan setting was their silver bullet for whenever they were in a troublesome situation like this and they fucked it up.
If they had simply followed a more "traditional and safer" path, avoided all the controversy and simply made a badass looking AC game set in Japan, the game would sell at least as much if not more than Valhalla.
But they decided to go for whatever Shadows was and instead in the following months after the reveal the game was drowning in so many different controversies and political shitstorms that it wasn't even funny...

But then again, the game probably began being conceptualized way before shit hit the fan, by the time Ubisoft got in really bad trouble it was already in production and was way too late to change it.
Sure, Valhalla had the extra of the Covid bump, and the extra of being crossgen, and Shadows pretty likely suffered because of the controversies.

But Shadows still had an insane launch: the 2nd top grossing AC launch ever. In the PSN store had the best launch of any Ubisoft game ever.
 
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I really liked their Avatar game, but it's a fairly long game, and it sounds like most of their games share the exact same formula, so I never really felt the need to play any of their other titles.

If they focused more on shorter narrative based titles, and toned down their aggressive pricing and 20 different fomo editions of everything, I think they could win folks back over.

But then even stuff like prince of persia flopped so it feels like they can't catch a break either way
 
2.4 million in two months?? Can someone on GAF help me out here. I was promised 3 million players in a week for AC and that it proved certain mindsets of gamers.

Can someone out there explain the 0.6 million people who played but didn't buy the game? And did it stop selling immediate after?

Someone helps!
Anyone doing UBI+ or Xbox/Ps home sharing would have extra players playing but not actually buying the game.

When it comes to sales numbers they are never 100% perfect anyway unless it's purely a digital sale where it can be accurately tracked on sites and someone publicly says the sales number.

Any disc sales will be tracked by research companies and store POS systems but that only goes so far as not every store is tracked or gives out the info.

So what any company does for vague situations like this is get real sales data and then for "rest of market" do some kind of algorithm to estimate what that is worth to get a ballpark grand total. Like if Store X is known to not give out sales data but is 2% of the industry and fully carries that product, then do some reverse math making it so the sales total is manually adjusted to take that into account.
 
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If the numbers are accurate, I believe they likely are in the margin of error, what's the defense from those who were juicing their lemons over its "success"? - reporting "players reached" is such a flimsy metric….

And what's the real path to redemption for Ubisoft?
 
I think Ubisoft probably gave a master class on how NOT to develop, market or release based in Japan. The contrast with Ghost of Tsushima is incredibly stark. So yeah.....I think a lot of the negativity could have been avoided.

And ultimately, I thought the game was completely average. I finished it and platinumed it but it just did so much wrong and I complained about it quite loudly in the OT. Others loved it, but as a fan of the AC franchise, I was a bit disappointed.
I'm an assumed hater of modern AC games but the AC franchise itself is one of my favourites so I was biased from the very beginning, but I still think the Yasuke thing is simply retarded and I just rolled my eyes when I saw it because it was obviously just for the brownie points.
Had they used him as a supporting character like Da Vinci, Machiavelli, Mary Read, etc, you'd still have chuds screaming their lungs out but most people would not give a shit and it wouldn't have become a controversy with so many headlines around it.

I did play the game, now whenever I think about it I just laugh, regardless of all the other stuff, Yasuke's gameplay is so fucking terrible compared to Naoe's that it just left me scratching my head as to why all this bullshit was necessary in an AC game in the first place.
Naoe was pretty cool but then again, the RPG witcher wannabe crap brings the rest of the game down as well and the story was very very mid and generic...

An AC set in Japan was my dream ever since I played AC2, thinking about how it was wasted like this actually hurts me a bit.
Sure, Valhalla had the extra of the Covid bump, and the extra of being crossgen, and Shadows pretty likely suffered because of the controversies.

But Shadows still had an insane launch: the 2nd top grossing AC launch ever. In the PSN store had the best launch of any Ubisoft game ever.
And I never said anything about Shadows not performing well. All I'm saying is, if Ubisoft had played their cards right an AC game set in Japan would shatter records for the franchise imo.
 
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But Shadows still had an insane launch: the 2nd top grossing AC launch ever. In the PSN store had the best launch of any Ubisoft game ever.

That's in terms of revenue. We don't really know how well it did compared to the rest in terms of units.

As mentioned previously in the other thread, the average cost of Shadows is $70 , while the other games were $60 . That's around 16.67% increase in price which leads to inflated revenue. Its kind of misleading as its better to compare the games in units.

Also a better comparison would be the 1st month rather the 1st day lol . We don't know if Shadows has legs like other games or how did the controversy affected the game sales. We do know that Shadows underperformed in units sales in Japan compared to the other games. We have sales data on that if someone could pull them up.

first-week sales:

Assassin's Creed Shadows (PS5)17,701 units

Assassin's Creed Mirage (PS5+PS4)
– 28,436 units

Assassin's Creed Valhalla (PS4) – 45,055 units

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (PS4) – 45,166 units

 
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I'm an assumed hater of modern AC games but the AC franchise itself is one of my favourites so I was biased from the very beginning, but I still think the Yasuke thing is simply retarded and I just rolled my eyes when I saw it because it was obviously just for the brownie points.
Had they used him as a supporting character like Da Vinci, Machiavelli, Mary Read, etc, you'd still have chuds screaming their lungs out but most people would not give a shit and it wouldn't have become a controversy with so many headlines around it.

I did play the game, now whenever I think about it I just laugh, regardless of all the other stuff, Yasuke's gameplay is so fucking terrible compared to Naoe's that it just left me scratching my head as to why all this bullshit was necessary in an AC game in the first place.
Naoe was pretty cool but then again, the RPG witcher wannabe crap brings the rest of the game down as well and the story was very very mid and generic...

An AC set in Japan was my dream ever since I played AC2, thinking about how it was wasted like this actually hurts me a bit.

And I never said anything about Shadows not performing well. All I'm saying is, if Ubisoft had played their cards right an AC game set in Japan would shatter records for the franchise imo.
Classic case of media development taking years to finish and the DEI/BLM full blown media promotion disappeared. In fact, people kind of had enough for at least 12 months so the pendulum is actually swaying back hard.

If AC shadows came out in 2021 it'd probably be lauded as most diverse accommodating game ever.

Too bad for UBI, it's 2025. Their jump on the brownie pt train was too late.

That's the problem with media and entertainment. consumer sentiment can change whether it's politics, too much superhero and star wars stuff, or kiddie stuff like rainbow loom for $19.99. If they take too long, the ride is already over.
 
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All I'm saying is, if Ubisoft had played their cards right an AC game set in Japan would shatter records for the franchise imo.
I assume this was the reason of why they took so long to make an AC set in ancient Japan with ninjas and samurais (fun fact: like many other people Yves Guillemot asked for it during years and the team kept ignoring him).

And I agree. But well, Ubisoft being Ubisoft lost the chance of breaking records by going too woke and not getting proper, good historian and Japan culture consultors and pissing off many people who would have bought it.

I assume it was too late to react, but I assume they'll partially address it in DLCs and future games.
 
Classic case of media development taking years to finish and the DEI/BLM full blown media promotion disappeared. In fact, people kind of had enough for at least 12 months so the pendulum is actually swaying back hard.

If AC shadows came out in 2021 it'd probably be lauded as most diverse accommodating game ever.

Too bad for UBI, it's 2025. Their jump on the brownie pt train was too late.

That's the problem with media. consumer sentiment can change whether it's politics, or kiddie stuff like rainbow loom for $19.99. If they take too long, the ride is already over.

Yep, and this is why if you have a budget that size you need to keep your target to be as general of an audience as possible. Not the flavor of the month, vanity politics. Even when this performative shit was in vogue, finer sentiments for it were shifting day to day. It was apparent it was never going to last and it was a volatile hill to die on.

This game should have been a lay up. It's actually far more difficult for this game to fuck up like it did than for it to break records.
 
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Yep, and this is why if you have a budget that size you need to keep your target to be as general of an audience as possible. Not the flavor of the month, vanity politics. Even when this performative shit was in vogue, finer sentiments for it were shifting day to day. It was apparent it was never going to last and it was a volatile hill to die on.

This game should have been a lay up. It's actually far more difficult for this game to fuck up like it did than for it to break records.
I don't even play AC games. I dabbled with the very first one and bailed after I found out it wasn't purely a old era action adventure game but instead some sci fi time warping thing.

But even when I'd flipped through AC threads even I remember there was always people talking Japan as it was the perfect setting to go 500 years ago and be an assassin. People would naturally assume I'd be a Japanese people focused game because hey it's Japan.

Nope. Had to make it a combo Japan/black guy game. Complete with preview videos showing him being a bruiser doing battles with rap music. Lol.

Sad thing for AC fans wanting a Japanese game, it seems they choose different settings every game. So getting a purely Japanese game probably won't come for 10 years if UBI rotates back to japan.
 
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When Ubisoft started using words other than 'sales' to describe the games 'sales performance', it was obvious the title was underperforming.
 
Not shilling to have bought Shadows at all. However, we tried to warn everyone.

I think the anti-woke stuff actually hurt us here. It made people noseblind to the quality issues. People were so fed up with anti-woke that they auto-dismissed legit concerns about the game.

When a game is super politicized like this one it is hard to tell what is real. Even now.
 
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Not shilling to have bought Shadows at all. However, we tried to warn everyone.

I think the anti-woke stuff actually hurt us here. It made people noseblind to the quality issues. People were so fed up with anti-woke that they auto-dismissed legit concerns about the game.

When a game is super politicized like this one it is hard to tell what is real. Even now.

Warn about what? All indications were it was a great game. Plenty of folks here enjoyed it here. I didn't like as much as others, but there was no warnings for the things I didn't like. As you say, everything was obsessed about the "woke" stuff which turned out to be nothing.
 
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