Ubisoft Reveals Publishing Plans; PC Sales Coming in Right After PS4
Ubisoft has shared its publishing plans for the near future. In addition, the French company summarized the share of individual platforms and regions in the sales of its games.
- North America and Europe are the most important markets for Ubisoft;
- PlayStation 4 is the most important platform for the French giant, although the PC is hot on its heels;
- the best is still before Uplay.
Daniel Ahmad, a senior video game analyst at Niko Partners, has shared, via Twitter, the most important parts of the report on Ubisoft's publishing plans for between January to March 2020. The company has not only released new titles, but also intends to develop large games from its portfolio and will make two new games available to Google Stadia subscribers. In addition, we found out what share of the company's game sales in recent months was accounted for by individual regions and platforms. Among the former, the United States was in the lead, while PlayStation 4 led the list of the latter.
Ubisoft's plans
The discussion of Ubisoft's plans for the period from January to March 2020 should start with new games that have already added to its portfolio. Unfortunately, we won't find any candidates for global hits on their list - we are talking about such titles as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and the recently released Might & Magic Chess Royale, an auto battler available on PC and mobile devices.
More interesting are the plans for the development of already published, large games belonging to the company. These include the fourth year of support for For Honor, the third episode for Tom Clancy's The Division 2, and the fifth year in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege. Additionally, the list includes the first adventure for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, called Deep State.
The games that are to appear on Stadia's offer by the end of next month includes Tom Clancy's The Division 2 and The Crew 2.
Sales of Ubisoft games
So let's move on to the distribution of game sales by regions and platforms. In the last nine months, North America contributet almost half (48% to be precise) of the result. Europe came in second (with 34%), while the "rest of the world" secured 18%. It is worth noting that although in the same period last year the "balance of power" was similar, the United States had a slightly smaller advantage over the Old Continent. However, this does not change the fact that these are apparently the two most important sales markets for the company.
Now we will look at the results of Ubisoft sales on individual platforms over the last nine months. The undisputed winner here is PlayStation 4, which secured 31%; later on there's PC (with 27%), Xbox One (17%), Nintendo Switch (9%), mobile platforms (9%) and the broadly defined "other" (with a result of 7%). An interesting fact is that compared to the same period last year only Xbox One did not manage to strengthen its position, giving the other platforms three percentage points.
Things look a little different if we only consider the last quarter. As it turns out, in the third quarter of the fiscal year 2020, the biggest share in the sales of Ubisoft's games was held by PC, which managed to overtake PlayStation 4. The coming months will show whether this trend will continue.
Some other figures
In addition, Ubisoft has reported that in the calendar year 2019, the players spent a total of 4.5 billion hours on the company's PC and console games. Meanwhile, in 2016 the number of played hours was only 2 billion. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege has already been checked out by 55 million players, Just Dance 2020 is selling better than the previous installment of the series in the same period since its launch, and Uplay's revenue in the last nine months has increased by 73% compared to the same period last year.
