I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren’t free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that’s still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn’t mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they’re generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.
I’m not familiar with hyperscape but the other two are about 70 on metacritic. That’s a pretty great score considering launch performance. But then no game in the last five years at least has launched without shitty initial performance. Where are you getting information about sales numbers though? Most publishers are very vague about hard numbers what with the bullshit subscription services but I didn’t see anything that indicated they lost money on either title.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.
Seventy is good bordering on great. What the hell is this trend of everyone thinking seven out of ten is garbage when it’s better than most? Seventy is a very good score. I understand that everyone says this and that, everyone says they underperformed but nobody has any hard data, and all the people that have actually played the games have a positive experience. I also don’t know why everyone is automatically attributing layoffs to poor sales when literally every game company and media company and just fuckin every company is doing the same. Clearly ubisoft is suffering financially, but it isn’t because they make bad games. Literally everything consumer-hostile practice they have other companies do more aggressively. Ubisoft doesn’t hold a candle to the mtx fuckery of rockstar and bethesda but nobody trashes their games like the Ubisoft dogpile. Like yeah, the games are derivative and remix mechanics ad nauseum but they’re high quality for the most part. You get a shit load of content, the writing is always solid, they’re fun to play. I just can’t help feeling like most of the people circlejerking Ubisoft hate were probably active in gamergate.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold.
There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.
I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.
Didn’t both those games review and sell well? They were both polished and pretty fantastic actually.
I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren’t free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that’s still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn’t mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they’re generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.
I’m not familiar with hyperscape but the other two are about 70 on metacritic. That’s a pretty great score considering launch performance. But then no game in the last five years at least has launched without shitty initial performance. Where are you getting information about sales numbers though? Most publishers are very vague about hard numbers what with the bullshit subscription services but I didn’t see anything that indicated they lost money on either title.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.
Seventy is good bordering on great. What the hell is this trend of everyone thinking seven out of ten is garbage when it’s better than most? Seventy is a very good score. I understand that everyone says this and that, everyone says they underperformed but nobody has any hard data, and all the people that have actually played the games have a positive experience. I also don’t know why everyone is automatically attributing layoffs to poor sales when literally every game company and media company and just fuckin every company is doing the same. Clearly ubisoft is suffering financially, but it isn’t because they make bad games. Literally everything consumer-hostile practice they have other companies do more aggressively. Ubisoft doesn’t hold a candle to the mtx fuckery of rockstar and bethesda but nobody trashes their games like the Ubisoft dogpile. Like yeah, the games are derivative and remix mechanics ad nauseum but they’re high quality for the most part. You get a shit load of content, the writing is always solid, they’re fun to play. I just can’t help feeling like most of the people circlejerking Ubisoft hate were probably active in gamergate.
There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.
I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.