After revealing their financials, Ubisoft held an earnings call where they detailed quite a few different things regarding the future of the company and the industry.
While it already seems as though the PlayStation 4 is out-pre-ordering the Xbox One, when you combine the numbers of the two next-gen systems, “Some retailers – not all of them – are saying their preorders are two times what they saw for the last-gen launch,” said Yves Guillemot (via GI.Biz). Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag were named as two of the top 5 most pre-ordered games for the systems.
Ubisoft is already a major player in the next generation of consoles, with Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed IV, and Just Dance 2014 all expected to launch alongside the PS4 and Xbox One. When it comes to games coming down the pipeline, Yves says, “Open worlds are the clear direction where game genres are evolving.”
Referencing how Grand Theft Auto started it for the action genre, Skyrim continued it for RPGs, and Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 3 did it for the adventure and FPS genres, Yves believes that The Crew will do the exact same thing for driving games.
Guillemot then talked about how the company needs to “release open-world on a regular basis” (via Joystiq), explaining just how many of these games they’ve released lately:
We have put to the market nine open-world games over the last seven years, including two in 2013. This is by far an unmatched performance. Through those years, we have developed technologies, we have grown the experience of our teams, we have put in place pre-sized processes to ensure efficient collaboration between multiple studios working simultaneously on the same massive maps. This gives us a unique opportunity in the industry to bring open-world on a regular basis.
Yves also confirmed that the companion app for The Division won’t require the full retail game, and that the game itself is scheduled to release “closer to the end of the [calendar] year than the beginning.”
Finally, looking at the expected performance of Watch Dogs, a Ubisoft director said (via Gamespot):
What is true is that three months ago when we announced our results, we were kind of referencing that we, in our plan, we had built up Watch Dogs with expectation slightly below what Assassin’s Creed 1 did when it was first released – and it was 6.2 million. So after E3, what we said today was that we do feel that we can expect…slightly above the 6.2 million that Assassin’s Creed did.
Do you think Watch Dogs can eclipse the sales of Assassin’s Creed 1? Let us know in the comments below.
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