Ubisoft half-year figures: A new hope for Star Wars Outlaws

Coming on August 30, 2024 for PC, PS5 and Xbox: Star Wars Outlaws (Image: Ubisoft)

Better games with lower costs and fewer staff: Ubisoft wants to show that this calculation works.

“Underperformed sales expectations” from Star Wars Outlaws: The shareholders now have it in black and white at the latest, which Ubisoft management had already anticipated at the end of September – and which resulted in a dramatic drop in share price, from which the French publisher's shares have only slowly recovered. And only because the founding Guillemot family and major shareholder Tencent are obviously thinking intensively about the future structure of the ailing games company.

The profit warning from September also explains why the Ubisoft share price this morning is quite unimpressed by the mixed half-year results that Ubisoft published on Wednesday evening after the stock market closed.

Specific sales and player numbers for Star Wars Outlaws The company still does not name. What is obvious, however, is that the Star Wars game has a direct impact on sales figures in the first six months of the financial year (April to September), which are €350 million, 22 percent below the previous year. The blockbuster, released shortly after Gamescom, is now to be improved and expanded with updates – the publication on Steam should provide additional impetus.

For the current Christmas business (October to December), Ubisoft is planning sales of €380 million – for the year as a whole, the group is aiming for almost €1.95 billion and in the black. Whether and to what extent this succeeds depends entirely on Assassin's Creed Shadows from November 2024 to February 2025.

Until the end of the year, only digital-only releases are on the program, including a flood of expansions for long-running favorites like The Crew or Just Dancebut also a blockchain game called Champions Tacticswhich launched without much fanfare.

With a view to the cost reduction program that has been initiated, Ubisoft sees itself on track: In addition to fixed costs, personnel costs in particular were reduced. In the past 24 months alone, the workforce has shrunk by 2,000 employees: at the end of the quarter, Ubisoft had exactly 18,666 employees – almost 850 of them in the studios in Düsseldorf, Mainz and Berlin and at Kolibri Games. The company is one of the largest employers in the German industry.

And another interesting detail from the annual report, which is obviously intended to document the value of the game manufacturer: In total, there are now six Ubisoft brands that have grossed more than a billion euros – The Division, Ghost Recon, Just Dance, Far Cry (€2 billion), Rainbow Six Siege (€3.5 billion) and of course Assassin's Creed with around 4 billion euros.

This analysis and this GamesWirtschaft column deals with the situation at Ubisoft.

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