A few days ago, there was a report of Ubisoft pinning the blame for its financial losses on the Wii while lavishing praise for the sales Assassin’s Creed II pulled in. However, it appears that may indeed not be the case.
According to one member of the NeoGAF, “Guillemot’s statement is being over-analyzed and taken out of context. The purpose of that statement was to distract people from otherwise poor results… nothing more. It was comments about recent sales and next quarter’s guidance having nothing to do with the rest of the report. Guillemot was not bashing the Wii at all… in any way, shape, or form.”
The poster goes on to say that the article was “merely reciting the press release” without having heard the actual contents of the conference call. He says that nothing beyond the first page was cited, and “[t]here is a lot information being ignored for this article to reach its conclusion.”
The conference call was apparently regarding their first half-year outcome, which ended on September 30th, and breaks down like so:
System 2009 2008
DS 23% 37%
PC 17% 14%
PS2 2% 3%
PS3 15% 21%
PSP 5% 4%
Wii 22% 11%
360 14% 9%
other 2% 0%
With that, it appears that the Wii is not only doing better than the other platforms, but twice as well as it did the year prior. Not a lot to criticize in that.
Other relevant notes from the call regarding Wii state:
– Regarding Wii software sales… ‘some games are meeting expectations, some are not.’ They refused to say which titles did what, claiming that they were still waiting for more numbers and that it was too early to know…
– … They did claim that “Rabbids Go Home is taking off.”
– Two investors phrased their questions in a way that would make this thread proud. One called Wii software sales a “malaise,” the other saying that the Wii wasn’t helping the industry. The Ubisoft reps shot down both suggestions, stating that they expect the Wii to have huge December and that ‘the system has a high penetration and can be very profitable with quality software.’
They also say they expect most of their growth for the next year to come from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. At 14 and 15 percent, respectively, that’s not surprising.
So, in the end, it appears that some wires were crossed somewhere, leaving Ubisoft a rather strong Wii supporter. Even so, I can still only think of a couple of noteworthy Wii titles which came out in that period, but I guess Petz and the like still sell.
In any case, we regret the error.
