Star Wars, mobile and free-to-play: Ubisoft's bid to transform its business
In my view, one of the best games of last year was by Ubisoft.
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is a wonderful strategy game, and I'd picked it to be a breakout hit. Its predecessor had exceeded ten million players, it was the Mario game of Christmas, and its only real competition was Pokémon, which was arriving a month later.
It didn't quite work out that way. It would be harsh to call the game a flop, but it missed Ubisoft's targets significantly. In fact, it was a disappointing Christmas overall for the publisher, with Just Dance 2023 failing to hit the financial mark, too.
Ubisoft pointed to a growing trend, partially driven by the current economic climate, of gamers gravitating towards the bigger brands. And when you look at the record-breaking performances of games like God of War, Pokémon, Zelda and Hogwarts Legacy, there's certainly evidence to support that analysis.
"The market is suffering a little bit with the inflation situation," Yves Guillemot told GamesIndustry.biz during the firm's Forward event last week.
"It's a shame the industry isn't putting more effort into getting together to show their games"
"There's more pressure on all the families to be more careful. We see that everywhere... we met with a first-party partner at midday, and they have also seen the influence of the economic conditions on how much people are buying.
"Although, I think it was a different issue with Mario. We had already released a Mario Rabbids game [on Switch], so by doing another we had two similar experiences on one machine. On Nintendo, games like this never die. There are 25 Mario games on Switch. Nintendo [has advised] that it's better to do one iteration on each machine. We were a bit too early, we should have waited
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