During Ubisoft’s quarterly financial conference call for investors and analysts, CEO Yves Guillemot and CFO Frédérick Duguet talked about the next fiscal year and beyond.
The executives were asked if there is room for a fourth AAA game on top of Avatar: Frontier of Pandora, Skull & Bones, & Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope.
The reply was that there are “Other Exciting Premium Games” expected to come in the fiscal year, which spans the period between April 2022 and March 2023. It’s worth mentioning that Ubisoft defines “premium” non-free to play AAA games.
While not explicitly, Duguet seemed to hint that none of these will be an Assassin’s Creed game in response to another question, mentioning that Ubisoft will be focusing on delivering a “big year two” for Valhalla, with the biggest post-launch program ever for the franchise.
Incidentally, we also heard that Skull & Bones is considered “very promising” and has just passed an important milestone in development. On the other hand, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope should be much bigger than Kingdom Battle due to the fact that the installed base of the Switch is much higher now.
Asked to comment on the sales performance of PS5, Duguet mentioned that as seen from Sony’s results sales of PS5 are increasing quarter to quarter and that’s what Ubisoft expected. Ultimately, the publisher expects that given the strong demand, the cumulative installed base of PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles will be higher than that of the previous generation.
Guillemot added that nowadays next-gen platforms are at the top of sales of all the games Ubisoft launches. He expects that that share will become bigger and bigger as the installed base grows.
Asked about the mysterious Assassin’s Creed Infinity project, Guillemot clarified that it’s not going to be a free-to-play game. It’s going to have “a lot of narrative elements” and it’s going to be a “very innovative game” but it’ll still have what players already love in all Assassin’s Creed games from the start. It’s going to be a “huge game”
Duguet also clarified that the game is still early in development so nothing more can be said about it.
If you want to read more about Ubisoft’s financial performance, you can check out our dedicated article from earlier today.
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