During yesterday’s full-year 2020-21 conference call, Ubisoft Chief Financial Officer Frédérick Duguet offered an interesting comment regarding the publisher’s increased focus on free-to-play games going forward.
In line with the evolution of our high-quality line-up that is increasingly diverse, we are moving on from our prior comment regarding releasing 3-4 premium triple-As per year. It is no longer a proper indication of our value creation dynamics. For example, our expectations for Just Dance and Riders Republic are consistent with some of the industry’s triple-As performance. Additionally, we are building high-end free-to-play games to be trending towards triple-A ambitions over the long term.
We think we have a great opportunity to meaningfully expand the audience of our biggest franchises. We’ve taken the time to learn from what we did last year with Hyper Scape. We’re also learning with the launch we’ll be making on Roller Champions, we’ve been learning a lot with Brawlhalla that is rapidly growing, and we think it is now the time to come with high-quality free-to-play games across all our biggest franchises, across all platforms.
This is purely a financial communication evolution and doesn’t change the fact that we continue to expect a high cadence of content delivery, including powerful premium and free-to-play new releases as well as the continued expansion of our post-launch plans with an increased focus on growing our biggest franchises.
This statement is not meant to indicate that Ubisoft will develop fewer premium games, as a senior analyst from the company explained on Twitter. Rather, it will expand its offering of free-to-play titles.
Hi. Regarding the Ubisoft comment, it’s in reference to F2P becoming a larger share of the revenue pie, not an indication that there will be less traditional paid games like AC. The content mix is expanding, not changing. A good comp is the evolution of CoD since Warzone.
— Shonboppin (@shonboppin) May 11, 2021
Some of the interpretations of the article I’m seeing are incorrect. I mostly wanted to steer the convo away from “F2P games are replacing AAA paid games” to “F2P is going to be an additional way to experience some of these IPs”, and pointed to CoD as a good example of the model
— Shonboppin (@shonboppin) May 12, 2021
As part of the FY 2020-21 Ubisoft press release, we also learned that Skull and Bones won’t be available before April 2022, while Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Quarantine are still planned to launch before the end of September. More information will be shared at E3 2021, where Ubisoft is confirmed to appear.
