On October 24, 2019, the Ubisoft Group held its financial results conference, and the news was not encouraging for either players or shareholders.
Financial targets have been seriously revised downwards from an expected turnover of €2.1 billion to €1.4 billion for the current fiscal year. This will reduce pre-tax profits to between €20 million and €50 million instead of the expected €480 million.
The main culprit is Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which turned out to be a big disappointment, both critically and commercially, as players obviously did not choose to use their credit card.
The Division 2, released earlier this year, is also considered a commercial failure to a lesser extent. According to their analysis, the main reason being that these games are too similar and that they came out too close to each other.
This can be a euphemism if you monitor Ubisoft's game releases over the past few years.
To answer to these repeated failures, Ubisoft has decided to postpone the release of all its major titles planned for early 2020, in order to give them more development time, which will allow them to be much more refined when they are released.
They rejected the fact that this is to avoid releasing them at the same time as the games of other publishers, which are very numerous to release in early 2020 as a reason. Examples include Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom Eternal.
Rainbow Six Quarantine is postponed to the next fiscal year, after March-April 2020. Watch Dogs Legion and Gods and Monsters are being pushed back to the second half of 2020.
We can only approve of this policy change, as the hasty exits have ruined the reputation and potential of many stocks over the years. All that remains is to wait for their new precise release date.
You can see all this in this official report.
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