Ubisoft® reports estimated sales
for third-quarter 2011-12
Estimated sales of around €650 million, outstripping targets
Release of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier(TM) postponed to the first quarter of fiscal 2012-13
Revision of targets for full-year 2011-12
Paris, January 10, 2012 – Today, Ubisoft reported its estimated sales for the third quarter of fiscal 2011-12 and revised its full-year targets.
“I’ve been saying that it’s our long-term goal to take back the first-person shooter category leadership. We made strong progress in calendar ’10 over calendar ’09. This year, with the trail end of Battlefield Bad Company 2 still doing well, Medal of Honor doing well, Crysis [2] and Bulletstorm, we’re clearly going to make more progress on our goal, and that’s before we get to what I think is going to be a very exciting entry later in the year that we’re not yet announcing.” – EA CEO John Riccitiello
It’s possible that this title is something we have not heard about, but while talking about “taking back the FPS category” in the past Riccitiello has mentioned Battlefield 3. I’d put my money on that rather than something new.
“[The original 'GTA'] was a real mess for years, it never moved on, it never went anywhere… It was almost canned. The publisher, BMG Interactive, wanted to can it, as it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. One of them [GTA's problems] is stability, which is a really boring one but it crashed all the f***ing time… The designers couldn’t test stuff out or try things out, it just kept crashing as simple as that… the core of gameplay was fundamentally broken.” – Original GTA programmer Gary Penn
Not that the original GTA was a major sales success, but had it got cancelled the video game industry would be a very different place right now.
EDISON, N.J., Jan. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Majesco Entertainment Company (Nasdaq: COOL), an innovative provider of video games for the mass market, announced today that on January 28, 2011, it received a letter from the Nasdaq Stock Market indicating that the Company had regained compliance with Listing Rule 5550(a)(2) as the closing bid price of the Company’s common stock had been at $1.00 per share or greater for at least 10 consecutive business days. On March 2, 2010, the Company was notified that its common stock failed to maintain a minimum bid price of $1.00 for 30 consecutive business days. The letter received on January 28, 2011 further stated that this matter is now closed. The company is now in full compliance with Nasdaq listing requirements.
“Yeah, we have been discussing it [a new Timesplitters title], but nothing has been confirmed yet, so let’s see after Crysis 2,” – Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli
Free Radical, the studio behind Timesplitters, was purchased by Crytek a few years ago and is currently working on Crysis 2′s multiplayer mode. From this statment (and others last year) it sounds like Timesplitters 4 is the developer’s next likely project.
“We have two big original titles for 2011 that we haven’t revealed yet… [One of them will make people think] At this point, what the hell are you doing? What, are you stupid?” – Takeuchi (RE 5 and Lost Planet 2 producer)
Nothing inspires shareholder confidence like saying “Our next product will make you think we are stupid.”
In general, I’m a pretty big Capcom fan so consider me excited.
“Hell yeah! I know RE6 is in the works, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to audition for it… Or you guys could bug Capcom into casting me in it! ;-) I’m workin’ it, baby!” – Albert Wesker’s voice actor D.C. Douglas
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Capcom would continue on with the Resident Evil series (plus this is not the first time we have heard of RE6), but it’s always nice to hear of a new RE title. Hopefully, we get a return to survival horror and zombies with this one.
“Based on information received from a number of publishers we have estimates of games piracy running at between 4:1 against legitimate sales… We took a conservative position of saying if this is only 1:1 across all titles it would have a retail equivalent value of £1.45 billion. We did not say this was the loss to industry… What is clear is people who ‘share’ games via P2P networks or buy illegal copies are not buying the real product, and this reduces retailer sales. It can provide the consumer with a sub-standard product and money paid to illegal traders does not flow back to the creative… In turn, investors see higher risks/lower returns, and this in turn will undermine confidence in the sector and lower the amount of money invested, reducing the developer’s chance to create new products.” – UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE) director general Michael Rawlinson
