In news that has shocked nobody, GFK has released information on sales numbers for the recent week of Wii U software. Dominating the list is Mario Kart 8 and New Super Mario Bros. U, with Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric squeezing in an unlikely third from unfortunately unknowing parents and grandparents. The biggest reveal from the charts is that Watch Dogs has placed 14th, failing to even make it into the top 10 on its launch week.
Skull and Bones surprises with second-highest player engagement in Ubisoft's history, marking an unexpected success story.
Funny how all the clickhate was trying to spin that it was "struggling" to reach these very numbers.
Over 700 Ubisoft staff in France strike due to failed salary talks, highlighting a major dispute over fair compensation.
Ubisoft is eroding from within. They used to be such a great publisher, but their hubris, greed, ignorance, and willingness to embrace crappy business practices such as intentionally releasing broken games with a "patch it later" mentality just so they can garner Black Friday sales, their in-game cash shops to sell you virtual junk, over priced collectors editions where their price increases but their quality remains the same, giant open bland land masses to explore packed with copy & paste boring filler side quests designed to waste your time with menial tasks.
And let's not forget their employees constantly getting pissed at the executives treating them like crap, which has been an on-going problem for years. Yeah, Ubisoft had rightfully earned their title of Ubi-junk.
What a shame.
Couldn't happened to a more deserving company. Here's to a AAAA Strike for all those well deserved AAAA Salaries.
🖕 Choke on it U-beSawft.
The industry is hitting some issues I'm seeing games not selling as well, Sony projections are down, games cost way too much to make and are not hitting return on investment, and now employees demanding to be paid more.
It reminds me of the movie industry. The cost to make movies aren't making their money back yet you have everyone demanding to be paid more. The things that needs to change are cost of development including employee/contractor wages, and I'd even say to lower the MSRP on games. I know they are trying like hell to monetize games to bring in recurring revenue like mobile games, but that's not the answer. The onus is on the industry to correct this and I think the way to do it is cutting back on costs.
I don't see how employees can demand to be paid more when sh*t like Skull and Bones isn't bringing back money and god knows how much they spent on the development of that game. I think I remember seeing that after Black Flag or when Sea of Thieves was announced.
Ubisoft just announced its financial results for Q3 of the fiscal year 2023-2024 and confirmed a release window for Assassin’s Creed Codename Red, on top of a lot more information about the performance of its major games.
Sad for Nintendo. I know Watch_dogs was released super late, but poor sales don't entice other 3rd party developers to port games to wiiu
It's funny to look at the factores that led to this flop.
It was a 6 month delayed port of a regular game, priced at 60 dollars, on a weaker console compared to ONE and PS4, platforms where the game is much cheaper right now.
Ubisoft shouldn't complain after this disaster.
What did they expect...? Sucks for the Wii U though, it's certainly not going to give a good impression to other developers. Even though this poor launch was no fault of Nintendo's.
That was expected, a lot of people already played Watch Dogs on another platforms, and the game is mediocre at best, few people would buy the game now for $60.
This pretty much sums up why no third party dev is left on the Wii U