Ubisoft released its first quarter earnings today, and the headline for gamers is that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced has already blown past the sales expectations Ubisoft had for its entire year, just 14 days after launch. The remake has now reached 3.5 million copies sold-in, up from the three million mark it hit last week, and CEO Yves Guillemot called the launch proof that the company’s turnaround plan is starting to work. Sold-in counts copies shipped to retailers and digital storefronts rather than copies in players’ hands.
Ubisoft also confirmed Resynced sits at an 84 on both OpenCritic and Metacritic, making it the highest rated Assassin’s Creed since the original Black Flag in 2013, and its Steam peak of around 105,000 concurrent players remains the franchise record on the platform, with the U.S. and China leading a historically high share of PC sales. That tracks with our review, where we called Resynced a great experience after roughly 40 hours, particularly for newcomers meeting Edward Kenway for the first time, and argued that the remake’s obvious goal of pulling new players into the franchise actually works.
The rest of the quarter is more complicated. Net bookings came in at 256 million euros, down 9 percent year over year, though that still beat Ubisoft’s own target of around 250 million, and the decline mostly reflects last year’s quarter being inflated by the Assassin’s Creed Shadows launch. The surprise hero was Invincible: Guarding the Globe, the mobile game that posted a record quarter more than two years after launch thanks to the show’s fourth season and a new character. Rainbow Six Siege performed as expected, and Season 3 will add a shield-counter defense operator alongside the Legends Division, a new playlist aimed at core competitive players, before the game heads to the Esports World Cup in Paris in August.
Unfortunately, the cost cutting hasn’t stopped, though. Ubisoft closed its Winnipeg and Belgrade studios in June, restructured Ubisoft Barcelona, and made cuts across its global publishing organization. On the leadership side, Take-Two veteran and 2K Games co-founder Christoph Hartmann is now running Creative House 2, the division housing The Division, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and March of Giants, the MOBA Ubisoft acquired in December.
Looking ahead, the year’s remaining lineup includes Rayman Legends Retold on October 1, a full 3D remake marking the franchise’s 30th anniversary that we previewed in June, and Just Dance Decades of Hits on October 13, with more premium titles from established brands still unannounced. Ubisoft expects full year revenue to keep shrinking and plans to burn through as much as 500 million euros in cash before a bigger content push across Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon over the following two years. For now, a 13-year-old pirate story is doing the heavy lifting.
