During yesterday's Q1 investors call, Ubisoft executives Frédérick Duguet (Chief Financial Officer) and Yves Guillemot (Chief Executive Officer) provided quite a few interesting responses in the Q&A session.
Duguet, for example, revealed Ubisoft expectations for Ghost Recon Breakpoint to be higher than for the previous game, Wildlands, while the post-launch plan is going to be even stronger. He also admitted the company will face less competition in their Q4 given that Cyberpunk 2077's release date (April 16th, 2020) has now been set outside that window. Still, Ubisoft remains cautious on the guidance front.
Frédérick Duguet
The good start from Ghost Recon Wildlands in the first quarter is, of course, good news. It doesn’t really change what we anticipate for Ghost Recon Breakpoint. We believe Breakpoint will be stronger than Wildlands on the PRI side overall why because it’s coming with PvP from the very beginning, while it was not the case for Wildlands. So we can have a stronger fun base that we can build upon from Breakpoint and we will come with a two-year post-launch program that would be even bigger than on Wildlands. So that we are busy talking of stronger PRI for Breakpoint. Then, of course, it’s good to see that Wildlands continues to do well.
On Q4, yes, it’s good news that Cyberpunk is not in the quarter but we will stay cautious on this. We stick to your assumption that we might have a strong potential competition in Q4. The key point for us was really to have a fantastic release with Wildlands at Q3 and that’s what we achieved, we believe that our guidance across our games in Q4 is a good reflection of all the potential of the games and of the potentially strong competition there.
Later, Yves Guillemot mentioned that developing games for Google Stadia (the cloud-only streaming platform due to launch in November) isn't that costly. As a reminder, Ubisoft is one of the major partners of Google Stadia so far and will release The Crew 2, Trials Rising, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Just Dance 2020, The Division 2, Ghost Recon Breakpoint as part of the launch lineup.
Yves Guillemot
Yes, the cost -- the extra cost to put to make sure the games work well on Stadia is not that high. It's part now of our pipelines and we have a good relationship with Stadia to make sure it is profitable for us.
Frédérick Duguet
On the platform commission, we will let Google talk about. What we can just say is that the financial equation is good for us.
Lastly, the two commented favorably on the partnership with Epic to deliver games on both UPlay and the Epic Games Store instead of Steam.
Yves Guillemot
We can't give much information on that because we have been with them for a short time now. What we can say is we're working very well hand-in-hands to make sure we can grow the sales directly now between our Uplay Store which is doing extremely well and Epic Store that is growing step-by-step. So overall when you take Uplay and Epic Store, we are very happy with what we are achieving.
Frédérick Duguet
And we did well on Anno 1800 on Epic Store, but the key point here is really that we continue to have a very strong momentum on Uplay.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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