So between special editions and discounts maybe $80m in revenue at most, which would be about $60m after the retailers take their cut, and just $30m after Disney take their half.
Given this took at least a couple of hundred million to make, that is really fucking bad.
Worse, likely retailers paid ahead of time for stock they were assured would sell, and are now sitting on at a loss, so eventually Ubisoft would have to buy a lot of the leftover stock/keys back and pay for the time/inventory wasted, so that would eventually eat into their revenue as well.
I think most here don't understand how
critical this game was for Ubi, and in how much trouble they are.
This rips a huge hole in their already fucked budget. An organization like Ubi needs a ton of money and it's not like they were healthy.
2023:
Revenue of $1.97b
Net loss of over $500 million
Median debt of the last five years was over $2b
21k employees across many regions and countries.
It's not looking too good from a financial standpoint, having as much debt as your yearly revenue and making half a billion net loss last year. And that's with AC games selling well and not many total failures in the past. Now of course, we need to keep in mind that 2023 was a weak Ubi year with AC Mirage and Avatar, with Avatar bringing in $133 million as of January 2024, it was fine but didn't set the world on fire.
Now they desperately needed Outlaws to be very successful, they invested a lot in licensing, development, marketing and bot armies. Its commercial failure is a very, very rough blow to their financials. According to Ubi, it had the largest marketing budget of any Ubi game ever. That game, with marketing, surely cost them at least $250mil and needed to make a killing. Which it obviously didn't.
AC Shadows needs to completely knock it out of the park to save Ubi. Even if it's only somewhat successful, Ubi won't be able to pay the bills.
I can't see them being able to survive on their own. Investors will wait for AC Shadows, knowing it won't be able to save Ubi, then strike when Ubi is at their weakest, to buy and salvage them.