Ubisoft CEO: “Nintendo has to perform this year, otherwise they will have less games”

[Zod95]

padib said:

And no they don't, as I've already showed Nintendo is very well capable of selling on the U, Ubisoft's low sales are their work. Also, again, Ubisoft Montpellier games don't sell nearly as much as Ubi Montreal games, you still haven't countered that argument.

Things are not that simple. First of all, Nintendo games sell well on WiiU comparatively to other publishers but poorly when compared to other consoles, specially Wii.

Second, they do so because they are first party titles and Nintendo has always a great driving force inside their ecosystem due to the familiar environment they create around their systems. Therefore, comparing Nintendo games with Ubisoft games on a Nintendo console is like comparing oranges with apples. Why don't they give the same juice? Of course they don't, and it's not because an apple is a bad orange but because it's an apple.

Third, a game can have very different sales on different platforms. Is it really just their work? If it was, sales on different platforms should be similar for any game. To give you a few examples: football games sell better on PlayStation ; Call Of Duty games sell better on Xbox ; Watch Dogs is selling far better on PS4 than on XOne ; Assassin's Creed and Batman Arkham sell almost nothing on WiiU when compared to other platforms.

Fourth, even if the game is not the same, sometimes the franchise is and the title is actually very tailored to the platform. I'm thinking of GTA and how it sold so well on PS1 and Xbox and PSP, extremely well on PS2, PS3 and X360 and so poorly on DS. On Nintendo's handheld, they developed a new kind of GTA, not requiring good graphics, being more accessible and brilliantly taking advantage of the touch feature of the system. In the end, it only sold 1.3M (a small fraction of the average GTA title). To offset the losses, they launched the very same title (tailored for DS) on PSP and it sold almost as much, even not being the kind of GTA gamers were used to on PSP and not having the mini-games using the touch feature.

 

I agree that Ubisoft has every right to be unsatisfied with WiiU and demand more from Nintendo.