Ubisoft's latest earnings report shows that the French mega-publisher is making significantly more money from selling PS4 games than Xbox One games. That's not surprising, considering that the PS4is handily outselling the Xbox One worldwide. What is somewhat surprising is that the Xbox One owners appear to be spending more on Ubisoft games on a per user basis (as VentureBeat noticed).
Ubisoft didn't break out this per-user stat in its most recent earnings report, but it did report that 41 percent of its holiday quarter 2015 revenue came from PS4 game sales versus 27 percent of revenue from Xbox One games. So in their entirety, the PS4 market is currently worth about 52 percent more to Ubisoft than the Xbox One market (all of Ubisoft's recent games have come out for both platforms).
The best available hardware sell-through estimates, though, suggest that there were 35.9 million PS4s in homes worldwide at the end of 2015 compared to 19.1 million Xbox One units. Based on those figures, the size of the PS4 market should be 88 percent bigger than the Xbox One market, all things being equal (the ratio changes only slightly if you look at estimates for consoles shipped to stores by the end of the year).
Put all those numbers together, and it suggests the average Xbox One user is worth about 24 percent more than the average PS4 user for Ubisoft's latest quarter (€7.94 or $8.93 per Xbox One user vs. €6.42 or $7.22 per PS4 user, to be precise). If you extended the outlook to the past nine months of Ubisoft earnings, individual Xbox One users still look about 18 percent more valuable than PS4 users.
This is actually a turnaround from the last time we looked directly at Ubisoft's platform earnings breakdown. In the spring of 2015, Ubisoft's quarterly PS4 game sales were worth twice as much as Xbox One game sales, outpacing the PS4's relative hardware sales lead at the time. Evenlooking at the Ubisoft's lifetime revenues as of mid-2015, an individual Xbox One user was only worth about 5 percent more than an average PS4 user. In the intervening six months, Xbox One owners appear to have increased their relative spending rate, according to Ubisoft's data and sales estimates.
Of course, this is just a single data point from one major cross-platform third-party publisher. It's quite possible other game makers are seeing different revenue splits or that Ubisoft's games just tend to be more appealing to Xbox One owners.
Still, Ubisoft's revenue split suggests the Xbox One may be more attractive to publishers than its raw hardware sales numbers indicate. At the very least, it's worth keeping in mind as we see whether the PS4 continues to increase it relative share of the worldwide console market.
I think this is pretty interesting, I'm not really sure why Xbox games spend more per-person on Ubisoft games than PS4 gamers do, maybe it's because of the kinds of games they make?
What's your guys take on this?
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