What is the end result on Sales??? for UBI? [Archive]

Apache312

03-11-10, 08:16 AM

SH 5 is a bestseller in germany.

Place 5 on the sales charts, place 6 is napoleon total war :haha:

Assassins Creed 2 is on place 2

source: http://www.4players.de/4players.php/verkaufscharts/PC-CDROM/mediacontrol.html

I have a question for you Darkreaver...what is the most popular genre in Germany? In the U.S., it would be MMORPG or FPS...what about in Deutschland?

/S

Apache312

Sonarman

03-11-10, 08:56 AM

I think the poor sales of SH4 in the US explain whiy there is no printed manual stateside this time. Strange that almost twice as many customers in the US bought a game about u-boats compared to that on their own subs. It looks like a lot more copies are sold in Europe than in the US, SH3 was number 3 in the charts in the UK for a couple of months, unheard of for a subsim, whilst it has always been a very strong seller in Germany as Darkreaver suggests.

UPDATE
As we can see here SH5 is also number 8 in the UK PC chart (http://www.chart-track.co.uk/index.jsp?c=p/software/uk/latest/index_test.jsp&ct=110022), incredible!

Bilge_Rat

03-11-10, 09:17 AM

The only ones obssessed with DRM are a handful of posters, most consumers could not care less as you can see from the sales figure.

Nordmann

03-11-10, 09:23 AM

The only ones obssessed with DRM are a handful of posters, most consumers could not care less as you can see from the sales figure.

A handful being what? A few hundred? A hundred? Fifty? Because if I remember rightly, this forum exploded the moment OSP was announced. Given that we have many active posters on here opposed to DRM, I doubt it could be quantified as a "handful".

XXi

03-11-10, 09:24 AM

The problem is, if sales are good Ubi will see that the game can be buggy, problematic and half done and YET sell. In such case they would feel it`s just ok, no need to change anything really.
If sales are bad than Ubi will create a piece of reality on its own, blaming pirates, blaming the game for beeing a niche market, nerds who can do nothing but whine et caetera et caetera. Noone would make the link between the sales and bugs, DRM issues, playability and all that stuff.

Bilge_Rat

03-11-10, 09:28 AM

A handful being what? A few hundred? A hundred? Fifty? Because if I remember rightly, this forum exploded the moment OSP was announced. Given that we have many active posters on here opposed to DRM, I doubt it could be quantified as a "handful".

Many of which bought it as soon as it came out or were lucky enough to have received it as a "gift"....:rotfl2:

mookiemookie

03-11-10, 09:28 AM

In the end, the DRM zealots were full of sound and fury, but signified nothing. Steam's sales chart for last week:

01) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Limited Edition
02) Supreme Commander 2
03) Assassin's Creed 2
04) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
05) Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
06) Napoleon: Total War Imperial Edition
07) Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising
08) Napoleon: Total War
09) Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic
10) Aliens vs Predator

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bestselling-pc-download-games-of-the-week-purchasers-unperturbed-by-protective-measures-1918550.html

McBeck

03-11-10, 09:32 AM

Sales figures will be posted among their press releases here:

http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/index.php?p=59&art_id=

Gammelpreusse

03-11-10, 09:38 AM

I have a question for you Darkreaver...what is the most popular genre in Germany? In the U.S., it would be MMORPG or FPS...what about in Deutschland?

/S

Apache312

economic or military strategy/managing games usually. Settlers, CIVILISATION, sports managers, stuff like that. At least that was case around 5 years ago.

IanC

03-11-10, 09:53 AM

The only ones obssessed with DRM are a handful of posters, most consumers could not care less as you can see from the sales figure.

How do you come to that conclusion? SH5 would probably be way higher up on the sales list if your average consumer didn't see "Constant internet connection required" on the box.

Nordmann

03-11-10, 10:28 AM

Many of which bought it as soon as it came out or were lucky enough to have received it as a "gift"....:rotfl2:

Yes, there were a few weak willed individuals, but many of us stalwarts did not buy the game. You cannot claim that everyone opposed to DRM bought or was gifted it, that's simply not true.

In the end, the DRM zealots were full of sound and fury, but signified nothing.

Well, this particular zealot is sticking to his guns, even if others do not. If you buy the game, you are signalling to Ubi that you are ready and willing to be walked all over. As the server outage proved, it's a slippery downhill slope from there.

Bilge_Rat

03-11-10, 10:50 AM

Yes, there were a few weak willed individuals, but many of us stalwarts did not buy the game. You cannot claim that everyone opposed to DRM bought or was gifted it, that's simply not true.

That is why I said "many" and not "most" or "all". I respect the posters who said they would not buy it because of DRM and stuck to their principles.

In my case...well what can I say, I'm a Sub gaming whore...but then I never claimed to be otherwise...:arrgh!:

Bilge_Rat

03-11-10, 10:58 AM

How do you come to that conclusion? SH5 would probably be way higher up on the sales list if your average consumer didn't see "Constant internet connection required" on the box.

SH4 had no DRM to speak of and sold very poorly. How do you explain that?

SH4 was about the same out of the box as SH3 or SH5, a few bugs but no game killers. After it was patched and the Add-on came out, it was even better. I am still playing it after 3 years.

Did SH4 sell poorly because of lack of DRM or because everyone who dropped by this forum only saw an endless string of threads savaging it as an incomplete, buggy POS...?

:ahoy:

RSColonel_131st

03-11-10, 11:03 AM

The only ones obssessed with DRM are a handful of posters, most consumers could not care less as you can see from the sales figure.

You realize that since last weekend about 90% of Amazon Reviews for AC2 and SH5 are negative 1-Star Ratings with a focus on the DRM?

I would say UBI did a great job (thanks Ubi!) of showing the average user who previously did not care about DRM what kind of problems it implies.

I mean, this DRM Failure made printing press in the UK and many other countries.

But no, I suppose short of Media and 90% angry Amazon customers, no one cares...

Ziggy

03-11-10, 11:05 AM

economic or military strategy/managing games usually. Settlers, CIVILISATION, sports managers, stuff like that. At least that was case around 5 years ago.

Was Victoria: Empire Under the Sun big over there? My friend and I were the only people for miles that even knew what it was. That and EU.

Anyway, since it was developed in Romania, their cost to produce should have been much lower than, for example, Assassins Creed 2 which was developed in Montreal. Not to mention the fact that it isn't done, that must have saved them a ton of money on development lol.

janh

03-11-10, 11:07 AM

My advice: Wait and see. As I posted elsewhere, Steam is just one sales channel for Ubisoft. Further, Steam (nor Amazon or any other seller) tells you the overall sales volume that lets you get the meaningful numbers. If they had a weak sales day, the rank can be skewed. If they just sold 1000 copies that day, the even rank 1 is the first looser.

Ask yourself: How much of the targeted sales are made within the first week, first month etc? Only time will tell how they are doing. For general customer reviews, magazine reviews and the reception of OSP/DRM, the picture appears gloomy. But it still seems AHV and ACII are doing quite fine. And as I posted elsewhere too, with just 9% of Ubisoft sales coming from the PC market, even a disaster for SHV and ACII won't do their revenue much harm given their fast growth rate in recent years (check Ubisoft-Corporate for the precise figures from the 2009 Annual Report). Especially we are a sideshow, and but a few people may listen -- not to speak about taking concerns here serious. Ubisoft has proven in the past (and with this OSP DRM once again), that their own ideas of what customers desire are closer to their reality than our ideas.

As much as I understand the idea of protection of property, I still would like to buy the game and play it once the last patch is out and it achieved full functionalilty. But with OSP/DRM I can basically only play it half the time due to my travelling, and that would not make it a good investment compared to other games, movies, books or whatever I could spent my time with.

But one thing for sure: The pirates should have ignored these games altogether, because only then the message would have been very clear to Ubisoft if sales had been low. Cracking the game was idiotic, and -- if true -- the DDOS attacks where the biggest no-brainer I ever heard about. It does much damage in the long run.

Bilge_Rat

03-11-10, 11:09 AM

You realize that since last weekend about 90% of Amazon Reviews for AC2 and SH5 are negative 1-Star Ratings with a focus on the DRM?

I would say UBI did a great job (thanks Ubi!) of showing the average user who previously did not care about DRM what kind of problems it implies.

I mean, this DRM Failure made printing press in the UK and many other countries.

But no, I suppose short of Media and 90% angry Amazon customers, no one cares...

the sales figures speak for themselves, consumers are voting with their wallets and they don't care about DRM.

you want to base yourself on the opinion of Amazon customers? here is a great game, 4 stars and DRM free...

http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Clancys-HAWX-Pc/dp/B0018BOL1E/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1268323970&sr=1-4

...enjoy...

IanC

03-11-10, 11:13 AM

SH4 had no DRM to speak of and sold very poorly. How do you explain that?

SH4 sold badly for a number of reasons. I'm not sure what your point is sorry.

RSColonel_131st

03-11-10, 11:21 AM

the sales figures speak for themselves, consumers are voting with their wallets and they don't care about DRM.

The sales figures we've seen so far are from the week before the DRM crash. You don't think, for a moment, that this might change things a bit, hmm?

Myxale

03-11-10, 11:28 AM

Yep, I agree

And then Ubisoft will release a note to investors blaming pirates, the DDoS fiasco and lack of interest in the market to justify the termination of the franchise.

Assassins Creed 2 has this fancy Protection system too.

If that flops too because of it, will they accuse it of being a niche Product too?

Bilge_Rat

03-11-10, 11:41 AM

SH4 sold badly for a number of reasons. I'm not sure what your point is sorry.

Sorry if I was unclear. Sh5 will probably lose sales because of DRM, that is a safe assumption, we will know when the final figures come out.

If all Ubisoft DRM protected titles do less well than expected, including AC2, Ubi may come to the conclusion that sales were affected by DRM and revise their approach.

If only sales of SH5 are affected, they will come to the conclusion, after the disappointing SH4 sales, that there is no longer any market for subsims and pull the plug on the series.

amazing how every thread turns into a DRM discussion...:damn:

IanC

03-11-10, 11:46 AM

Faamecanic

03-11-10, 12:01 PM

SH4 had no DRM to speak of and sold very poorly. How do you explain that?

SH4 was about the same out of the box as SH3 or SH5, a few bugs but no game killers. After it was patched and the Add-on came out, it was even better. I am still playing it after 3 years.

Did SH4 sell poorly because of lack of DRM or because everyone who dropped by this forum only saw an endless string of threads savaging it as an incomplete, buggy POS...?

:ahoy:

I disagree....SH4 was garbage out of the box compared to SH3.

Repeating the same mission over and over and over even after the last "free patch" (gamebreaker for me as I stopped playing it), Ghost crewmen with missing eyes and see thru bodies, Sub on extreme rails.

Then a patch that FINALLY brought SH4 up to SH3 vanilla fully patched...but guess what... you had to PAY for the patch in the way of buying Uboat missions.... double baloney.

The poor release of SH3 with bugs caused a lot of "niche" players to wait to buy SH4 until it was patched and even modded to be somewhat decent. SH4's even MORE buggy release has now cause SH series fans like me (since the first SH on the Commodore 64 back in the 80's) to NOT buy SH5 immediately.

THEN you add the DRM crap on top of it all..... bargin bin time is when I would consider buying SH5....

maurader

03-11-10, 12:04 PM

The sales figures we've seen so far are from the week before the DRM crash. You don't think, for a moment, that this might change things a bit, hmm?

Also note that this doesnt take into account the number of games returned. The manager at the Best Buy near me is taking returns of SH5 with almost no questions asked. They said that they have gotten quite a few returns because of the outage this last weekend.

janh

03-11-10, 12:12 PM

Sorry if I was unclear. Sh5 will probably lose sales because of DRM, that is a safe assumption, we will know when the final figures come out.

If all Ubisoft DRM protected titles do less well than expected, including AC2, Ubi may come to the conclusion that sales were affected by DRM and revise their approach.

If only sales of SH5 are affected, they will come to the conclusion, after the disappointing SH4 sales, that there is no longer any market for subsims and pull the plug on the series.

amazing how every thread turns into a DRM discussion...:damn:

Thanks to the pirates, they can easily justify the argument that the sales were low because pirates attacked their servers and thus hampered legal customers. They will not question their DRM approach seriously, nor the quality of the their provided products. That would only have been clear if all that happened was customers voting with the wallet -- and not cracking, hacking, DDOS attacking. Now it is all mingled again, and no clear answer will be given.

And obviously Ubisoft did not analyse the failure of SHIV properly, otherwise SHV would have received a proper beta testing and quality down to the bones. Indeed the recent 2010 strategy paper you will find on Ubisoft Corporate states that major franchises will in the future receive and publish titles more frequently. So maybe 1 Silent Hunter per year? And they plan on reusing engines more often (so Silent Hunter -- the cold war?).

Guess how that will end after the present experience? But it won't matter -- it is a niche within the 9% sales, a niche in the niche...

Jeevz

03-11-10, 12:25 PM

Hard to ignore the elephant in the room.

Also hard to ignore the same people posting about it over and over and over and over and over...

IanC

03-11-10, 12:29 PM

Also hard to ignore the same people posting about it over and over and over and over and over...

That's because there's an elephant in the room! :lol:

Webster

03-11-10, 12:43 PM

Okay people I want to know sells figures!!! I want to know just how this game actually impacted UBI... So does anyone know...???? Did it bomb because of OSP/DRM or did it give them what they wanted??

ok, anyone interested in this or who wants to keep track of such things can look here to find this info.

by law ubisoft (a publicly traded company) must release this data and ensure it is accurate.

the most recent info since sh5 was released is not out yet but this is where you will find it when the next quarterly news release will report it.

http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/index.php?p=59&art_id=&PHPSESSID=f752608d7df538117a1c44ccbb9a59b5

kylania

03-11-10, 12:56 PM

Direct2Drive's sales list for Feb 28 - Mar 6th:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Limited Edition + prima guide
Silent Hunter: Battle Of The Atlantic Gold Edition
Civilization 4: The Complete Edition
Star Trek Online Digital Deluxe Edition
Dragon Age: Origins (Mac) Digital Deluxe Edition
Star Trek Online
Best of Indie Bundle Vol. 3
Tropico 3
Mass Effect 2 Digital Deluxe Edition
Supreme Commander Gold

Seems a lot of people got suckered into buying the utterly worthless Gold version instead of the normal one.

SubSim Skipper

03-11-10, 04:20 PM

Okay So what I have learned from reading most of these threads on this subject is this.

Sh5 sales were more than we would have liked for them to be.....

Maybe it was b/c the game appealed a bit more to a broader audience?

But the reviews by consumers and Prof reviews alike we aweful as a whole

Do UBI may have gotten sales but this time but they shot themselves for the general audience for the next one.

KiwiVenge

03-11-10, 04:57 PM

There might be a learning curve either way. Depending how the overall reaction to DRM goes. The hype is there either way, it sucks or it's fine, with people in each camp.
Personally I think future sales on the next round of new games will be more effected by the DRM issue. People will be more knowledgeable either way (for or against) DRM after SH5 and AC2 and this is when speaking with your wallet will be even more apparent.

Ducimus

03-11-10, 04:59 PM

SH4 had no DRM to speak of and sold very poorly. How do you explain that?

For two primary reasons as I see it.

1.) It was about a theater most people know or care very little about. Everyone's heard of uboats, Few have heard of fleet boats. Uboats are surrounded by romance and mythology, uboats have tons of pre existing marketing material (see Das Boot), fleet boats do not. They have left the public conciousness ages ago, even in their country of origin (US). Fewer still outside the US know much about them. In short, Uboats sell because hollywoods pushed them in the lime light, fleet boats are this forgotten bit of history few know anything about. Make a game out of it, and naturally its not going to sell as well.

2.) well publicised buggy release that left it with a stigma it never overcame.

janh

03-11-10, 05:07 PM

...

Sh5 sales were more than we would have liked for them to be.....
...
Do UBI may have gotten sales but this time but they shot themselves for the general audience for the next one.

We do not know the absolute amount of the sales volume at this point. We now the ranking in a few sales channels, including amazon, steam, and a few local internet shops. However, unless we now the total volumes of sales for each of these channels, we cannot know how many pieces were really sold. Further, returns are not considered.

I agree, however, that though many may have bought and may buy ACII and SHV, the buyer reviews of these products suggest that they probably will be much more careful buying another title in the future. So maybe we will not observe an immediate strong impact on the sales in this quarter, but possibly a long term effect. But at this point all we can do is speculate, no matter how exciting it is to see whether Ubi went a step to far this time. And I do not specify here for what reasons -- there are obviously plenty aside from the DRM.

jwilliams

03-11-10, 05:09 PM

The reason why sales figures are high is because Ubi refused to let anyone review SH5 before it was released.
I would guess that sales will now drop off because people can now read reviews.
And most reviews i've read are pretty bad.

FIREWALL

03-11-10, 05:12 PM

I disagree....SH4 was garbage out of the box compared to SH3.

Repeating the same mission over and over and over even after the last "free patch" (gamebreaker for me as I stopped playing it), Ghost crewmen with missing eyes and see thru bodies, Sub on extreme rails.

Then a patch that FINALLY brought SH4 up to SH3 vanilla fully patched...but guess what... you had to PAY for the patch in the way of buying Uboat missions.... double baloney.

The poor release of SH3 with bugs caused a lot of "niche" players to wait to buy SH4 until it was patched and even modded to be somewhat decent. SH4's even MORE buggy release has now cause SH series fans like me (since the first SH on the Commodore 64 back in the 80's) to NOT buy SH5 immediately.

THEN you add the DRM crap on top of it all..... bargin bin time is when I would consider buying SH5....

Sorry that your post will be passed by so most can either toot their own horn or blow smoke.

Yours made too much sense. And that lacks around here. :yep:

BTW To all of you... Anybody can post sale numbers. How many report returns.

Sub Marauder

03-11-10, 05:20 PM

In the end, the DRM zealots were full of sound and fury, but signified nothing. Steam's sales chart for last week:

01) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Limited Edition
02) Supreme Commander 2
03) Assassin's Creed 2
04) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
05) Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
06) Napoleon: Total War Imperial Edition
07) Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising
08) Napoleon: Total War
09) Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic
10) Aliens vs Predator

Give it a month. Bad reviews of SH5 won't have effect on the initial sales.

Hylander_1314

03-11-10, 05:22 PM

I really want SH-V. But with the DRM issue, and my crappy out in the country wireless connection, I don't want the disappointment of disconnecting. I really want it, but I can't live with that.

So until they decide to drop the DRm, or somebody can get around it, I will have to pass. I have too many coasters as it is, along with rotware.

Iron Budokan

03-11-10, 05:23 PM

Also hard to ignore the same people posting about it over and over and over and over and over...

And also hard to ignore the same apologists who refuse to acknowledge an elephant even exists, despite the clarity of unrefutable evidence to the contrary....

Jeevz

03-11-10, 05:59 PM

Who doesn't acknowlege it exists? I can't imagine theres a single member of subsim who isn't FULLY aware that SH5 requires a constant internet connection.

Piggy

03-11-10, 06:38 PM

SH4 had no DRM to speak of and sold very poorly. How do you explain that?

SH4 was about the same out of the box as SH3 or SH5, a few bugs but no game killers. After it was patched and the Add-on came out, it was even better. I am still playing it after 3 years.

Did SH4 sell poorly because of lack of DRM or because everyone who dropped by this forum only saw an endless string of threads savaging it as an incomplete, buggy POS...?

:ahoy:

Uboats hold far more attraction to the average person then fleet boats. The battle of the atlantic is well known, the US silent service is not well known to most. (Hell, most people, even ones who think they know about the pacific, dont know that submarines sank more ships/tonnage in the pacific then all other forces combined. Pacific = carriers in most peoples minds)

SH4 was bad on release, very bad and as has been pointed out required a expansion, cough... paid patch to bring it up to snuff.

Right now I would call the current AI a game breaker in SH5. I would also call the CO2 bug a game breaker because once it happens your patrol (game) is over, so yes, there are game breakers in SH5. (sure you can reload and do the whole thing over again... sighhh.)

I think you give too much credit to this forum and forums in general. Are you implying claiming that the neg posts here are the cause of SH4's poor sales? Isnt that like a chicken and the egg thing...

goldorak

03-11-10, 06:49 PM

And obviously Ubisoft did not analyse the failure of SHIV properly, otherwise SHV would have received a proper beta testing and quality down to the bones. Indeed the recent 2010 strategy paper you will find on Ubisoft Corporate states that major franchises will in the future receive and publish titles more frequently. So maybe 1 Silent Hunter per year? And they plan on reusing engines more often (so Silent Hunter -- the cold war?).

Guess how that will end after the present experience? But it won't matter -- it is a niche within the 9% sales, a niche in the niche...

You are living in a dreamworld if you think in this day and age that publishers will beta test software before selling it. Hell even games such as MW2 that raked in hundreds of milions for Activision/IW still has enormous bugs left in.
I mean, really take a look at your computer. Ever seen how many bioses the motherboard manufacturers make availalble after selling you a motherboard that most of the time barely works ? You think they don't have the time and or resources to betatest this **** before release.
Of coure they do, but its more convenient to let us suckers beta test it for them.
We are way past the time when you were sold a functioning product. No game can be bug free, but there is a difference between a game that has several minor bugs and one that basically doesn't work at all. SH 5 falls in this second category.