Support NeoGAF

[IbizaPocholo]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/ubisoft-dlc#nnn

Ubisoft made €745 million in the six months ending on September 30. The only major release in that time was The Crew 2, though it does include all but the first week of Far Cry 5 sales. That revenue is still a marked increase of 60% compared to last year, led primarily by increased sales in the digital realm.

Digital revenue is up 51.5% compared to the previous year, totalling €519 million – that’s 69.6% of total Ubisoft revenue. That splits out to €256 million from full game sales, and €262 million from what these financial reports refer to as ‘player recurring investment.’ In more human terms, that’s DLC, in-game items, subscriptions, and advertising.

Break it down, and PRI accounts for 35.1% of Ubisoft revenue. Yes, over a third of Ubisoft’s revenue in the last six months was generated from DLC and microtransactions. The effect of those long term sales are somewhat more pronounced in a six month period without many big releases, but in last year’s full earnings, PRI had already reached 27.9% of net bookings. That number is continuing to rise.

 

[ThatStupidLion]

feels good that 0% of it is my money

good for the suits. bad for the consumers

 

[AV]

feels good that 0% of it is my money

good for the suits. bad for the consumers

Bad for the other 2/3 of consumers, you mean. Some people clearly like this stuff, even if we hate it.

 

[ThatStupidLion]

Bad for the other 2/3 of consumers, you mean. Some people clearly like this stuff, even if we hate it.

true true.

they probably just don't know any better unfortunately.

12 years ago horse armor came out. thats a lot of teens/early 20 year olds who don't know anything other than DLC being standard.

 

[Allandor]

Well, actually I gladly buy DLCs if the game and the DLCs are worth it.
But everything else, that is not a story-driven addition to the game .. I won't buy. But there seems to be enough people out there that actually buy those shitty lootboxed and exp boosts.

 

[Skyn3t]

DLC and microtransactions? Two most cancerous things in gaming. Apart of Fortnite, of course.

 

[Ballthyrm]

Bad for the other 2/3 of consumers, you mean. Some people clearly like this stuff, even if we hate it.

That's not how it works. People who buy DLC already bought the game FYI...

DLC and microtransactions are a necessary evil, this is rich people subsidizing the rest of us to keep games at 60 dollars.
The only vote that count is the one you do with your dollars and as always rich people have more power (ie money).

 

[JohnnyFootball]

When you consider that it cost $115 to get all non-booster content for AC:Odyssey it's not hard to see why.

 

[Malio]

WTG gamers. The future looks brigh...er, bleak.

 

[kraspkibble]

can't really blame them. they are a business after all so they will go where the money is.

if you want to blame somebody then blame the people who buy this crap. i don't mind microtransactions in a free to play game but if i'm paying £40-60 then NO.

 

[Thiagosc777]

DLC and microtransactions are a necessary evil, this is rich people subsidizing the rest of us to keep games at 60 dollars.

The only thing they are subsidizing are grindfests and bloated games with plenty of repetitive side quests, i.e., time sinks designed to drive people towards MTX. Expect lots of games with "RPG elements" popping up everywhere.

Good gameplay? Interesting art direction? Something like Dark Souls, for example? In this industry the only ones who might do it are some indie dev or some Japanese developer who still cares. Games made by EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Microsoft, etc, would level gate all bosses and require a 5 hour grind in side quests for you to get to try defeating them.

 

[Husky]

CD Projekt shines as more and more of a blessing.

 

[VertigoOA]

When you consider that it cost $115 to get all non-booster content for AC:Odyssey it's not hard to see why.

You get three games and dlc for odysssey’s season pass. Odyssey and far cry 4 are good examples of dlc. And after playing a good amount of odyssey — the microtransactions are worthless and a faux outrage

 

[SirKicksalot]

I bought the AssCreed Origins expansions and they were worth every penny.

 

[Grimmrobe]

Way to go Ubi. Best dev and publisher working today.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

You get three games and dlc for odysssey’s season pass. Odyssey and far cry 4 are good examples of dlc. And after playing a good amount of odyssey — the microtransactions are worthless and a faux outrage

That was the cost of all content without one single microtransaction.
Cost was actually $120 not $115 as my previous post said.

$60 game.
$20 costumes
$40 season pass

My post had nothing to do with microtransactions.

 

[A.Romero]

As far as I've heard, Ubisoft is one of the companies that has fair job practices (limited crunch, paid OT, etc) so this could be the cost of playing ethically developed games.

Honestly I've never had issues with microtransactions and DLC business models. They are not for me but it doesn't bother me that other people are willing to pay for whatever they want. I rather have a hybrid model than F2P or having to pay 100 USD upfront for a "full" game.

 

[DeleteriousObnoxious]

Doesn’t bother me, just shaking my head at the industry practices. It gets and harder to share your enthusiasm. When the medium in average is dumped down every year to new lows.
Yes yes I know we got our piece of the pie too with rockstar, cd project red games pushing a bit in the tows of engagement and pushing the possibilities. Still for how long will that last. All it takes is possible one failure as those companies are spending such a large amount of Resources to deliver those games.

 

[Woo-Fu]

I would have guessed higher. Post-initial-sale monetization has been driving the industry for quite some time.

 

[RoyBrown7777]

Rarely buy ubi games. I did buy AC odd. Traded it for rdr2.

 

[Dice]

I think reports like these can have a confirmation bias effect on the company. For example, say you have a $60 base game and $35-40 Season Pass. This is very typical, especially for Ubisoft. If you do that for every game, you've already set up your basic expectation model to have such a high percentage to be counted as coming from DLC, but are you sure players are viewing it that way?

Look at what a huge success Witcher 3 was even before the expansions. If you make a good game, people will buy it, no? Assassins Creed Origins was particularly well made over the few before it and it sold really well. So if you have income growth due to individual game quality, marketing success, and overall franchise popularity development, how do you discern that increase from DLC as a bonus on top? If you simply included everything in the game and told players "Such and such expansions, episodes, and events will release in the future. You already own them!" and that game sold really well, would there be a 35% difference in sales between that game and a typical Ubisoft Gold edition?

I mean to some extent of course, yes, players will pay for fluff add-ons and it is fine to offer that and make money from it. However, I think when looking back and evaluating things in this manner, a lot gets lost in arbitrary classifications of content types which then makes publishers think "oh, they want more of this kind of content" rather than "players want a complete game they can have complete confidence in and we presented it as though 35% of their experience would be lacking" and that likewise also damages understanding of the rightful place of large DLC and MTX and how to best please players and benefit themselves with them.

Ubisoft clearly has perception issues with this, as does Activision and Capcom. Some other publishers do better and seem to understand Whole Game vs Substantial Paid Expansion vs Small Bonus MTX as players perceive it. I think EA actually understands quite well, they are just straight Machiavellian with that understanding and design their whole games as psychological manipulation interfaces.

 

[Humdinger]

I'm fine with good DLC. I question MTs. I'd like to see a breakdown, rather than lumping those together.

 

[KonradLaw]

Ubisoft does really good job with supporting their games post release with patches and paid DLCs, so this doesn't surprise me.

 

[Iaterain]

Call me insane or ignorant but I believe that they could achieve the same results or even better by selling "full experience" games for $60.
It just the idea of integrating shady business practises like lootboxes/microtransactions/paidDLC content is similar to creating steady flow of revenue is more appealing to investors (easy money) than selling full experience for one time purchase.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

And EA and Activision have huge digital microtrans rev too.

So if gamers are all up in arms about being nickel and dimed to death, why the hell doe the game companies keep reporting record microtrans revenue where the pie slice of total revenue keeps getting bigger.

Show of hands, who are these gamers? I'll start: Not me. Aside from some old ass CoD map packs (I think BO2 was the last time I bought any DLC), I've never bought any microtrans.

 

[Petrae]

This is why microtransactions and DLC will never go away— even when the MSRP of games inevitably increases. Consumers voted with their wallets to make this okay. They still do, by spending Scrooge McDuck-levels of cash every year on this stuff.

As much as critics and pundits like to trash publishers for forcing this bullshit into their games, some of the blame should rightfully fall on the group of consumers who made this not only okay, but standard operating practice.

 

[Dice]

Call me insane or ignorant but I believe that they could achieve the same results or even better by selling "full experience" games for $60.
It just the idea of integrating shady business practises like lootboxes/microtransactions/paidDLC content is similar to creating steady flow of revenue is more appealing to investors (easy money) than selling full experience for one time purchase.

I do think Ubisoft does an okay job navigating the complexities of it. One of the things about the "full game only" approach is that it doesn't match how communities are built around games anymore. You'll have one sales pop at launch and then it's all over; people get bored, stop playing and discussing it online, the value of the standing product diminishes compared to the launch experience and people start anticipating the next thing which they expect to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.

It doesn't work as well as people think. It puts a lot of risk on the line, creates multi-year development gaps that are hard to explain to investors, lowers an interactive engagement with the playerbase to learn what they like and provide it, and it's harder to track and understand why one thing was a success and another wasn't. So, the way games have been shifting is toward continuous content releases over 1-3 years. This allows you to keep a development team on a game (which costs money) to fix issues players have with it, experiment a bit with new ideas on smaller scales, incorporate trendy things and special events, new players can come to a game late and still relate to others in fresh excitement and learning, etc. In this regard Ubisoft has been doing a great job, although I their their concept of a basic game model is too grindy and their MTX that they try to mix in is usually trash.

Overall I think it's a decent negotiation, at least compared to crappy alternative models. Episodic content was a mostly failed attempt to start with this lowball content and fund future content by the sales of it. Turns out that piecemeal offerings are good for sustain but not to get anyone's attention, so the early episodes usually bomb and fail to fund the rest. Worse is in situations where the small beginnings were actually so underfunded that they weren't only meager but low quality. Then another model is where the sustain seasonal content is $50-$60 even though it only offers what most gamers would consider $20-30 value content. Activision and MS are the worst offenders there, although Bandai-Namco used to be and has been getting better. Now MS is taking a whole different route with Game Pass, so we'll see where that goes, but they still way overcharge for say, a dozen cars in a game that has 600 by default.

Being a hardliner for the old models just doesn't make sense to me if you're holding present day expectations. It costs money to keep a game online, to keep supporting it and revamp it in responsive ways, to make new stuff for it. And okay you can choose to not do that, but then look at what games stay popular and build a fanbase. Brand engagement is a very real thing and the old way of releasing games isn't how it is generated. Nier: Automata was a massive hit, but it's done now and while they spend forever crafting a sequel that will hopefully please fans, they have to rely on merch and cameos in other games. Maybe that can still work out for that kind of game (yet it is more risky, see Shadow of the Tomb Raider kind of bombing), but anything substantially meant as an online experience will need more, and that more costs money.