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Ubisoft doesn’t expect next year’s Ghost Recon Wildlands to sell as many units as this November’s Watch Dogs 2, instead comparing the upcoming shooter’s sales projections to something similar to Rainbow Six Siege.
“What we can say on [Ghost Recon: Wildlands is that it was really well recognised and appreciated by all the press at E3,” CEO Yves Guillemots said while discussing the game’s expectations in an investor call last night. “And it got lots of comments – and positive comments – from the fact that it’s a new open world shooter, and this we think is a complete revolution for the industry and we think it will have a huge impact.
“Now we expect it to be one of the best games launched this [financial] year. As you know we did very well with The Division last [financial] year. We expect it to be a big release in the first quarter of next year.”
Ghost Recon Wildlands is a co-op-focused open-world shooter that sees groups of players teaming up to take down Bolivian drug cartels. The game was first announced at E3 2015.
But it’s Watch Dogs 2 that is expected to be Ubisoft’s top-selling game for the current financial year, which runs until just after Wildlands’ release next March.
“I would say that if you look at the colour of our line-up, very clearly we do believe that Watch Dogs [2] is our number one title for this year,” added CFO Alain Martinez. “So if we compare to what we delivered last year it’s in the high side. And if you look at Ghost Recon I would say it will be closer to a Rainbow Six, more or less, so I would today rank it a bit lower than Watch Dogs but we will see what happens.”
Ubisoft won’t say exactly how many units of Watch Dogs 2 it expects to sell, however, although it does believe it’ll perform similarly to the 10+ million selling original.
“We believe that Watch Dogs [2] is a very high potential AAA blockbuster for this year,” Martinez explained earlier in the call. “We haven’t given… exactly the number of units [we] expect to deliver, but we do believe that Watch Dogs [2] will sit very close to what Watch Dogs did last time. And as you said we might expect better.”
Watch Dogs broke records to become the fastest-selling new IP of all time following its release in May 2014, selling 4 million copies in its first week on sale. Watch Dogs 2 is due to launch on PS4, Xbox One and PC on November 15. Ghost Recon Wildlands, meanwhile, releases on all three platforms on March 7, 2017.
Source: Ubisoft Q1 2016-17 Sales
