Ubisoft: PC Overtakes PS4 as Most Profitable Platform in the First Quarter of FY2020
The French company Ubisoft, the fourth company worldwide dedicated to producing and publishing games, has just presented its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2019/2020. And these results have confirmed that right now more games are being sold for the PC platform, than in the rest of the gaming platforms, including the three main consoles plus the mobile device market. These results come before the worldwide launch of Uplay+.
For many years, the consoles platform has always had the highest sales volume. And for a very important reason: it is not easy to pirate a console so we cannot use pirated games in it. However, on the PC platform, piracy is at ease. And yet, this platform has been the most profitable of all possible during the presentation of the financial results of Ubisoft.
In fact, the segment of computer games for PC has been the one that has grown the most since 2018, achieving an increase in sales of 10%. Interestingly, the rest of the gaming platforms have experienced declines in sales, or a stagnation of these. For example, the PS4 platform has gone from having 38% sales to having only 31% sales. Similarly, the gaming platform for Xbox One has dropped from 22% to 18%.
All this is curious when some companies have been predicting the death of the PC platform for years. However, reality seems to be far from what is usually said. It seems that the PC game market continues to enjoy excellent health.
If we continue analyzing the previous table of the financial results of Ubisoft, we can see that the main market of this company is still the American, which brings together almost half of its total sales worldwide. It is followed by the European market, which has fallen by two points in sales. Those points have gone, one to the American market and one to the rest of the world. So you could say that the situation is quite stable in these three markets.
On the other hand, it should be remembered that Ubisoft is about to launch its new platform of games by Uplay+ subscription. In this platform, users will only pay a fixed fee every month, which will give them access to a catalog of more than 100 games. The interesting thing about the Ubisoft option is that the games that can be played will always be at their highest version, with all the extras, DLC and completely free updates for the user. This is in clear contrast to the other options that are now in the market (Xbox Game Pass for PC and Origin Access) where the extras of the games have to be paid apart from the corresponding fixed monthly fee.
In any case, what is clear is that PC users have been encouraged more to buy games for this platform. And that’s an important message for this developer, who is fourth behind Activision-Blizzard, EA and Take-Two Interactive.