Strong performance from major series such as the “Avatar” tie-up game and the blockbuster “Assassin’s Creed” boosted French game giant Ubisoft’s sluggish third-quarter results, the company announced Thursday.
Chief Executive Yves Guilmot said in a statement that sales for the October-December period were 318 million euros (about $380 million), a “strong” period and “better than expected.”
The Ubisoft star has suffered a fall in investor valuation in recent months as the company overcame mixed reviews for several new titles and announced a wide-ranging reorganization and cost-cutting efforts.
The group’s shares have lost nearly 95 per cent of their value in five years, plummeting 40 per cent in January, their worst single-day performance ever.
Ubisoft reported on Thursday that its preferred “net bookings” measure (excluding revenue from deferred sales) rose 12% year-on-year to about 340 million euros in the third quarter.
The pace was even higher in the first nine months of the financial year, increasing by 17.6% to €1.1 billion.
The main contributors to the sales increase were tie-up games with the latest installment of the Assassin’s Creed series, released last year, and the movie Avatar, which was updated to coincide with the release of the latest episode of the James Cameron saga in December.
Ubisoft confirmed in January that it would incur a full-year operating loss of approximately 1 billion euros due to repeated postponements and cancellations announced along with details of its business restructuring.
The bosses’ woes are far from over as the company faces a three-day strike this week by hundreds of its 3,800 French employees.
The triggers for the strike included the repeal of work-from-home provisions.
Ubisoft’s reorganization will consolidate many of its dozens of studios around the world into an industry-first system of five “creative houses,” each dedicated to developing a different genre of games.
In January, the company also announced the start of a third round of cost cuts aimed at saving 200 million euros over two years.
The company announced in the same month that it would consider cutting up to 200 of the approximately 1,100 positions at its Paris headquarters.
These layoffs follow studio closures elsewhere in the company’s global network, including San Francisco, Osaka, Stockholm, Remington, UK, and Halifax, Canada.
France’s largest gaming company, Ubisoft, currently has around 17,000 employees worldwide, after cutting more than 3,000 jobs in recent years.
KF/TGB/JJ