Ubisoft has closed out the first half of its 2018-19 fiscal year with both sales and player recurring investment on the rise, announcing in its quarterly report that it has so far seen €767.0 million (~$869.9 million) in sales and €262.0 million (~$297.1 million) in net bookings from player recurring investment this year.
Digital net bookings, or digital sales minus income from deferred services, also rose up by roughly 51 percent year-over-year to €519.2 million (~$588.8 million), though digital notably claimed only 69.6 percent of overall net bookings versus last year’s 73.5 percent.
This most recent quarter saw the release of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a release that Ubisoft notes in a conference call came earlier than it had originally planned to give it some breathing room in the wake of Rockstar’s late-October Red Dead Redemption 2 release. For Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ubisoft notes as well that 45 percent of the game’s total sales came from digital download, a 10 percent jump from the series’ previous release.
All in all, the company says this October came with more competition — competition it usually expects to see in November –but, despite this, it still saw a year-over-year increase in monthly active users overall.
“Led by an increasingly direct relationship with our player communities as well as very high-quality titles, our first-half 2018-19 performance confirms the potential of Ubisoft’s many short- and medium-term growth drivers,” said CEO Yves Guillemot in a press release. “The steady rise in player engagement is feeding our digital development and the quality of our games is enabling us to achieve top-rate performance.”
As with past reports, Ubisoft says that its back catalog games continued to perform well, with net bookings for those previous releases rising by 48.8 percent year-over-year to €564.9 million (~$640.7 million) for the first half of the 2018-19 fiscal year.