NEWS - Thursday, August 23, 2007
Ubisoft Expects Rapid Market Growth
In an interview with Reuters, Guillemot said that a huge influx of new consumers meant nothing but good news for the industry. At the Games Convention in Leipzig, he told the reporter “There are so many new customers to the business; this is going to grow the market tremendously. I expect the market to grow by 50 percent in the next four years.” Guillemot largely credits this growth to the new influx of casual gamers that are being enticed to spend in larger amounts by products like the Nintendo Wii. He said that Ubisoft’s casual games efforts have been “hugely profitable”, a necessary source of income given the expense of creating a development infrastructure for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This profitability is due not only to the increasing customer base, but also the economics of development; according to Guillemot, casual games can be made on a budget of 1 to 4 million euros, compared to Wii game costs of 5 to 10 million and next generation console costs of 10 to 20 million. The CEO said he expected casual games to contribute 20% of Ubisoft’s revenue this year, twice the contribution of 2006.Source: http://www.next-gen.biz/
