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We are currently at a point in gaming where most major publishers are keen to push micro-transaction sales and gain consistent revenue from games past the initial sale price. A lot of gamers might not be fond of this strategy, but unfortunately for them, it seems to be working. This week during Ubisoft's earnings call, the publisher revealed that micro-transaction revenue surpassed digital game sales for the first time.
Ubisoft just held its earnings call for the first half of 2017. During this, the publisher noted that its “player recurring investment” (microtransactions) revenue had risen by 83 percent. The recurring investment category includes things like DLC, season passes and digital items. In all, these purchases generated €174.5 million for the first half of the year, overtaking digital game sales, which contributed €168 million in revenue.
Ubisoft isn't the only publisher seeing a rise in microtransaction or ‘recurring investment' revenue either. Earlier this morning we learned that Take-Two would be including microtransactions in all of its future games following the consistent success of GTA Online and the NBA 2K series.
On the plus side, it looks like Ubisoft's experimentation with Assassin's Creed: Origins has paid off. The game has caused the series to adopt RPG elements, a new combat system and explore world and character depth more through side-quests. So far, many seem happy with the changes, with Origins selling twice as much as Assassin's Creed Syndicate at launch.
KitGuru Says: For the most part, Ubisoft tends to handle micro-transactions fairly well. The yearly ‘season' model for Rainbow Six Siege for instance is quite fairly balanced. With that in mind, It would be interesting to see how Warner Bros' numbers look in comparison, as Shadow of War's micro-transactions were largely deemed as completely unnecessary.
Erm, the issue with those figures is that they have released very few games in that quarter, and few people buy digitally from Uplay due to the absurd pricing. But this is the company that just lies with its demo’s so it’s no surprise that it would like to screw over the consumer at any given chance.
Looks like now’s the time to conduct a revolution against neoliberalism 🙂
Headline: “Snail outruns NFL player!”
Reality: NFL player is retired and wheelchair bound, with dementia.
Point being, it’s all about perspective. In this case, have microtransactions overtaken game sales because they are popular, or because the games are unpopular?
its all about real money and loots