Ubisoft has made a ton of money from in-game purchases and it plans to keep its focus on games as services. During the last 9 months, Ubisoft made €318.5 million from recurring player investment. In other words, the company made millions of EUROs from microtransactions.
According to the data shared by the company, the number is up 87.4 percent from the same period of last year. During the last time, month microtransactions made up 26.7 percent of total sales. The sales were up 20.9 percent from the same period last year.
All content sold under the microtransactions batter in high-margin content. According to Ubisoft, this content has low lower levels of marketing and development & research costs.
To put this into perspective, Ubisoft is selling an in-game flaming horse in Assassin’s Creed Origins. It goes for 1500 in-game currency or €15 of real-world money. Since Ubisoft is using this as an example, it is safe to say that Ubisoft sold a ton of these horse through in-game money.
Ubisoft isn’t the only one using microtransactions as a tool to promote in-game recurring spendings. Activision made $4B thanks to microtransactions last year.
There are so many games using this model as one of the primary ways to monetize. While the word “microtransactions” isn’t a bad thing on its own but due to predatory practices, this monetization model has got a bad rep.
Such large sums of money being made will sure push not only Ubisoft but other publishers as well to move toward games as service models.
In fact, Ubisoft, EA, and Activision are one of the leading companies to already plan their games development with future recurring payments in mind.
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