'Assassin's Creed' Executive Producer Reveals AAA Games Need To Sell 10 Million Copies To Break Even
Marc-Alexis Côté, the Executive Producer for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise revealed that AAA games need to sell around 10 million copies in order to break even.
During an interview at XDS24, Côté discussed how video game development costs are increasing year over year.
He shared, “We are in a complex and tough economical situation right now, at least in the games industry. We’ve all seen our costs rising, our profits shrinking. In a way, there’s a lot of very, very intense competition. But the cost of building games has probably increased tenfold since the first Assassin’s Creed and the one that’s coming out this year. Both cost, complexity, amount of people has probably risen by a factor of 10.”
READ: 'Star Wars Outlaws' Barely In Top 250 Of Most Wishlisted Upcoming Steam Games A Day Before Release
“When you look at who succeeds, at least in the AAA space. So what I’m going to say applies to like mostly premium games, more traditional kind of AAA games. You have 10 games in any given year that will sell about 10 million copies,” he continued.
He then explained, “The reason I’m quoting the 10 million copies kind of mark is from what I’ve seen and how I’ve seen costs, our costs, and costs of competitors, and everybody—. Everything leaks in our industry so you have privileged information on where the competition is going. But mostly I estimate that 10 million copies give or take 2 million copies is mostly what you need to break even. But you have only 10 games that breach that every year.”
Côté then broke down what those 10 games look like, “Out of those 10, you’ll have probably three sports games. You’ll have four games on established franchises and probably 2 or 3 games that are surprise hits coming from nowhere. But that leaves very, very little room and wiggle room for success.”
“So I’m trying to steer the Assassin’s Creed franchise through that,” he added.
A little bit later he noted that Ubisoft is not only competing against other developers, but are also competing with themselves and their own back catalogue.
He said, “When you come out with an Assassin’s Creed game, you’re not only competing against the competition, you’re competing against your own back catalogue, right?”
“So, if you’ve released a hit game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and you come out with a new game, but your old game is 6 years old now and it still looks pretty good. It’s scaled very well technologically speaking with new consoles. We’ve released patches to make it run at 4K etc… But you can have it for $20. So the $80 game that I come out with better be very, very good,” he elaborated.
Côté’s comments are damning for the company as its recently released AAA Star Wars Outlaws game allegedly only sold 1 million units in its first month.
When asked about the current sales curve, CEO Yves Guillemot completely punted.
He was asked by a BMO investor, “On Star Wars Outlaws, obviously, off to a slower start than you guys wanted, can you provide a little color into the sales curve there more recently? Have you guys started to see things pick up? Can you talk about any discounting you might be doing or strategies for discounting into the holiday period would be helpful?”
Guillemot replied, “On Outlaws what we can say is that the three title updates that we’ve delivered at the same time we’ve been observing substantial positive community sentiment improvement. The biggest update is still to come by November 21st. And it will come on the same day as the first big story pack and the launch for Steam. So we are putting ourselves in a position to have a must-play game that should address a mainstream audience for the busy season. Also to be a long-term seller.”
He continued, “It has great quality and the team wanted to make sure that we will remove a few frictions. And then implement some gameplay mechanics that will certainly delight the players.”
As for how the game is performing on Steam, it does not look good at all. The game has only hit a peak concurrent player count of just 651 on its release day. To put that in context, Concord, which was shut down by Sony less than two weeks after release, hit an all-time peak of 697.
What do you make of Côté’s comments regarding how many units a AAA game needs to sell in order to break even? Become a paid member to leave a comment and let us know.
AAA Game Developers: Your budgets are too big. Learn how it was done in the past. Lean how games like Farm Simulator do it today. The only thing you have to lose is debt!