Ubisoft just released its third-quarter results for the fiscal year 2021, and it paints a rosy picture of the company's finances. Although net bookings were down overall compared to the same time last year, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot focused on the positives. Like how long it takes people to play through Assassin's Creed Valhalla and how this seems to lead them to spend more money in-game.
Like many game developers, Ubisoft tracks player time spent in-game and presents it as a measure of success. The more time spent playing, the less time you spend playing something else--possibly even a game from another company. And there's also a correlation to spending more on DLC the more time you spend in that game.
And that seems to be true for Ubisoft. For example, Far Cry 6 players spent 45% more time playing that game than Far Cry 5, and this also resulted in a 30% rise in player recurring investments. PRI is just a fancy term for paid DLC, whether that be larger content drops like season passes or expansions, or just a fancy skin you bought for a dollar or two.
The same thing happened with Riders Republic. Players spent 60% more time in-game than they did in the previous most similar game, Steep, resulting in a rise in PRI.
But the biggest jump was easily in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Guillemot noted that the game has well over 130 hours of content, and it's received a whopping 80% rise in PRI compared to Assassin's Creed Origins. All those microtransactions and DLC purchases helped push Assassin’s Creed Valhalla over $1 billion in earned revenue, the first Ubisoft game to break into the billions.
We all know that a longer game doesn't necessarily mean a better game, and spending more time in that game doesn't necessarily mean you'll spend more money. But over a large enough population, it does seem that spending time and money are highly related, and Ubisoft plans to keep making bigger games to keep raking in those dineros.