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[Maintenance]

Can't wait until we start measuring things in fun levels.

"Our newest Assassins Creed saw a considerable growth on its fun levels, 15 funbits per moment, compared to 11 funbits per moment on the old iteration during the same period."

 

[TheSeks]

Source?

Well, in Rainbow Six's case: After the lukewarm reception the game quickly added Steam Trading Cards to try to get trading card people to buy the game to idle play it in the hopes of getting a better reception.

I wouldn't necessarily say that was "low sales" but the timing of it was REALLY fishy.

 

[Jospina]

Are the "back-catalog" sales referring to older titles? So they are making just about as much (in terms of growth anyway) from old titles on sale vs brand new games during the $60 launch window?

 

[Nirolak]

Then why don't share revenues coming from micro-transactions? Engagement levels don't tell much per se, in particular with more traditional games.

They give the bundled/obfuscated version of it here:

"The increasing weighting of digital within Ubisoft's overall sales, with this segment's revenues amounting to €207.7 million for the first nine months of 2015-16 and representing 27.0% of the total, versus 21.2% for the same period of 2014-15."

Mind, Ubisoft's actual results aren't fantastic (they missed expectations) and they *are* trying to hide this, so they don't give those breakdowns, but when we look at companies like EA we do actually see that data:

Or, put another way, I don't think engagement is an invalid metric overall since it is what drives this kind of revenue, even if in this case they don't want to share shipment data for Assassin's Creed which is basically a regular ass packaged goods game with a weak digital component.

I do feel Ubisoft's movement to this type of revenue will be a boon to them in the long run since this type of content is both more profitable, more stable, and generally easier to develop than three gigantic open world games every year.

 

[CosmicQueso]

Welcome to the Future.

 

[NullPointer]

What are there common standards, if any, for measuring engagement?

 

[Nirolak]

What are there common standards, if any, for measuring engagement?

The most popular are monthly active users (MAU), daily active users (DAU, though this is more popular among mobile games than console games due to how they monetize differently), sessions per time period (usually a month or a week), and time spent per session.

Someone who plays your game 20 times a month for 1.5 hours at a time is more likely to spend additional money than someone who plays your game for a week after launch and stops or once every three months.

The way Ubisoft wrote this I'd guess they're using playtime since launch, but they're hiding that, yes.

 

[_machine]

What are there common standards, if any, for measuring engagement?

Retention is king and overall activity comes second (as in DAU/MAU), then you have sessions, playtime/day, lifetime-playtime, sessions/day, session length etc.

EDIT: Retention being in engagement of "a" user, and activity of the whole userbase.

 

[jkanownik]

I for one am shocked. Shocked. Who could have possibly imagined that a game that only sold to a small core audience would have higher engagement than more mass market games? Time to buy some Ubisoft stock.

 

[SmoothRunningGun]

We KNOW it sold at least 1.3 - 1.5 million in its opening month. Thats a pretty fantastic opening. Ubi should have never put that 7+ million estimate out there as it will be looked at for comparison over the life of the title. But it is not by any means a flop or failure. And given the number of players using weapon skins online they are making a killing on micro transactions

How do you know that? And 1.5 is not alot for the 5+ years they've been working on this and patriots. It's going to take a lot to get their money back

 

[Newtype-001]

Siege is their best game since AC2 for me. I hope the game continues to do well.

 

[NullPointer]

Thanks for the explanations. Those engagement metrics make some sense.

And that's certainly why we're seeing games throw ever more ritual activities like dailies and weeklies, and seasonal content updates. Gotta have an engaged audience for DLC and microtransactions.

All the games I've seen this for have long progression schemes that keep the hamster wheel spinning, but R6 feels different. There is a progression in terms of the game's reknown currency for unlocks, but its a very shallow one compared to its competitors. I think the main draw is truly the core gameplay loop here and not the quest for more addiction-points, and I'm curious how that'll play out over the long term and whether Ubi will know how to properly nurture their community.

 

[Chû Totoro]

Yeah DAU/MAU is the trend in KPIs... (comes from mobile if we stay in the gaming market).

I wish gaming trend would be to make a complete and optimized game from day 1 :/

 

[El-Suave]

Multiplayer engagement is the new hotness - release the two latest games in your biggest franchises as single player games. Yeah right...

 

[SomTervo]

It's really addicting.

Addictive