Tag Archives: earnings

In an earnings call today, Ubisoft announced a 50 percent sales drop from the same quarter last year, and attributed the brunt of that heavy blow to piracy.

“Altogether on console, the piracy is low,” Ubisoft head Yves Guillemot said. “On the PC the piracy is quite a lot. We are working on a tool that would allow us to decrease that on the PC starting next year and probably one game this year.”

On top of that, Guillemot noted that DS piracy is a larger-than-expected problem — something he hopes to rectify by selling physical pack-ins (like figurines) with games.

The PSP, also, has seen its fair share of piracy in the past, but now that the console possesses “new ways to control piracy,” Ubisoft is once again looking into potential projects on Sony’s handheld.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Variety reports that, despite Sony having 20 million registered PSN users, Xbox Live has made Microsoft more than five times as much in its lifetime.

The story says that Sony may have accumulated $180 million from PSN in the last two years, but it’s a paltry sum compared to the $1 billion earned by Xbox Live in the last five-and-a-half.

Essentially, PSN has been around about 40 percent as long as Xbox Live, but made less than 20 percent of the revenue.

Lots more through there.

A GameDeveloper research paper has been published, showing that American game developers earn a salary of $73,600 on average.

Apparently business and marketing bods make the most money, with an average salary of $101,848, while QA makes the least, earning $39,063 on average.

Get a quick breakdown of the figures on GI.

PlayStation 3 profitability has driven record revenues for Sony in its quarter ending December 31, with net income rising 25 percent to 200.2 billion yen over the same period in the previous year. The company has now raised its full-year forecast 3 percent to 340 billion yen.

The news will delight PS3-loving industry-watchers, as the machine now appears to be solidly placed and advancing into a period that will see price cuts and major releases for 2008 in the form of GTA IV, GT5, FFXIII (maybe), Killzone 2 (maybe) and MGS4.