While James Cameron's Avatar has become one of the top grossing movies of all time, the corresponding video game from French publisher Ubisoft hasn't exactly followed suit on the video game charts. Analysts have pointed to the game's early release (it hit retail over two weeks before the movie debuted), but Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that acquiring a license for a December film is always risky.
Speaking in a conference call after Ubisoft slashed its guidance, Guillemot commented, "We knew we were taking [some risk]. The fact that the movie was coming in December was a potential problem, and it did result in a problem. We thought the game would continue to sell after the new year. It will be difficult in the future to buy rights to a movie that comes in December, because it's too risky, and it cannot [capture] Christmas season [sales]. It doesn't work as well for a video game company."
Learning from its error, Ubisoft will now scale back its investments in movie tie-ins. The publisher has a wealth of great IP, and it plans to focus more on its own brands. "The goal is to reduce the investment in licenses, and put more emphasis on making our brands bigger [and appear] more often, with very high quality," Guillemot explained. "It doesn't mean we will stop, but we are going to spend less on licenses in the future."
Even though Avatar didn't live up to expectations for Ubisoft, CFO Alain Martinez stressed that it didn't really hurt the company's bottom line either. "Avatar is not a loss-making project," he stated. "When we lose 1 million sales [from our projections], that's about 30 million euros in sales and 65 or 70 percent of gross margin that has been lost."
[Thanks to Gamasutra]
