Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, and Just Dance push Ubisoft to new record highs

Ubisoft has claimed a number of new records at the close of the third quarter of its 2020-21 financial year, including record highs in net bookings and unique players across its catalog.

For the quarter ending December 31, 2020, Ubisoft reported net bookings of €1 billion (~$1.2 billion), over double the €455.5 million (~$551 million) from Q3 last year, higher than the €860-€960 million it previously projected, and a new record high for Ubisoft as a whole.

It was, after all, a busy quarter for Ubisoft. Q3 saw the release of several big ticket Ubisoft games across both the holiday season and the first month or so of a new console generation. For instance, Ubisoft's CFO Frederick Duget notes that both Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs: Legion ranked among the top four best sellers on Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.

As always, Ubisoft's back catalog is called out as a strong driver behind its success as well, with Duget calling out both "record momentum for Assassin's Creed titles, solid growth of the Far Cry franchise, and strong increase in engagement and revenues for The Crew brand and our free-to-play game Brawlhalla."

The Just Dance games also earned a call out both on the new releases and the back catalog fronts, with Just Dance 2020 named as one of the standout games of the quarter and the Just Dance franchise as a whole boating a "more than 200 percent surge" on the back catalog front.

Back catalog games were solely responsible for €306.1 million in net bookings for the quarter, up from €252.2 million the year before. Digital sources, meanwhile, were responsible for 588.4 million of that €1 billion whole.

Due to French accounting laws, we won't hear much about overall profit for Ubisoft until the company closes out its Q4 later this year. However, on the net bookings front Ubisoft has so far reported €1.76 billion in sales for the first nine months of the fiscal year, up from €1.12 billion the year before.