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Ubisoft's Software Sales Projections

French publisher reveals sales targets for major holiday releases, including Far Cry 2 and Shaun White Snowboarding.

As Ubisoft navigates the holiday shopping season, the Paris-based publisher expects a number of titles to sell over 1 million units.

Speaking at the UBS Global Media Conference on Wednesday, Ubisoft CFO Alain Martinez revealed the following sales targets for new major titles:

Brothers in Arms (September): 1.5 million

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party (November): 1.5 million

  • Higher expectations than the previous Rayman installment, which achieved sales of 1.2 million.
  • Sales are up 50 percent in the U.S.
  • "It's typically a Christmas product," said Martinez.

Far Cry 2 (October): 2.5-3 million
  • 2 million of those sales expected to come from Europe, Middle East and Asia sales; the rest coming from the U.S. "It didn't perform as well as [Ubisoft] would have liked in the U.S."
  • "We're seeing after the launch of Call of Duty and the launch of Gears of War, Far Cry 2 is ramping up," the exec said.
     
 Shaun White Snowboarding (November): 2-2.5 million
  • "We do feel comfortable that we should be hitting the 1 million target on the Wii, maybe probably exceeding it," Martinez revealed about the Balance Board-compatible version.

Tom Clancy's EndWar (November): 1.4 million
  • The CFO expects the strategy game to hit "the low end" of expectations.

Martinez also said that casual games are "outperforming" company expectations, although he did not release an updated sales figure.

Performance of the newly released Prince of Persia is a mixed bag, the exec said. "In the first four or five days of sales, we're faring better than the prior Prince of Persia, but lower than Far Cry."

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time sold 4 million copies over the course of two years.

Martinez believes that the new Prince of Persia, released early this month, has a mainstream appeal, and "therefore, has longer legs."