Ubisoft: Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023 Underperformed - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 January 2023 / 7,910 Views
Ubisoft has revealed sales for two of its 2022 games, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023 Edition, did not meet sales expectations.
Despite excellent ratings and players’ reception as well as an ambitious marketing plan, we were surprised by Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope underperformance in the final weeks of 2022 and early January," said Ubisoft Co-Founder and CEO Yves Guillemot. "Just Dance 2023 underperformed as well."
With the lower than expected sales from these games and a more challenging environment, Ubisoft has lowered its expectations for Q3 2022-23 from €830 million to €725 million.
Ubisoft has also announced has cancelled three unannounced games and has delayed Skull & Bones once again.
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope released for the Nintendo Switch on October 20, 2022, while Just Dance 2023 Edition released for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on November 22, 2022.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Ubisoft's expectations where too high. Just because it's on Switch doesn't mean it will sell great. Rabbits was released at the wrong time to be successful as most people will choose Pokémon over it and there was basically no hype.
Ubisoft games get discounts rather fast. Why would people choose to buy them day one when they can get those at half the price a couple of months down the line? Even more son when they had to compete with bigger titles.
Yeh, they're destroying their own value. I remember Immortals: Fenyx Rising had a 33% discount only 6 or so weeks after release. The first game also had insane 85% discounts. Why would you pay full price, or even first discount price.
Besides that, I did enjoy the game, though I feel they should have increased the difficulty on hard or add an actual hard mode.
Did you play it on the Switch? I want to give it a try, since it's always so cheap, but I'm not sure how it works on the Switch.
I heard Mario pus Rabbits was really good. Perhaps this means an early discount. I will be picking this up.
Yeah there was like a 25% discount during the holidays. Which makes it even more surprising that it sold under their expectations, given that there was a nice discount on it just two months after it came out.
I mean, why settle for 25% ? You know Ubi will drop it at 50%, season pass included, a month later…
That sucks. I hope we still get another Mario + Rabbids style game from them next-gen. I haven't gotten Sparks of Hope yet but will eventually. The first game was awesome. It'd be very cool to see them do a Zelda version next-gen.
But actually they never said the true sales of the Mario + Rabbidsgsmes.🙄
Well hard to know how disappointing without seeing any numbers. Sparks Of Hope was good though.
Damn, hope M+R has legs.
Yeah blame these two games for the fact that your company is a shell of a developer.
Ubisoft is just going to mark it down to insanely low prices eventually. Plenty will pick it up for $19.99 or $14.99 eventually. They have created their own shortfall by being so predictably desperate for sales all the time. People criticize Nintendo all the time for their pricing strategy, but we can't deny that it works. Granted, this is Nintendo quality vs Ubisoft "quality" we are talking about here, but the Mario v Rabbids games show Ubisoft in rare form. I think it may have made more sense to hold off on this one until Switch 2 and take advantage of software scarcity at launch.
The first Mario + Rabbids saw discounts between 50 - 80 % during the holiday season. Maybe people rather bought the first game. It could also mean that people weren't too happy with the first game and maybe thought it would be a different game, so there's not enough interest in a second game.
I don't think the last point is likely since Kingdom Battle still keeps selling and has over 10mil players already.
I mean.. they actually just said it underperformed in the final weeks of December and early Jan. Not that it overall underperformed. They just expected bigger Christmas/after Christmas sales than it got. It probably still sold pretty damn well
OOOOOFFFFFF!
Market cap for Ubisoft has been getting lower which atm is around 2.5 Billion Euros, achievable by companies like Sony, Tencent and others.
It is their fault , Just Dance 2023 is mediocre , no online mode and only 4-5 great songs
However Mario sparks , I haven’t played it yet , but it is on my list for this year
I probably won't ever play this series. Didn't play the first one either. I just can't get past the stupid rabbits. I know they have their fans but I've always been put off and slightly creeped out by them. They just ruin it for me. Don't know what they have to do with Mario anyway. The crossover is tacky and something nobody wanted or asked for.
I don't like the Rabbids either, but I enjoyed the first game in the series a lot.
My son likes the first one.
You're getting too stuck up on the Rabbids. I've never played a rabbids game and know nothing about them and have no desire to play those games. But the first Mario + Rabbids looked awesome and indeed it was awesome. Sounds like this second game is also awesome. You don't need to care at all about rabbids to have a blast with these games.
