Yeah, when a company hides behind largely meaningless cope numbers and adamantly refuses to give actual sales figures, even as investors openly demand them, while firing most of the employees and selling off chunks of their business while the actual release quietly fades into obscurity, I'd call that a flop.
I sperged out about the numbers recently to someone who tried to tell me it was a success, so I've got the data. Let's look at it like this. The last big milestone they bragged about was in July/August, where they said they reached "5 Million players." The budget for Shadows is reported to be anywhere between $180,000,000 and $350,000,000. We'll split the middle and say it was somewhere around $250,000,000 marketing included. This means that they'd have to sell 3,571,429 copies at the full $70 asking price to break even. A midwit may look at that "5 Million Players" statistic and think they turned a huge profit, but the reality is that "Players" are not the equivalent of sales. In fact, they didn't even specify "Unique Players", so in all reality, that "5 Million" could easily have been a meager 1 million people who booted the game up on 5 occasions. And while we can't know how often each player booted up the game, it's safe to assume 5 times is actually a low estimate.
But it gets WORSE. Ubisoft has a subscription service, and for $18 a month, you can play every first party Ubisoft title on day one. So, if someone for any reason had any reservations about AC Shadows and didn't want to pay full price, there was nothing stopping them from paying for the $18 subscription, beating the game, and canceling. They experienced the whole thing for only 25.7% of the full cost. This means that even if the game did reach 1 million unique players, there's no shot that every single one of them even paid the full price.
There is literally no way you can analyze this data and spin it in a way which makes it seem like Shadows was a financial success, or even that it broke even. Add on the fact that there was a mutiny against the CEO and the company is selling large portions of itself to China in the wake of Shadows, and all signs point to "It fucking flopped harder than my man-boobs on a jog".
Granted, if Shadows were an indy game that was developed on a much, much lower budget, that 1 million sales estimate would make the game a huge success. But devs like Ubisoft have so many bullshit "positions" for employees who literally do nothing all day, and such an intense focus on graphics (Which drive the cost of a game up immensely) rather than gameplay, that their expenses are absurd and every game they release would have to be a classic like AC II in order to keep them afloat. It's an unsustainable business model.
