Ubisoft recently filed its fourth quarter and year end reports for fiscal 2013, reporting total sales of €1.26 billion for the year ($1.66 billion), an 18.4% increase on FY2012, and €175 million for the quarter ($230 million), an 8.7% year-on-year increase.

Far Cry 3 was one of the major movers and shakers behind this bounty, having shipped 6 million units, but The Settlers Online and Just Dance were also major performers, with Ubisoft highlighting the performance of free-to-play and casual games. The publisher noted that Assassin’s Creed and Just Dance had joined the ranks of the 20 best-selling franchies in the industry during the year.

It also revealed that the tepidly-received Assassin’s Creed III managed to ship 12.5 million units, including digital sales. During a post-release call to investors, Ubisoft said that it isn’t banking on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag to do the same.

“In our numbers we expect less than last year,” CEO Yves Guillemot said.

“We are actually pushing to achieve more than last year because we think the pirate segment is a great segment that can generate a lot more on a worldwide basis than what was achieved last year. But we wanted to be prudent on our expectations so that it can probably be a bonus if it comes.”

Other reveals from the call include word of the shelving of Patrice Desiléts’s 1666.

Source: Ubisoft IR via Blue’s News

Patrice Desilets, the man who designed the first two Assassin’s Creed games which went on to make Ubisoft squillions, left the company a while back to go work at THQ. Then, THQ collapsed, and Ubisoft purchased the studio that Patrice was leading, as well as the game they were working on — something called 1666.

Today, however, it looks like the relationship between Desiliets and the company has soured.

“Unfortunately, since the acquisition (of THQ Montreal), the good faith discussions between Patrice and Ubisoft aimed at aligning Patrice’s and the studio’s visions have been inconclusive,” reads a statement by Ubisoft. “As a result, Patrice has left the studio. Our priorities remain with the teams already hard at work on projects in development.”

Patrice, however, tells a different story.

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The original Assassin’s Creed was originally going to ship with a drop-in co-op mode, Ubisoft Montreal has confirmed. The mission director for Assassin’s Creed III, a Mr Phillipe Bergeron has explained the idea — and the reasoning for its disappearance — in an interview with OXM.

“It just became too hard to do: the engine couldn’t support it, and then the metaphor we had above it didn’t support it. Co-op was one of those big things at the beginning that just didn’t make sense in the end,” Bergeron said.

“For us it was really part of the single player experience, to have in-and-out co-op, and in the end we never thought it made sense in the storyline that we had for the Animus. There was no way to reconcile having multiplayer or co-op in an ancestor’s memories. Your ancestor lived his life in a certain way, so assuming you had branching storylines, it creates a paradox. It didn’t fit.”

An interesting development! What do you think? Would co-op have added to the experience? Would you like to see some sort of more-easily-justified co-op in a later Assassin’s Creed game?

Source: OXM

Trusty Amazon, always leaking like a sieve. Their latest drop from the bucket is the Assassin’s Creed Anthology: Ubisoft plan to release the entire Assassin’s Creed franchise (up to this point?) in one big box.

Perhaps learning from Skyrim‘s mistake or perhaps simply because it’s common sense, the box pack will come with all DLC included. This should include, presumably, a season pass for Assassin’s Creed 3 DLC, which isn’t due out until next year.

While Ubisoft is yet to officially announce the pack, they have confirmed that it exists and say that more information will be forthcoming this week.

Source: Eurogamer

Michael Fassbender, most recently of X-Men: First Class and Prometheus, is set to take the starring role in the upcoming movie adaptation of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Fassbender will co-produce as well as star in the film, being described as the “first choice” for the role by Jean-Julien Baronnet, head of Ubisoft Motion Pictures.

Baronnet went on to describe Fassbender as an “extremely smart, talented, versatile and committed actor”, which is nice. The film will be developed independently by Ubisoft in order to maintain greater creative control, so we could well be set to receive a video game movie that is actually faithful to the source material for the first time in recorded human history.

Source: Variety