Assassin's Creed: Unity and Rogue shipped 10m copies combined
Despite "painful" development.
Last year Ubisoft shipped a combined 10m copies of last year's Assassin's Creed: Unity and Assassin's Creed: Rogue.
Unity launched in November for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, alongside Rogue for PS3 and Xbox 360. A PC version of Rogue is due to launch next month.
By comparison, Ubisoft announced last May that it had shipped 11m copies of 2013 title Assassin's Creed: Black Flag - released across all of the same platforms. With five months of sales still to go it is likely that 2014's titles will beat that number by a decent margin.
Ubisoft announced the new figures in its latest
financial report, where company boss Yves Guillemot commented on Unity's much-chronicled
launch issues.
"Each time there's a new transition of consoles, we try to create engines that take full advantage of the capacity of those consoles," he said.
"In the case of Unity, we had to redo 100 per cent of the engine. So when you do that, it's painful for all the group... and everything has to be recalibrated.
"With this game, a few things were not perfect when the game was launched. But the engine has been created, and it's going to help the brands to shine in the future.
"Next fiscal year we will launch a new Assassin's Creed game based on the same technology that powered Unity. We are very confident that the experiences learned, along with the customer feedback, will help us take Assassin's Creed to the next level of quality and innovation."
Meanwhile, Ubisoft noted it had now shipped 10m copies of open-world hackathon Watch Dogs.
Himalayan safari shooter Far Cry 4 has shipped 7m copies, while The Crew has shipped 2m.
Watch Dogs holds the record for the biggest launch of a new IP in Europe and the second-largest launch in the US (behind Destiny, which also holds the global record).
"In 2014, Ubisoft offered gamers the most diversified line-up in the industry," Guillemot continued. "As a result we achieved a third-quarter performance that was well above target and we expect to generate a record level of free cash flow for 2014-15.
"We are now capitalising on the investments we have made over the past several years to further develop our creative strengths, boost our marketing impact and extend our digital footprint. Our performance is all the more impressive given that it is wholly the result of Ubisoft's teams.
"Each of these successful games was developed by our in-house studios and we own our brands, which means that our destiny is in our own hands and we are internalising the value created for our shareholders."
