Or you grow your audience and convert more consumers to digital. People who buy games digitally are probably more likely to spend on MTX; and we see that as digital sales for Ubi went up, so did MTX revenue. They've been promoting this by adding cheap entry versions of games down the line as well as deals like the Ubi points currency that you can spend for 20% off their digital store. I'm confident the push for digital will grow only more in coming years.
Yeah I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't change that investors will always want to see as much growth as possible
Digital sales were always going up and always will, MXT are going up because more games have them and more games push them, or build their entire game around them
I'm not saying that as a negative by the way, as loads of games (including Ubisoft games) have really been able to thrive using this model, but games from 2018 have more monitisation than games in 2008, and the chances are games in 2028 will have more monitisation than games in 2018
Getting the balance right while maintaining growth is where the challenge is. You need to ensure the game is great without needing to keep pumping money into it and while also having enough options for those who do want to keep pumping money into it
When only a minority of your players generate your MXT money you can either make them more far reaching and encourage those who don't currently pay to start paying, which will work for some and alienate others, or you cater the game from a design perspective towards the minority who pay (which is what a lot of mobile games do)
We've already seen several (though not from Ubisoft) examples of GaaS fail to meet this balance and end up worse games for it, however they're in the minority. My concern is that chasing growth every year and the market becoming saturated with more 500 hour long GaaS like titles will cause some publishers to overreach and mess the balance up
Only time will tell of course, and I could well be wrong, but generally companies are not that thrilled when games don't make more money than before. Only this week Activison were disappointing with Black Ops 4 because it only made a similar amount of money to their previous game, even though it made $500m