14 DAY TRIAL // The Avatar movie, which marks James Cameron's return to the director chair of a commercial release following the launch of Titanic, is doing very well, selling close to 500 million dollars worth of tickets in the United States and more than a billion worldwide.
The game also picked up some Golden Globe awards and an Oscar might be in the works for its director. Meanwhile, Avatar: The Videogame, developed and published by Ubisoft, performed rather badly, not being one of the first 20 top selling videogames of December 2009 and registering an abrupt drop in sales as 2010 debuted.
And Yves Guillemot, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Ubisoft, is stating that the problem was mainly in the release schedule for the product. He talks about the risk of a late launch, saying that “We knew we were taking. The fact that the movie was coming in December was a potential problem, and it did result in a problem.” Most reviewers talked about the fact that the Avatar videogaming experience was mostly unimaginative and lacked an original hook and not about the badly chosen release date.
Guillemot also says that his company will be reducing its exposure to the movie-videogame market, “The goal is to reduce the investment in licenses, and put more emphasis on making our brands bigger more often, with very high quality. It doesn't mean we will stop, but we are going to spend less on licenses in the future.” Titles which are linked to movie releases often have rather low quality, mostly because of the compressed development schedule and the lack of any innovation.
Alain Martinez, who is the Chief Financial Officer of Ubisoft, has stated that any losses his company has incurred on the Avatar project have been more than made up by the bigger than projected sales of Assassin's Creed II, the biggest title Ubisoft released in late 2009.