While Ubisoft has three relatively big-name games on or making their way to the iPhone by March, the company still remains on the fence about the potential of the iPhone market. More »
Profits were up, income was down and the Imagine games sold tons in the last 12 months, according to year-end financial results released by Ubisoft today. More »
It stings a little to report on this, but sometimes, we must bite our lips and bring the bad news, as well as the good: Ubisoft’s Imagine series has passed 1 million in sales.
As part of Ubisoft’s 3rd quarter sales report, the company posted their release schedule for the first three months of 2009, filled with iPetz, Jace Power, and a heaping helping of imagination.
French video game publisher Ubisoft announced its quarterly results today, which are up over 37%, resulting in a second quarter take of about $339 million (€175 million). The company attributes its better than expected results to Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway and Soulcalibur IV for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But you know where the real money is coming from — the Petz, Imagine and ENER-G series.
With all the press (mostly of the incredulous variety) swirling around Ubisoft’s line of DS games for girls (featuring such scintillating titles as Imagine: Babyz and Imagine: Fashion Designer, as Ashcraft mentioned earlier this week), Ian Bogost is here to set the record straight and chastise us all for having short memories and no sense of history (ouch!): the series isn’t new, and Babyz was first released in 1999. I think Bogost is being a little disingenuous here – is it any wonder that many of us have no recollection of minor software toys targeted towards adult women released in the mid-to-late 90s (and do interactive desktop pets really count as a ‘game’?)? I’ll concede that a more complete historiography makes for some more interesting observations:
Petz and Babyz were software toys for adults, not for kids, at least not explicitly. They ran in a process on top of the Windows desktop, and the pets and babies literally moved around in the foreground, as you worked. They were little creatures and characters you could interact with ….
None of these observations change Ubisoft’s strange assertion that girls want shopping and childcare, but the history of the titles make other observations possible. For example, Ubisoft is also just recycling old IP rather than reinventing these games from whole cloth.
Bogost says that the brand value has apparently evaporated, necessitating that miserable deliberate misspelling – but how much value did it have in the first place? And does currency with the inching-towards-menopause market in the 90s really have any impact on how well it does with tweens and teens in 2007 and beyond?
Imagine Game History [Water Cooler Games] More »
Remember Ubisoft’s propagation of female gaming stereotypes Imagine series for the DS? Sure ya do! According to French publisher Ubisoft, in-house research showed that pre-teen girls were interested in things like fashion, cooking and caring for animals and babies (and probably baby animals). The Imagine series is aimed at 6-14 year-old females. According to Ubisoft’s Shara Hashemi:
We did research, and we are studying the market… that’s what the girls actually like, so we should try to fulfil their needs… Those games were really designed for young girls who are just looking for fun games and ways to explore their favourite hobbies… From what we’ve seen, [the girls]didn’t mention anything about being a police officer.
Thus, later this month will see clothes deigning and photo shoot coordinating Imagine: Fashion Designer, cooking with gas Imagine: Master Chef, sick animal vet sim Imagine: Animal Doctor and baby-sitting title Imagine: Babyz. (See that? See how they changed Imagine: Babies to Imagine: Babyz?) Next March, Ubisoft will release another DS title, Imagine: Figure Skater, and there are plans to expand to the Wii. According to Hashemi, “The games are built on ideas and concepts that every girl can relate to and they allow girls to expand their creativity while they’re learning real facts and real-life concepts.” Can’t wait for Imagine: Glass Ceiling! Ubisoft Talks Imagine [Multiplayer] More »
Now that loads of women are buying a DS, somebody needs to teach them things. Like their place. Enter Ubisoft with their Imagine series, aimed at instructing 6-14 year-old girls in the sacred, lost arts of womanhood. Things like cooking, fashion design and the making, and subsequent caring, for babies. Those are actually three of the first games in the series, with further titles to come including things like…Figure Skating, and another cooking game. Because girls are never too young to start learning about the glass ceiling, right Ubisoft? What’s next? We kicked a few possible suggestions around Kotaku Tower.
