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‘Assassin’s Creed’ Sales Outpace Expectations

From: MSNBC.com

A Middle Ages assassin is helping game maker Ubisoft stand up to bigger competitors. The France-based company said Thursday it was revising its targets for this fiscal year upward and was able to delay release of several high-profile games due to to unexpectedly strong sales of its blockbuster “Assassin’s Creed.”

The game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is expected to sell more than five million copies worldwide by the end of the fiscal year, up from the company’s initial estimate of three million, company CEO Yves Guillemot said. It cost $15 million to $20 million to develop, and was in the works for four years.

“It’s doing extremely well, and what we see is it is actually the fastest selling new (intellectual property) in the industry in the U.S.,” Guillemot told The Associated Press. “It shows that consumers are avid for novelty, and when you do something new, they respond.” A sequel to the open-world stealth action game is already in development by the same Montreal office that created the first.

Guillemot said the success of “Assassin’s” allowed Ubisoft to delay until after the holidays the release of “Haze,” a first-person shooter for Xbox and PS3 in which players can turn enemies on one another. Delayed into the next fiscal year were “Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway,” “Far Cry 2″ and “Tom Clancy’s End War,” which allows players issue voice commands to their military squads.