The Ten Highest Selling Game Series from Ubisoft

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Watch Dogs is out today, and it’s one of those rare times in the video game industry where you can feel a new franchise being born. The gaming sphere relies heavily on initial hits producing loads of profitable sequels, and that’s something Watch Dogs publisher/developer Ubisoft knows very well.

The game it’s being compared to Assassin’s Creed, in the sense that Ubisoft is hoping it might turn into a franchise of that size and scope over the next decade or so. I thought it was a good time to turn and look back at what Ubisoft’s most profitable franchises have been over the years, and how Watch Dogs might stack up with them.

According to data from April 2014, here are the ten highest selling series from Ubisoft, when all the games are added up.

1. Assassin’s Creed: 73 million

2. Just Dance: 48 million

3. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: 30 million

4. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: 26 million

5. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: 25 million

6. Petz: 24 million

7. Rayman: 25 million

8. Imagine: 21 million

9. Prince of Persia: 20 million

10. Driver: 19 million

As can be seen from the chart, Assassin’s Creed is on top with nothing else even close. The series has had four numbered games and more than a few sub-titles and spin-offs over the years. At the time, the original game expanded the notion of what a sandbox game could be like, and the series has tumbled through different time periods ever since. Ubisoft has now made the series an annual release, and AC IV was arguably one of the best games in the series, despite being released only a year after AC III.

Just Dance is a game people may not even realize is an Ubisoft title, but it’s proved to be one of their biggest hits. It’s this generations Dance Dance Revolution, and one of the only games that made owning a motion-sensing Xbox Kinect worthwhile. It shows that Ubisoft can do family friendly titles as well as gory epics, and that’s further proven by other titles on the list like the Petz and Imagine series.

Tom Clancy is an interesting case because if you add up all of those titles, they surpass the Assassin’s Creed total. But even though all have the Clancy name attached, they are three distinct series and really can’t all be lumped together in that fashion. They are sleeper hits that don’t get tons of press in this day and age of constantly released Call of Duty installments, but they’re a reliable moneymaker for Ubisoft.

It’s hard to say where Watch Dogs will end up on a list like this someday. It’s debuted to average-to-good reviews, hovering between 7-9 in terms of score. Not bad, but not great considering this was supposed to be a huge new IP for Ubisoft, and it’s hard to tell if it will be a sales monster with just this first installment. Recently, EA’s Titanfall debuted as a new IP with a lot of hype and decent reviews, but so far has failed to catch fire in terms of sales, with the company keeping grand totals under wraps, even months after launch. The last major new IP of the year will be Activision/Bungie’s Destiny, coming out later this fall, and it looks to be more ambitious than even these two.

Like Titanfall and Destiny, Watch Dogs is designed to spawn many, many sequels, as anyone who finishes the story will discover, and the potential is there to improve on what flaws it has. It’s been compared to Grand Theft Auto, and it certainly plays a lot like that game, but I have to wonder what the release schedule is going to be for new Watch Dogs games. GTA titles take between 3-5 years to make, but Ubisoft is making open world Assassin’s Creed games every year somehow. Will they be able to expand that prowess to Watch Dogs, and put Aiden Pearce in a new city every year? Perhaps, but not right away. Watch Dogs also has the disadvantage of not really being able to jump around to different time periods like AC or Call of Duty. A yearly game released in a new modern day city could feel stale rather quickly.

It’s a solid start, just not anything revolutionary. We’ll have to wait and see what the first batch of sales numbers are like.

[Photo via Ubisoft]

Written by Paul

Paul lives in New York with his beautiful and supportive wife. He writes for Forbes and his work also appears on IGN, The Daily Dot, Unreality Magazine, TVOvermind and more. It's a slow day if he's written less than 10,000 words.