PSP World

Ubisoft Hopes Assassin's Creed PSP Bundle will Boost Sales

Ubisoft did not have a great fiscal quarter, announcing yesterday that the company saw a 50% reduction in sales compared with the same period a year earlier. However, the company says that things will be looking much better come this holiday season, when one of its highly-anticipated games, Assassin's Creed 2, is set to arrive. According to Ubisoft executive director Alain Corre, the game is projected to sell about 15% more units than its predecessor. However, he does not see this growth coming from the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions of the game, but rather from an all new installment on the PSP:

"Following the strong showing of Assassin's Creed at E3 and the current buzz, we now think the game should be selling around 15 per cent more units than the first title. Our previous guidance suggested it was going to sell less units than the first title. Most of this performance actually comes from the addition of one platform, the PSP, on which Assassin's Creed 1 was not released in the past. Half of this performance is done with guaranteed bundles,"

It seems that Corre is a little bit confused about the difference between Assassin's Creed 2 and Bloodlines, which is the name of the PSP game. Up until now, we have been told to expect a completely different experience on the handheld, that is not tied directly to the events of Assassin's Creed 2. Maybe Corre knows something that we don't, or perhaps it is all the same to them and they see the PSP game simply as a value-add for the console title.

Also, as a result of his comments, we can now confidently confirm an Assassin's Creed PSP bundle heading our way this winter. We don't yet know what this bundle will look like, and whether it will be offered across the PSP Go and PSP 3000 hardware, on UMD, or as digital download only. It would also be really helpful to know what "guaranteed bundles" mean. Could this be a marketing subsidy from Sony to attract developers to their handheld platform?

We will have more information for readers as soon as we hear it, of course.

We've been told that Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines features main character Altair from the first game.

[Source: Spong]