While plenty of game devs and pubs have proven that the gaming industry is not impervious to the economic downturn, Ubisoft is certainly not one of them. Ubi's sales for the 2008 fiscal year reached $1.5 billion dollars, which is a 14% increase over 2007. But enough of the boring stuff, let's get onto what announcements were made about games and consoles during the publisher's recent financial meeting.

On top of confirming that Red Steel 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 are coming in fiscal 2009, Ubisoft also announced Ghost Recon 4, saying it should hit stores in the January-March 2010 quarter. And don't worry about Splinter Cell: Conviction, as that's still supposed to arrive on 360 in time for the holidays.

Serious soldier dude is serious.

Game announcements are certainly exciting, but CEO Yves Guillemot's comments about how Ubisoft needs "to get ready for the future generation of consoles," has made us perk up our ears. Gamasutra connects these comments with Microsoft's comments about how its E3 presentation would, "completely transform how people think about home entertainment," and is speculating about the possibility of new hardware being announced.



Anthony says: I'm not ready to buy a new console, so I certainly hope that's not what Microsoft is proposing. My guess: It's probably just another 360 SKU or a price drop of the Arcade bundle to $149.