Publishers are increasingly paying attention to videogame reviews and aggregate scores, but Ubisoft CEO Alain Martinez feels the importance of them is sometimes overrated. Gamasutra reports that at the UBS Annual Global Media Conference, Martinez remarked that historically, ratings haven"t correlated with sales numbers for the company. "When Assassin"s Creed launched and got 82 percent, we were desperate, and we thought we were going to die," he said. Now in hindsight, we know the game has seen financial success both during launch and in the long term. "If you look at our first Prince of Persia [The Sands of Time], we thought it was going to do great, [but] it only did two million, so we were kind of disappointed." Sands of Time, of course, was a critical darling but failed to catch a wide market.

Regarding more recent releases, he commented that he hopes the new Prince of Persia will hit about three million, saying four or five million would be ideal to have a strong hit. The company was also hoping for a stronger debut of Far Cry 2, and is now counting on it becoming a slow burn through the next several months to reach about three million units.

Both the new Prince of Persia and Far Cry 2 have scored in the mid-to-high eighties on Metacritic, which is only slightly higher than Assassin"s Creed. Reviews and rankings may be less of an issue than publishers sometimes think, but Far Cry 2 didn"t have the explosive opening month the company hoped for. We"ll have to wait for next month"s NPD data to see if the Prince achieves the success of his little brother, Altair.