Compared to last year’s first quarter, Ubisoft is doing a lot better, making €160 million this quarter compared to the €83 million from the 2009-2010 fiscal year’s first quarter. That’s a 93% increase! This is almost entirely due to the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction, as well as continued sales from back catalog titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Just Dance (people still love to dance with their Wiis, apparently).

For the next quarter, what do you have to look forward to? Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., for one, and World War II RTS title R.U.S.E.

Unfortunately, not all the news is good in the land of Ubi: The latest edition of the “Driver” franchise has been delayed to the fourth quarter (after the holiday season). Ubisoft cited a “competitive market” at Christmas as the reason for the move. That’s not really having a lot of faith in your product, is it?

In any case, the game will likely see release around February 2011 now.

Ubisoft announced details today about it’s upcoming strategy game, R.U.S.E.. At E3, Ubisoft showed R.U.S.E. in closed doors on a Microsoft Surface table. Now Ubisoft announces that they will be using the multitouch capabilities of Windows 7 to bring it to gamers’ homes.

“Making images interactive is at the core of the video game industry, and over the last few years we have been striving to make this interactivity as intuitive and direct as possible. Today, thanks to Windows 7 and its full multitouch support, the barrier between the player and the image has been removed: they become one”, said John Parkes, EMEA marketing director. “As a strategy game relying on a clean and intuitive interface built around the zoom, R.U.S.E. was the perfect candidate for Ubisoft to demonstrate how multitouch improves and streamlines the way games are played”.

Ubisoft is working closely with Microsoft to make sure the experience is immersive and works well. R.U.S.E. should launch on touch-enabled devices running Windows 7 in Q1 2010.

“Windows 7 was designed with the customer in mind,” said Mike Ybarra, general manager of Windows Product Management at Microsoft. “We are pleased to see how Ubisoft has leveraged multi-touch in R.U.S.E to bring a new and dynamic gaming experience to our mutual customers.”

Here is the R.U.S.E. video from E3: