Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot’s has made some comments on the sales issues of Star Wars Outlaws. The big boss claims that Outlaws’ middling performance last year was, in large part, because the whole Star Wars franchise was in “choppy waters.”
Guillemot was at a recent shareholders Q&A, addressing complaints that last August’s open-worlds action-adventure didn’t hit the exceedingly high sales milestones that had been hoped for. The game—where you play as space criminal Kay Vess rushing around the galaxy committing acts of malfeasance—had “softer than expected” sales on release, which caused a huge drop in Ubisoft’s share value to the lowest it had been in ten years.
The causes of this were, of course, multi-factorial. The enormous game was buggy, had crappy stealth, and lackluster space-based sections, and these significant shortfalls immediately hurt word-of-mouth. It also released into the worst of 2024’s tiresome campaigning by the wannabe-Nazis of the alt-right, the game committing the twin crimes of featuring a central character who was both a woman and a person of color. Also, people were noticeably getting tired of Ubisoft’s repetitive formula across all its games, and Outlaws took the brunt of this. It was a whole bunch of stuff, but the game’s own failings were a significant part of it. What no one at all was saying was, “It’s because Book of Boba Fett wasn’t that great of a movie.”
During the shareholder meeting, someone in the audience stood up to ask an interminable barrage of questions, during which he asked of Outlaws, “What have you learned from the failure in terms of sales? Have you learned anything in terms of pricing, in terms of marketing?”
Guillemot replied, “We didn’t reach our sales targets. The game suffered from a number of items.” The first of these he listed was that “the brand that it belonged to was in a bit of choppy waters,” stopping before explaining exactly what he meant by that. He then added that “the game still had a few items that needed to be polished,” rapidly adding that they received polish in the early weeks of release, but saying that it “did affect sales volumes.” Guillemot then described the upcoming Switch 2 port as “a new version of the game.”
His underplaying of the bugginess of the game, dropped in as an afterthought after attempting to throw the entirety of Star Wars under the bus, is just odd! Was this an attempt to lump the game in with Disney+ TV series The Acolyte, that was also the target of a hate campaign from the organized bigots? While the movies had gone quiet since 2021, the TV series were otherwise flying high, with Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, and of course the beloved Andor proving critical successes. And if the entire franchise is to blame, then why didn’t this affect EA’s 2023 title Star Wars Jedi: Survivor? EA CEO Andrew Wilson described that game’s sales as “strongly” beating expectations, saying that EA was “overjoyed” with its performance.
Anyway, shareholders and stock values are the antithesis of creative pursuits, and Outlaws was a fine game released into a broken industry where only astonishing success is acceptable.
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