Ubisoft is going through some pretty tough times right now. The French publisher’s last financial year was anything but exhilarating. According to a recent financial report, new releases like Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope continued to sell below expectations. Just Dance 2023 also flopped on the market. As a result, the company’s shares fell to their lowest point in eight years, and profit forecasts were revised downwards. Approximately 200 million euros must be saved over the next three years, including through “restructuring of personnel”. Of course, this also has an impact on the in-house game production.
The pirate adventure Skull & Bones has now been postponed for the sixth (!) time to an unspecified date in the 2023/24 financial year. Other titles were even less fortunate: the development of three unannounced projects was even stopped completely after Ubisoft canceled Ghost Recon Frontline and Splinter Cell VR last year. And that was probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Battle Royale Overkill
According to a report by the website Insider-Gaming.com, the company has quietly pulled the plug on numerous other productions in recent months. Industry insider Tom Henderson claims to have learned this from various former and current Ubisoft employees. According to their anonymous statements, many games were simply put on hold because they should not have corresponded to “what gamers currently want”. Or to put it another way: At a certain point in time, Ubisoft is said to have been working on 12 Battle Royale titles at once. However, they got off pretty badly in playtesting and feedback rounds.
It is not known how many projects ended up surviving Ubisoft’s red pencil offensive. The “survivors” should still have a hard time though. The Battle Royale trend has flattened out significantly in recent years. It is not an easy task to assert oneself against the now established big names such as PUBG or Fortnite. Ubisoft even had to experience this firsthand. Genre representative HyperScape, which was launched in 2020, could not even last two years and was taken offline last April.
Source: Insider Gaming.com
