The battle royale concept isn’t quite as hot anymore, but not so long ago the subgenre was half-taking over the gaming world – and even today, the most popular titles are battle royale games.
Ubisoft has previously been criticized for blindly following trends and sometimes lacking its own identity with games that have open worlds with semi-identical foundations. An example of how they often follow trends rather than set them comes from journalist and insider Tom Henderson, who states that at one point Ubisoft had over 12 different Battle Royale games in the pipeline:
“The consensus among the employee’s Insider Gaming talked to though, was that the reason for delays and cancellations was that most of the games were “not what gamers wanted”, which was reflected in feedback during QA and playtests. Battle Royale has been a hugely popular genre these past couple of years and Ubisoft has seemingly been trying to capitalize on its success, to no avail. One employee had said they had known of at least a dozen Battle Royale games in various stages of development at one time but didn’t know the fate of most of these games.”
However, it appears that the majority of these will not be released, and it has recently been reported that countless of their projects have been shut down. However, Henderson also says that the staff is optimistic about the future pipeline of games, so there seem to be projects to look forward to.
