Assassin's Creed Shadows delay is a real gamble for Ubisoft | Opinion

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I always felt like Star Wars Outlaws should have been a Christmas game.

The title was revealed during the E3-that-wasn't in 2023 and received a rapturous response. It skyrocketed to the top of media wish lists and stole the show that year. A big, mainstream open world blockbuster set in the Star Wars universe... As long as it's not rubbish, how could it go wrong?

And yet it did. So many column inches have been preoccupied with the total failure of Concord, and understandably so, yet Sony's game was always a high risk concept. A new IP from a new developer in a space that PlayStation has little experience playing in… it was always a gamble. Star Wars Outlaws was none of those things. It should have flown off the digital shelves.

It continues a run of poor fortune and form for Ubisoft, and with anxious shareholders and a large wage bill, you have to fear the worst when it comes to the prospect of job cuts.

The first indicator, to me at least, that Star Wars Outlaws might not deliver financially came during Summer Games Fest in June. A year on from its reveal, and there was almost a level of apathy to what was being shown. Social media stats and wish list data put the game behind not just the big reveals, but many of the smaller ones, too. Of course, Outlaws was never going to get the buzz of a new announcement, but with less than three months to launch, it felt to me like the gaming world looked at it and shrugged.

There are plenty of armchair analysts eager to explain what happened. It was the release window, the business model, the available platforms, the review scores, the inconsistency of recent Star Wars TV shows and movies… the fact the game's protagonist isn't a bloke. I'm not convinced by any of those arguments in isolation (certainly not the last one). Yet I can't help but wonder that if the game was released in late October or early November then it might have found some broader players. It is the big Star Wars 'thing' of the holiday window. An old-school AAA