Is the Star Wars franchise in crisis? | Opinion
As hints about the sales numbers for Star Wars Outlaws have trickled out through various different data tracking agencies, the depth of the crisis that has engulfed Ubisoft is slowly becoming clear.
It's not the only factor that has sent the publisher into a tailspin, but the game's underperformance appears to be pretty serious, with the – admittedly very incomplete – numbers tracking quite a long way behind both other Star Wars titles in recent years, and other Ubisoft open world titles. The decision to pull back Assassin's Creed Shadows has no doubt been multifaceted, but at its core seems to be a sudden loss of confidence in the company's open-world formula and even in its own capacity to identify quality and potential in its games.
Those are valid concerns, especially if there is any truth to the report that internal assessments of Star Wars Outlaws had hyperbolically claimed it to be the company's answer to Red Dead Redemption 2 – an evaluation so self-serving as to have entirely lost touch with reality.
However, as unusual as it may be to point this out in the midst of what's clearly a crisis moment for Ubisoft: I'm not convinced that the underperformance of Outlaws is actually their fault.
That there are issues with the company's game pipeline is not in dispute; but it seems equally possible that Ubisoft has found itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, standing at Ground Zero as years of mismanagement of the Star Wars IP finally implodes.
It's certainly true that Star Wars Outlaws isn't all that it could have been, given the property and the premise, and the word-of-mouth around it post-launch has been a bit lukewarm as a result. It's equally true that only a few years ago, a game like this would absolutely have sold like gangbusters even in the face of such a lukewarm reception.
Ironically, perhaps, Disney seems to have fallen into the trap of running the entire Star Wars franchise much like Ubisoft designs its open-world games
A Star Wars game on this scale
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