Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's big recent open world game, has had "softer" sales than expected, according to a Ubisoft investor call. As a result, the game will be coming to Steam much earlier than expected, and will drop in November.
News in brief
- Sales for Star Wars Outlaws have been disappointing
- The game will now come to Steam earlier, to try and bolster sales
- Low sales have also spurred Ubisoft to delay Assassin's Creed Shadows
Star Wars Outlaws may be a decent game by most accounts, but it certainly hasn't been a sales hit. While numbers haven't been released, it seems Ubisoft is disappointed by the number of titles it managed to shift, telling investors that sale numbers were "softer than expected". It also revealed that Star Wars Outlaws' rather disappointing performance is the reason behind a sudden and unexpected delay for the new Assassin's Creed game.
"While [Assassin's Creed Shadows] is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," Ubisoft's statement reads. If nothing else, it shows that Ubisoft is rattled. If a Star Wars title can't do numbers (and Star Wars titles have done very well for other publishers), then can even an Assassin's Creed title pull the ailing publisher back from the brink? While a new AC game is likely to do well, Ubisoft is clearly taking no chances, and wants as much polish as possible before the game is pushed out of the door.
Speaking of taking no chances, Ubisoft also seems to be stopping its practice of publishing on the Epic Games Store first, and then coming to Steam later. This will happen first with Star Wars Outlaws, which will come to Steam earlier than expected, on November 21, while Assassin's Creed Outlaws will arrive on Steam day one.
While Ubisoft can be applauded for trying to expand the market to reduce the dominance of a specific storefront, choosing to limit yourself and sales by excluding your games from the PC's largest marketplace doesn't seem like the best business practice. Hopefully Outlaws will do better when it arrives on Steam.
