Ubisoft stock price recently hit 8-year lows and, according to recent news, there’s a good reason for that. In recent months, the company has canceled a number of games, many of which have not been announced, while major upcoming titles, such as Skull & BonesOnce again, they were hit by delaysand even the major titles that came out underperformed commercial expectations.
Now, a new report from Insider Gaming shed some light on the inner workings of the company and what led to the recent string of delays and cancellations. The report cites several current and former Ubisoft employees as sources and states that many of the unannounced titles that have been canceled by Ubisoft they were shelved because “they weren’t what the players wanted.”
An employee said that at one point Ubisoft had “at least a dozen battle royale games” in development, but it’s not known how many of those are still in development and how many have been cancelled.
Chasing trends and trying to capitalize on commercially viable genres has become a driving force for Ubisoft’s strategy in recent years, but the French house has failed to see success. The free-to-play battle royale shooter Hyper Scape launched in 2020 and did not meet society’s expectations, before being closed last year. In 2021, the company also unveiled Ghost Recon Frontline, another free-to-play battle royale shooter, which however received extremely negative reception at the time of the announcement and was canceled shortly thereafter.
Currently the company has confirmed the development of other competitive multiplayer games, including XDefiant, The Division Heartland, Project Q and Project U. While the first two have been confirmed as free-to-play titles, Ubisoft has not yet confirmed if the same will also apply to the last two.
As far as delays are concerned, the report seems to suggest that action is being taken to move in a positive direction. The main reason games get delayed is supposedly to give them more time for development and to make sure that they are launched as more curated products.
That said, it appears that the company has many games in the pipeline that are several years away from launch at this point, while other delays are likely to occur. As for the immediate future, Ubisoft has a number of major releases planned for next year and expects Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
