Yesterday alongside news of The Last of Us II being delayed until late may of 2020, Ubisoft also announced that a couple of their titles would be delayed following a lukewarm release with Ghost Recon Breakpoint. This news came during a investor conference call Ubisoft Ceo Yves Guillemot confirmed that The Division 2 and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint sold under initial projections. Because of this Ubi has delayed some titles that will now release during their next fiscal year.
Yves disclosed that 5 Ubisoft titles will be released by late 2020-21. With the added development time Ubisoft looks to improving and releasing Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Watch_Dogs Legion with two yet to be announced titles for a stronger release year.
Here’s some excerpts from the call:
“However, we have not capitalized on the potential of our latest two AAA releases. For Ghost Recon Breakpoint, while the game’s quality appeared on track – based on E3, Gamescom, previews and our latest internal playtests –, critical reception and sales during the game’s first weeks were very disappointing. As we have done with past titles, we will continue to support the game and listen to the community in order to deliver the necessary improvements.
At this stage, we have identified three main reasons behind this under performance:
- First, it is harder to generate interest for a sequel to a Live multiplayer game, when prior iterations benefited from years of optimization. Consequently, we need to make sure there is more time between each iteration of Live games.
- Second, our strategy of introducing gameplay innovations in our games has had a very positive impact on our brands. However, to win over players, these innovations need to be perfectly implemented in order to offer an optimal experience. This has not yet been sufficiently the case with Ghost Recon Breakpoint. While the change of formula has been very well received by some players, with an average daily playtime per player of over three hours, it also has been strongly rejected by a significant portion of the community.
- Finally, Ghost Recon Breakpoint did not come in with enough differentiation factors, which prevented the game’s intrinsic qualities from standing out.
We are tackling these issues head-on and already are implementing significant changes to our production processes. We are confident in our capacity to adapt and evolve, as we have done successfully many times in the past.
In this overall context, we have decided to postpone the releases of Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine and Watch_Dogs Legion until 2020-21. While each of these games already has a strong identity and high potential, we want our teams to have more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented so as to deliver optimal experiences for players. This decision will have a very significant impact on our financial results for this fiscal year and goes against our recent successes in building a more stable development model. However, it is in line with our strategy to maximize the future value of our brands for the long-term benefit of our employees, players and shareholders. We expect it to have a positive impact on our financial performance as from 2020-21.”
So what do you think did you play The Division 2 or Breakpoint? Was it up to your standards or do you think they could have used a little extra development time? What about the delayed games are you more excited now that they have a couple more months to come together?
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