Ubisoft recently held its annual shareholder’s meeting, an event at which CEO Yves Guillemot has to take questions about the publisher’s successes and failures. One of the latter is perhaps surprising, because Star Wars Outlaws is a pretty decent Star Wars game, and has benefitted from considerable post-launch support—it just didn’t do the numbers.
One shareholder asked Guillemot straight-up whether this was a failure of marketing. The question (being live translated from French during the meeting) was phrased thusly: “What have you learned from the failure [of Outlaws] in terms of sales? Have you learnt anything new in terms of pricing, in terms of marketing?”
“We didn’t reach our sales targets,” says Guillemot, before getting onto the real reasons. “The game suffered from a number of items. First, it suffered from the fact that it was released at a time when the brand that it belonged to was in a bit of choppy waters.”
Yowch. Star Wars fatigue feels like it’s been a thing ever since Disney acquired the brand and began blasting out forgettable shows (yes, and some good ones) at a rate of knots. Guillemot specifically invokes last year’s cancellation of the Acolyte here, which had disappointing viewing numbers.
Does he have a point? Outlaws launched in August 2024, a year that also saw new series of shows like the Acolyte, Skeleton Crew, Tales of the Empire, and The Bad Batch. My point is not that any of these shows are good or bad: I’m just saying, four new shows in a year is a lot for one brand to carry.
Guillemot does admit, however, that Outlaws wasn’t perfect either. “The game had a few items that still needed to be polished [at launch],” said Guillemot. “They were polished and debugged in the early weeks after release, but it did affect sales volumes.
“We did heavily improve the game by troubleshooting and debugging. When it will be released on upcoming consoles such as the Switch 2 it will have a new version of the game. Improvements on the game are not finished.”
And in answer to the original question, Ubisoft clearly did learn the lesson: Assassin’s Creed Shadows was delayed for exactly this reason. You’d think it would have worked out after 40-odd years that releasing games in an unpolished state is not a great idea, but better late than never Yves!
The other element here is that the sales expectations for Outlaws were high, perhaps unrealistically so, and there’s the small matter of it not being the only Star Wars offering out there. Thanks to Disney ending the exclusivity deals over licenses, Outlaws also has direct competition like Respawn’s excellent Jedi Survivor series: the games may not have released alongside one another, but surely even the most die-hard Force user can’t continually keep buying and playing 60-hour Star Wars games.
It’s hard these days to maintain much enthusiasm for the galaxy far, far away: Disney’s approach of flooding the market with Star Wars content has clearly found considerable commercial success, but it’s been a long time since Star Wars felt exciting. It’s actually a little sad in this case, because Outlaws was a love letter, and the most Star Wars-y Star Wars game in a very long time. I’m not saying it’s a lost classic, but it is a pleasant surprise: and, given all the above, your chances of picking it up cheap in one of the year’s various sales are high.