To say the last few weeks have been a tough one for Ubisoft would be an understatement with issues plaguing ‘Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’ suffering a very similar negative reaction both critically and from fans. I myself am just putting the final finishing touches to my review and yeah….the ball has definitely been dropped. Sadly the poor reaction has had a knock on effect with Ubisoft confirming that all their currently announced 2020 titles starting with ‘Watch Dogs: Legion’ have all been delayed with the next ‘Watch Dogs’ falling from an originally slated February release to now at some point in July.
All this was revealed during a company financial call and reported on by Marketscreener website, Yves Guillemot, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said:
“Over the past few years, we have delivered many high-quality titles, built a portfolio of diversified franchises and successfully conducted the digital transformation of our business. We have significantly grown our operations for PC, and in Asia and esports, and have further developed our Uplay platform. And we can now draw on a very robust back-catalog, which ended up again above our expectations in the second quarter, including the particularly outstanding momentum of Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
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 underperformance:
- 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.
Going forward, we are ideally positioned to benefit from the industry’s strong expansion and constant evolution. We are investing to develop our franchises and PRI, to fully tap the potential of the mobile market, to accelerate our growth in Asia and esports, and to reap the benefits of our brands ownership in the context of the rise of streaming and the multiplication of platforms. These opportunities are powerful drivers for our future topline and profitability growth.”
That is a lot to take in but basically both ‘The Division 2’ and ‘Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’ failed to live up to expectations especially with the shambolic condition Breakpoint was released in, something I will go into more with my review. However this is a sensible move by Ubisoft and is pretty much what happened following the poor reception that ‘Assassin’s Creed: Unity’ had when it releases with major issues on PC and console and something that lead to the breaking of the yearly release pattern for the series.
Taking more time to allow the teams to work on their games to avoid another Breakpoint mess is sensible and it is very clear that Ubisoft need to pause and take stock. We do know that Ubisoft can repair their titles such as bringing ‘Rainbow Six: Siege’ back from the brink and the original Division game did benefit from continued support right up to the release of the sequel, so Breakpoint can also be saved, but the damage of its failure is going to be felt for a long time and fans have long memories.
Ubisoft fans will most likely now have to wait until 2020 to find out what the revised release dates will be.