Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has made some comments on the sales issues of Star Wars Outlaws. The big boss claims that Outlaws\u2019 middling performance last year was, in large part, because the whole Star Wars franchise was in \u201cchoppy waters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Star Wars Outlaws Lost Me With Its Story Trailer<\/p>\n
Guillemot was at a recent shareholders Q&A<\/a>, addressing complaints that last August\u2019s open-world action-adventure didn\u2019t hit the exceedingly high sales milestones that had been hoped for. The game\u2014in which you play as space criminal Kay Vess, rushing around the galaxy committing acts of malfeasance\u2014had \u201csofter than expected\u201d sales on release, which caused a huge drop in Ubisoft\u2019s share value to the lowest it had been in ten years.<\/p>\n The causes of this were, of course, multi-factorial. The enormous game was buggy, had crappy stealth and lackluster space-based sections, and these significant shortfalls immediately hurt word-of-mouth. It also released into the worst of 2024’s tiresome campaigning by the wannabe-Nazis of the alt-right<\/a>, with the game committing the twin crimes of featuring a central character who was both a woman and a person of color. Also, people were noticeably getting tired of Ubisoft\u2019s repetitive formula across all its games, and Outlaws took the brunt of this. It was a whole bunch of stuff, but the game\u2019s own failings were a significant part of it. What no one at all was saying was, \u201cIt\u2019s because Book of Boba Fett wasn\u2019t that great of a show.\u201d<\/p>\n During the shareholder meeting, someone in the audience stood up to ask an interminable barrage of questions, during which he asked of Outlaws, \u201cWhat have you learned from the failure in terms of sales? Have you learned anything in terms of pricing, in terms of marketing?\u201d<\/p>\n Guillemot replied, \u201cWe didn\u2019t reach our sales targets. The game suffered from a number of items.\u201d The first of these he listed was that \u201cthe brand that it belonged to was in a bit of choppy waters,\u201d stopping before explaining exactly what he meant by that. He then added that \u201cthe game still had a few items that needed to be polished,\u201d rapidly adding that they received polish in the early weeks of release, but saying that it \u201cdid affect sales volumes.\u201d Guillemot then described the upcoming Switch 2 port as \u201ca new version of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n