In a nutshell: Ubisoft, once considered the most hated gaming brand in the world, is now going through hard times. In addition to lowering financial forecasts for the last quarter and acknowledging that recent releases didn’t work as well as expected, the company canceled three more games, adding them to the four it canceled over the summer. He also postponed “Skull and Bones” for the sixth time.
Back in July, Ubisoft announced the cancellation of four games in development, including Splinter Cell VR and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Frontline. Three more unannounced titles join the pile of discarded ones, bringing the total number of cancelled games to seven expensive ones in one fiscal year.
Explaining the reasons for the move, Ubisoft pointed out that Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023 are not working as expected. The company also stated that it “faces serious challenges as the industry continues to shift to mega-brands and long-lasting games that [so in the original] can reach players around the world, on different platforms and business models.”
There is bad news for those who hope to play the finished version of Skull and Bones on March 9th. The pirate simulator is being postponed for an incredible sixth time before the start of Ubisoft’s fiscal year 2023-24, which begins in April.
“Players will be able to discover the beauty of Skull and Bones in the upcoming beta testing phase. The extra time has already paid off and brought impressive quality improvements, which has been confirmed by recent gaming tests,” Ubisoft said in its financial report. “We believe that the players will be pleasantly surprised by his development. We decided to postpone its release in order to have more time to demonstrate a much more perfect and balanced experience and raise awareness.”
These ready-made games cost the company a lot of money. It devalued approximately 500 million euros ($538 million) in capitalized research and development costs related to “upcoming premium and free games, as well as recently canceled games.”
Ubisoft also lowered its financial forecasts for the October-December quarter from about 830 million euros ($891 million) to about 725 million euros ($779 million). He expects net orders to fall by 10% for the year, although it was previously forecast that these revenues would grow by 10%. The company expects to reduce costs by another 200 million euros ($215 million) over the next two years through “targeted restructuring, the sale of some non-core assets and the usual natural disposal.” Unsurprisingly, Ubisoft’s stock price is in free fall (higher).
2022 was far from the best year for Ubisoft. There was the NFT fiasco when the company’s arrogance about the experiment with non-interchangeable tokens with Ghost Recon Breakpoint was thrown in its face when it was folded just four months after launch. There was also talk of ransom or no ransom, disabling features in online games, allegations of sexual assault and misconduct at some Ubisoft studios, and let’s not forget that Far Cry 6 GOTY Edition was charged $120, even though the game did not win the GOTY award. For an organization recognized as the most hated gaming brand in 2021, there was certainly a lot of schadenfreude among consumers.
