General Gaming Ubisoft Acknowledges Disappointing Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Delays Rainbow Six: Quarantine, Watch_Dogs Legion and Gods & Monsters

[AbsolutSurgen]

Ubisoft Acknowledges Disappointing Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Delays Rainbow Six: Quarantine, Watch_Dogs Legion and Gods & Monsters

Quote

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 longterm 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.

I was looking forward to Watch_Dogs Legion -- besides their comments, the launch window was looking pretty crowded (Cyberpunk, Doom, TLou2, etc.)

 

[skillzdadirecta]

Watch Dog Legion getting pushed to next gen consoles possibly? The new consoles will definitely be out by 2021.

[AbsolutSurgen]

4 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Watch Dog Legion getting pushed to next gen consoles possibly? The new consoles will definitely be out by 2021.

Fiscal 2020-21 starts in April of 2020 -- in their call they said all games will be released in 2Q or 3Q (between July and December).  It could end up being a cross-gen game, but I suspect they will want Assassin's Creed to be their holiday 2020 game -- so maybe a release closer to July?

[Dexterryu]

He seems to fail to realize that while all of those franchises are good games, that they are all basically the same game of open world, climb tower, clear camp, find zone boss, repeat, repeat, repeat games. Sure, they all have good graphics and solid gameplay mechanics but when you're doing the same damn thing over and over to pad out your game length that people burn out on them.

[XxEvil AshxX]

What's ironic is that he literally just stated a week or two ago that they weren't goibg to do anymore "small scale" games, and that pretty much every game they made was going to be like Ass Creed Odyssey and Breakpoint.

 

It seems Yves is learning what crow tastes like.

[Dodger]

So basically they are saying their rip off microtransactions weren't done right, and the other games are being delayed not to make the games better, but to make their monitization models for the game more likely to succeed. Ubisoft can get fucked. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Vivendi should have won.

[chakoo]

30 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

Vivendi should have won.

For gameloft they were the best thing to happen to them, for Ubi it would have been a disaster. 

[projectmayhem]

On 10/25/2019 at 11:22 PM, Dexterryu said:

He seems to fail to realize that while all of those franchises are good games, that they are all basically the same game of open world, climb tower, clear camp, find zone boss, repeat, repeat, repeat games. Sure, they all have good graphics and solid gameplay mechanics but when you're doing the same damn thing over and over to pad out your game length that people burn out on them.

 

Pricisely, they couldn't even make a fucking racing game without making it open world and filling it with radio towers to capture. 

[5timechamp]

im loving the game..

the crafting, loot system is put in such a “broken” way that i can completely ignore it.. the micro transactions arent pay to win though they are dick-ish (sets of cosmetics broken into half is free half is transaction)..

additionally Wildlands had a fuck ton of weapons and other cosmetics right out the box.. breakpoint not even half as much.

 

im loving the game itself, hopefully it gets the refinement that the division series gets

[AbsolutSurgen]

On 10/25/2019 at 12:21 AM, skillzdadirecta said:

Watch Dog Legion getting pushed to next gen consoles possibly? The new consoles will definitely be out by 2021.

Yesterday, Yves Guillemot Ubi confirmed that Watch_Dogs Legion would be a cross-gen game (but did not announced a release date).

[Brian]

Interesting note from the Ubisoft conference call today:

Ubisoft plans to release all 5 of its AAA games in FY2021 (Apr 2020 - Mar 2021) on current and next gen.

This means Watch Dogs: Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Gods & Monsters and two unannounced games will be cross gen. pic.twitter.com/Bo9kbjmkRo

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) October 30, 2019

[Brian]

 

[XxEvil AshxX]

This all seems very... artificial. Just a month or two ago Ubisoft was all-in on the big, open world, "live service" model. Now two of their games have flopped (or "flopped" in the case of Division 2) and they're scrambling to right the ship under the guise of "hey all our stuff needs to be unique."

 

I see their next few games being conservative until they can win back the good will and then they'll start doing the same shit all over again.

 

HOWEVER.. I'm actually hoping that Ubi realizing that not every game can sustain that kind of model will give them the kick in the ass they needed to go back to "smaller," more focused projects like Splinter Cell, Rayman, Prince of Persia, Blazing Angels, and maybe even some deliberately designed tactical games like.. oh.. i dunno... Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six. 

 

I really miss the old Ubisoft.

[chakoo]

5 hours ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

This all seems very... artificial. Just a month or two ago Ubisoft was all-in on the big, open world, "live service" model. Now two of their games have flopped (or "flopped" in the case of Division 2) and they're scrambling to right the ship under the guise of "hey all our stuff needs to be unique."

As a former Ubi Mtl dev, this isn't new and they pull this shit all the time internally. They will act like things are solid, then at the drop of a hat get frantic when things are not as expected. I was working on a psp project that was going well that just straight up was canceled due to a Wii title (which was dog shit all throughout development) bombed and they were worried about the repercussions on the brand. So all auxiliary projects were dropped to let the series reboot.

[AbsolutSurgen]

5 minutes ago, chakoo said:

As a former Ubi Mtl dev, this isn't new and they pull this shit all the time internally. They will act like things are solid, then at the drop of a hat get frantic when things are not as expected. I was working on a psp project that was going well that just straight up was canceled due to a Wii title (which was dog shit all throughout development) bombed and they were worried about the repercussions on the brand. So all auxiliary projects were dropped to let the series reboot.

Shaun White Snowboarding?

[XxEvil AshxX]

12 hours ago, chakoo said:

As a former Ubi Mtl dev, this isn't new and they pull this shit all the time internally. They will act like things are solid, then at the drop of a hat get frantic when things are not as expected. I was working on a psp project that was going well that just straight up was canceled due to a Wii title (which was dog shit all throughout development) bombed and they were worried about the repercussions on the brand. So all auxiliary projects were dropped to let the series reboot.

 

That sucks, but I'm not surprised. I wish they had more faith in their other franchises.

[chakoo]

16 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Shaun White Snowboarding?

What no, the Wii version did gang busters and we got to build a PSP game in parallel (Ps2 version came as a last min decision due to lowered PSP sales of other titles from Ubi QC). Sadly no PSP version for the sequel because Ubi was pretty much giving up on PSP projects (I had a 2nd title killed due to a delay in the console version).

 

4 hours ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

That sucks, but I'm not surprised. I wish they had more faith in their other franchises.

My main gripe with Ubi internally really is just the marketing team has a lot of control and seems to make rash decisions because they weren't paying attention through development. Other then that the rest of the company was ACE.