Ubisoft Delays 'Skull & Bones' And Cancels Several Projects After A Disappointing 2022
Image Source: Earlygame.com
The last three years have been tough for many game developers, with people being forced to work from home and companies struggling to find the human resources they need to produce quality games.
One company that has been hit especially hard is Ubisoft. In an emergency call with investors, Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot no admitted that the company is expecting a financial loss of roughly $ 537 Million. for the fiscal year ending in March 2023 and will have to apply drastic cost-cutting measures to save $ 215 Million in the next two years.
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Contributing to these disappointing figures are the lacklustre sales of the Nintendo Switch title Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023.
Image Source: Digitaltrends
Guillemot also revealed that the release date of Skull and Bones will be pushed back again a few months. The game, which development started ten years ago as a multiplayer expansion to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was officially announced in 2017 and should have hit shelves in late 2018. Since then, it has been pushed back five times. According to insiders, the development of Skull and Bones has not only been plagued by technical issues but mostly by constantly changing directions on the strategy and scope of the game.
Ubisoft now calls the game complete and being polished for the upcoming public beta after the internal Technical Tests. To meet the new deadline, Ubisoft has combined the forces of its Paris studio and Ubisoft Singapore, with the latter remaining the lead studio.
Image Source: Xboxachivements
Attributed as "too big to fail", Skull and Bones will be released eventually, but developers who have worked on the game remain sceptical if it will be able to bring in the revenue that Ubisoft needs so desperately.
But the pirate game is not the only title that didn't make its release date: Both Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Assassin’s Creed Mirage should have been out before the end of 2022 and are still awaiting their release.
To make things even worse, Guillemot also revealed that three unannounced games have been cancelled altogether, adding to the four titles that were scrapped last summer.
The CEO tries to spread calculated optimism, calling Ubisoft's pipeline the biggest in the company's history with Skull and Bones, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and at least one additional big game, which details will be released at E3 in June. He urged his employees "to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality, and show everyone what we are capable of achieving.”
But all this will be hard to do with the desperate need to cut costs, lay off personnel without backfills, and no renewals of expiring contracts of freelance developers.
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Source: Kotaku
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