Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Delayed Until At Least April 2023

Ubisoft announced that the release of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the upcoming game based on James Cameron's Avatar film series, will be delayed.

Initially, the action-adventure game was set to be released before the end of 2022 – apparently, to coincide with the release of the second part of the film series, Avatar: The Way of Water. And now, according to Ubisoft, it will be released between April 2023 and March 2024.

The news that the game will be postponed was reported in the recent Ubisoft sales report. The publisher shared that the reason for that is the fact that it intends to deliver "a cutting-edge immersive experience that takes full advantage of next-gen technology." 

"We want to make [Avatar] a video game industry brand," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said during Thursday’s earnings call. "It is important for us that we come with something that is perfect."

In addition, the company noted that it wants to create "the most efficient working conditions" for its employees and overcome the difficulties in the production process that the gaming industry has encountered.

Ubisoft also mentioned the delay of another title which the publisher refers to as a "smaller unannounced premium game." The title was originally scheduled to release in 2022-2023, although now it will be postponed until 2023-2024.

The report also disclosed some financial results the company reached in the first quarter of 2022-23. According to it, Ubisoft's net bookings amounted to €293.3 million, which reflects a 10% decrease compared to the first quarter of the previous year. However, the figure was still slightly higher than the company expected. A little less than 90% of all net bookings accounted for digital sales, and more than half of this amount (52.3%) was delivered by microtransactions and DLC purchases.

Ubisoft expects its net bookings for the entire fiscal year 2022-23 to grow and targets to reach a non-IFRS operating income of approximately €400 million.