LogInA reason, maybe, but the reason..?
Besides drawing attention for his non-answer on Assassin's Creed Shadows' sales and revenue, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot also made headlines over the weekend for another public relations gem – blaming the failure of Massive Entertainment's Star Wars Outlaws on the declining relevance of the Star Wars franchise as a whole.
Ubisoft
Responding to a question from one of the shareholders, Guillemot pointed to the brand being "in a bit of choppy waters" at the time of Outlaws' release as the first reason why the game "didn't reach our sales targets." Predictably, he didn't mention what those sales targets actually were, though it's worth noting that previous reports stated Outlaws only sold 1 million copies in its first month – a number Guillemot had described as "softer than expected."
To his credit, he also acknowledged – in the most corporate way possible, of course – that the game had "a few items that still needed to be polished" at release, and even though, according to Yves, "they were polished and debugged in the early weeks," they still impacted sales.
As you may've guessed, the fact that the game continues to be criticized to this day for its horrible optimization, mandatory Ubisoft Connect linking, presence of Denuvo, boring game world, underwhelming story, game design, and character design, and an overall lack of anything truly "outlaw" in a game titled Star Wars Outlaws has not been addressed.
Because of that, the community was largely unconvinced by Yves' explanation, with the general consensus being that while Guillemot wasn't entirely wrong in his assessment – after all, it's no secret that Disney's Star Wars has been on a downward spiral ever since they purchased the franchise in the mid-2010s, doesn't have the same level of cultural relevancy it once had, and is failing to attract even the attention of dedicated fans, with The Acolyte getting canceled last year due to low viewership (imagine telling a Star Wars fan in, say, 2005 that a Star Wars show would flop) – it was still a reason for Outlaws' failure, but not the reason.
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