With a license as strong and popular as Star Wars, Ubisoft should have performed well with the release of its Star Wars Outlaws, and at the same time allowed the French company to regain its colors, it which has had to face financial problems for several years. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned and it is quite the opposite that happened. Indeed, despite a rather correct reception from the press (76% average on Metacritic), the game was much less well received by players who gave it a very average score of 5.4/10. For some, this is the tax that Ubisoft has been subjected to for several years, the target of players angry at a publisher who has industrialized its catalog. While Yves Guillemot says he is confident about the successful launch and longevity of his game, a Reuters report indicates that sales of Star Wars Outlaws are now considered “slow”, citing Morgan analyst Daniel Kerven of the JP Morgan agency, who said that the game “has struggled to meet sales expectations despite positive critical reviews”. Still according to Kerven, sales forecasts for Star Wars Outlaws until the end of March 2025 have been revised downward and have therefore gone from 7.5 million units to 5.5 million sales.
If 5.5 million sales is a significant figure, for Morgan Daniel Kerven it would be a failure for a game like Star Wars Outlaws, considering the investments but also the firepower of a license like Star Wars. The analyst recalls that titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 sold 25 million copies in October 2023, while more recently, Helldivers 2 exceeded 12 million copies sold in just three months, while Black Myth Wukong exploded the box office with 10 million copies sold in 3 days and reaching 18 million in 15 days of operation.
Faced with this setback, Ubisoft’s stock price plummeted to its lowest level since 2015. It should be noted, however, that the stock has been falling for several years, going from $94 in 2021 to just $16 today. Some analysts believe that this decline is partly due to years of difficulties, including the cancellation of many games in development (the Prince of Persia remake, Michel Ancel’s Wild, Project Q and Immortals Fenyx Rising 2), difficulties in completing large-scale projects (Skull & Bones, Beyond Good & Evil 2) and lukewarm reactions to the games it manages to release. Charles-Louis Planade, an analyst at Midcap Partners, goes further and takes as an example XDefiant, another Ubisoft game, calibrated to be a service game and which has not managed to find its audience. After a solid launch fueled by positive word-of-mouth, Charles-Louis Planade explains that the hype did not hold and that players quickly lost interest in the product. We also learn that the number of viewers of XDefiant on Twitch has also dropped dramatically, since according to TwitchTracker, they have gone from a peak of more than 203,000 viewers in May to only 1,440 currently. It should be noted that XDefiant is not an isolated case since the recent Concord also suffered from a general lack of interest from players, forcing Sony to pull the plug on the game just fifteen days after its release.
