The Star Wars Outlaws flop - Guillemot blames waning interest in the franchise

It‘s no brand thing. It‘s just a reaction on the way Ubisoft releases games these days and yes, the game could have been better but without the Star Wars-tag, it wouldn‘t have been noticed at all.

Agree. I played the shit out of this game and it was good. But it could have been so much better. All the ships and weapons and planets in the star wars universe and we get 1 ship and 1 weapon and 4 meh planets. So many missed opportunities that could have made this game great.
Remaster Kotor 1 or 2.
Watch it sell like crazy.
Never give ubi starwars licensing again.
- 💯! Alone KOTOR 1 and 2 in a remastered version would be something worth dying for - never stop dreaming! 🙏🏻

It's almost like if I'm constantly fed slop I avoid it

That's part of it for sure. It's grimdark. Read: boring.

Forever locked in a Jedi vs Sith binary. And it is the highest of heresy to dare imagine anything beyond it.

How is Star Wars even remotely grimdark? That's just a wild criticism.
And the game you're talking about literally has no Jedi or Sith at all, it's entirely about the regular people of the galaxy.
The worst bit is reflecting on how the first movie portrayed it all.
A horrific empire, but a secret mysterious force, not believed in by many, that can help you fight it. Classic warriors using heavy swords in an age of laser rifles.
I don't even really know what the message around the force was in The Last Jedi. I didn't even bother watching Force Awakens.
Only a Sith deals with absolutes!

Couldn’t care less about the games.

Couldn’t care less about the shows.

If a movie comes out, even a terrible one, I’ll be there.

Andor is the best thing the series has ever done, including every movie.
- And the animated Clone Wars series is a close second
- This last season came out swinging with their wardrobe budget. The first 2 episodes I think we just kept talking about how much we liked outfits

No it's because it was shite,poorly written and lousy with weird polical shit and terrble gameplay.

star wars is inherently a political franchise
- Difference between analogies to real or fictional politics.

Star wars should be in the public domain by now

All they have to do is get the same guys that did the trailers for KoTOR and they'd see very good things come out of it. They're just trying to milk it every way they can so that they can hold on to something now that they're losing all their OG IPs to public domain.

You mean SWTOR rather than KOTOR?

Wasn't it more that the game was a buggy mess? No that can't have been it it was clearly the fans fault.

these arrogant assholes.

just like movies and TV, the waning interest in the franchise is only because you keep making shitty games with it.

If you people start making GOOD star wars stuff again, we WILL eat it up.

Andor is an example of excellent Star Wars content that people want to see. They just produced crap.
- I actually strongly disagree.
  Andor was an example of actually telling a new story. Yes, people were eager to know who Cassian was. But If you had polled the entire Star Wars fanbase, like five of us would have said "Oh, I want a deeply political story with a massive focus on social justice that heavily focuses on a politician and a spymaster's daughter. Also, hold back zero punches about the kind of people who would spearhead a rebellion. Like, how crazy can Forrest go?". And we would have fully admitted we were on our bullshit.
  Which was basically the problem with Outlaws. Everyone has been asking for a Han Solo game since people realized a Star Wars Pacman could be a thing. And you need to go REAL hard to make that live up to people's expectations.
  Which, getting back to Andor: I would go so far as to say everything up until The Prison is REALLY rough. You have moments of brilliance (basically any time Skarsgard is on screen) but it spends too much time on a plot point it had already dropped and Cassian is kind of a mary sue. But we were enthralled because this was something NEW (well, less so if you have ever read a political thriller but... Star Wars!). And once it found its legs... it was painful beauty in all the best ways.
  And, to go back to "It is a Han Solo game" or "It is a Jedi knight but not a Jedi Knight" and so forth? It doesn't take much to realize "I have seen this story a million times" and wander off. Like, I know I basically did that once I heard there were insta-fail stealth sections (although I generally try to not give Ubi money to begin with). Same with Ginger McBoring Face Survivor. It had an interesting hook (I LOVED Dark Times and Dass Jennir) and the gameplay was fine but when it came time to come back for seconds it was just "Eh, I'm good".
  Nah. We need more Star Wars that people don't KNOW they want to see. Not just the tired crap that an exec would think was gold.
Personally I'm pretty tired of Star wars, every entertainment product doesn't need to belong to a Disney franchise
- Same, all the Star Wars slop Disney has churned out has completely washed any lingering magic out of the fabric of the franchise for me. I don't even feel the desire to watch supposedly good Star Wars products like Andor these days.
Unpopular Opinion: The Yuuzhan Vong Invasion would've been better than the Sequel Trilogy.
Seeing that business with Ithor on the big screen would've been great.
- Anything with a cohesive narrative would have been better than the sequel trilogy, including Dark Empire. Hell, Abrams did Dark Empire anyway, he just compressed it into a single film along with ESB and ROTJ because he's never had a single original idea about Star Wars.

Yeah, like beating a dead horse, it has no giddy-up and go. What the hell were they thinking when they decided to do Star Wars Outlaws?
This is perfect.

There is waning interest in Star Wars franchise. And Assassin's Creed franchise. And Far Cry Franchise. Hmmm, there seems to be a pattern here...

Meanwhile games like Marvel Rivals are doing great.
Conclusion: People are only interested in live-service games and we're not pumping out our slop fast enough!
Wasn't AC Shadows one of their best selling games? People still like Ubisoft games despite what people here want to believe. AC and FC fans play them precisely because they don't rock the boat too much, you get what you expect with these games. The problem is that Star Wars fans probably aren't looking for the same fix that Ubisoft's usual audience is looking for.
Are any of the Far Cry's remarkable? Not particularly but it's a good co-op game where I can mess around with a friend and shoot the shit with. And it consistently gives me a good experience if that's what I'm looking for.

I thought the game looked ok, but why would I pay $70 for a game that can disappear from my library whenever Ubisoft feels like it? They've demonstrated that they're willing to permanently take games away from paying customers, so I'm not willing to spend more than the cost of a rental on one of their games.

And that's the exact feeling I've had. So eloquently said. Thank you. 💯
If they sell me a product that i can't forever keep, then I've been renting the whole time.

Not waning interest in Ubisoft?

Because, ooh boy, did my interest in Ubisoft wane year after year of overproduced cookie cutter crap. And I'm not expecting a change of phase.

Also, Guillemot, you're talking publicly a lot for someone with (now convicted) sexual harrasser friends you've protected all of your career.

It just boggles my mind how execs can learn the wrong lesson 100% of the time. It seems impossible.

Regardless, they keep canning games like 1313 that get fans hyped and give us generic trash instead.

Oh, he 100% knows the truth. He just can't say it since admitting it's Ubisoft's fault would lower investor confidence (and therefore affect his personal wealth). This is the standard "blame our failures on market forces outside our control" move that all CEOs of publicly-traded are forced to do.
The stock market was a mistake.
- Maybe. It does kinda make sense.
  These assholes are the same idiots that think they can sell the company yet maintain creative control though.
  Hell yeah, comrade. Abolish the stock market.

Waning interest in Ubisoft. Everything they touch is painfully generic and uninteresting. On top of that, they infect the games with Denuvo malware while charging top dollar. But sure, blame the consumers for your lack of vision, passion, business sense, and technical acumen. See how that pays off, Yves.

It's really sad. I truly believe that Yves (or rather the Guillemots in general) were passionate about game development once. Now it feels mostly corporate, even though they still claim to be pro-gamer and innovative and fun. It's double sad because they acquired quite some good studios that have to be shaped into their corp structure and ultimately lose their innovation. It's not as bad as old-school EA, but it's still subjectively bad.

Could it be waning interest in the Ubislop formula?

No, it's the gamers who are wrong!

I don’t even hate the Ubisoft formula, but it’s, like, dawg…. Try something new. I go years without being interested in the schlog, then I get really into one. But it’s astounding that they’re still putting out the same game for over a decade now. The trimmings might be a little spruced and fluffed here and there but the core loop is still the same fucking game, again and again and again.
- Yeah, I played AC Odyssey and the DLC a while back, and I'm still burnt out on Assassin's Creed about 4 years later.
  It just seems designed to sap as much of your time as possible. Like an MMO but without any tangible benefit for them doing so.

A) And yet, not long after, Andor was massively successful.

B) Then stop making games exclusively based off of third party IPs.

The game looked quite generic to me. As someone who's not deep into Star Wars, the titular character looked more like 70s mom than space adventure. And the gameplay also looked like they just slapped yet another texture pack onto something I've seen a thousand times already.

So, I don't see why you'd buy this game in particular, unless you do a lot of gaming or a lot of Star Wars. I imagine, they missed out on most sales towards the more casual crowd.

It feels like they tried to make a PG/kids version of Red Dead Redemption with aliens, poorly written characters and a glitch-infested game engine as cheap as legally possible without being called slave labor.
titular character looked more like 70s mom than space adventure
So more like star wars inlaws than outlaws?

I love Star Wars and usually have a half decent time with Ubi games. You can usually pick them up for 50% off physical like a month after release.

I have never put down a game quicker than Outlaws. It’s Ubisoft open world map icon slop at its worst. The first 4 hours of story are boring and repetitive. Every mission was “sneak into an Imperial base, oh shit something went wrong! Now escape!” Progression and abilities might as well not be there.

Interest in SW isn’t waning. Companies keep making bad SW content.

Even if it was good, the formula you mentioned has been done to death. Every game they make is that. Then they say how can we possibly make an RDR2 level game, and I think to that and there was a game where honestly the gameplay was pretty repetitive - but you don't notice because the story is so good that of course you want to keep going.
But they make these bland corporate characters with boring stories and take absolutely zero risks because what if we offend one person in Ohio - and then it sells like crap. You try to make it for everyone, you made it for no one
I thought it did a good job at capturing the Star Wars feel, but yeah it feels like every open world game. Lots of fetch quests and running around in a massive world where every encounter/quest/battle feels the same as the last.
It may just be me, but most open world games suffer from trying to be too large. Although I think BOTW and TOTK are some of the weakest Zelda games, so maybe my opinions on open world games aren't popular.

This statement in the same week as Yves installs his son as Co-CEO in charge of their biggest franchises. A man who entered the industry as a CEO of a mobile company and then founded a AI/NFT/crypto game company that is being liquidated now.

Pure nepotism. The Guillemont family is the parasite that is killing Ubisoft.

If they would've stuck with the old 'gritty' Star Wars game that was supposed to be like GTA style adult oriented Star Wars instead of this stupid shit. It would have been massively successful.

There is a waning interest, but it wasn't the singular reason the game flopped. It's because it was a painfully mediocre game at an extremely inflated price.

Mass-produced corporate sludge like Outlaws is exactly why interest is waning. It sucks the soul out of the franchise and makes people lose interest.

Did Guillemot not hear about Andor? The costs of a Disney Plus subscription vs a $70 game aside, that show respected the viewer's time and intelligence in all the ways Outlaws didn't. But I'm not surprised the heads of Ubisoft lack basic retrospection. Regurgitating past successes is all they know how to do, and how could they be wrong? Must be the rest of the world. :/

Make boring shit, get no love from the community. It's as easy as that.

I think the turnoff for me was they wanted like $90 or something. No thanks.

Same here. It actually looks decent. But I'm in no hurry. I'll wait on it until the ultimate edition is $20 and it's been patched up.
I got it for free and I still didn't finish it. It had some interesting ideas but a lot of the gameplay elements were extremely shallow, the main character was annoying, the story was boring and I couldn't get it running on Linux and I wasn't going to boot into Windows just to play this game.
I probably would've been disappointed had I paid any money for it.
I believe it ws $70 USD at launch.
- You're right, base game. Then the gold edition was $110 and had the season pass in it. I think I felt like $70 when they were saying there was gonna be at least $40 more of content was something you should just wait for.
  That and I think it uses ubisofts launcher still was the no.

Idk, I liked Jedi: Survivor even though that one was EA.

I actually really liked this game.

This was another, though, that launched with a bunch of bugs on pc. And while I didn’t run into a ton on PS5, the game crashed for me here or there. And that sucks.

But I played and beat this game. And I quite enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece or anything.

What? I thought Ubisoft was saying sales were really strong and how Outlaws was such a big success?

I'm going to guess this is the exact same case with Assassins Creed. An AC game set in feudal Japan should have been a Grand Slam. Literally everyone wanted it. But leave it up to Ubisoft to find ways to make money from a printer drop right into the shredder.

It's more than just bugs and "blandness." Clearly people aren't buying what Ubisoft is making, and they keep changing stuff but none of the things they change are the reasons people aren't buying their games. It is crazy to me that executives continue to learn the wrong lesson from failed games 100% of the time. And then they ignore gamers when we straight up tell them what they should have changed. Crazy.

I agree about what's happening. They're producing boring games and not learning anything.
But I don't give a shit. Let them go down in flames. New indie devs an studios are popping up all the time with fresh, unique, and interesting games. I haven't bought a AAA game in over a decade and I'm not missing a damn thing.
- I partially disagree. I don't want Ubisoft to die. I want them to make good and fun games, like they used to 15 years ago. I want AAA to be like it once was. And I reward when AAA games are like that by buying them.
  Gamers want to give our money to developers and publishers. But we want good quality games that at the very least match (but ideally surpass) the quality of experiences we used to get in the past. Recently, Ubisoft has not been providing that, and thus Ubisoft sales have been plummeting. Now, is this a failure of executives? Developers? I say likely both.
  Give the developers autonomy for one game, where there is zero executive involvement in the development and see how it goes. If it does well, then just let them make another game with full autonomy. If it goes poorly, make employment cuts on the team or move them around because clearly they didn't do well even without executive direction. But also keep in mind if another huge competitor takes over, like releasing next to GTA6, pretty much every other games sales will suffer most likely (unless its $100 at launch lol).
  Its not a hard decision to make when it comes to business. Any person with a single braincell can see this. The problem is that giving a studio full autonomy is a financial risk. There is great potential for failure when executives feel like they have no control. Businesses are too risk averse now to make such simple decisions. They would rather maintain control of a sinking ship instead of giving crew members autonomy to try to right the ship. Its crazy to me.

Classic skill issue

It's been like 4-5 years since I've purchased a Ubisoft game. There's too many games out there to be spending money on a trash publishers games. Along with how slp on the wrist it seemed with their workplace sexual harassment/bullying/assault, always remember that they pioneered always online DRM for single player games. They've been a trash company publicly for almost 20 years. Culturally probably longer

I tried it in May/June and it was very meh. At the start I had an urge to play it, but after a day or two I had no urge to open it. A lot of it felt repetitive to a point of why bother.

I loved the acolyte and was sad to hear it was cancelled. Jason Mendoza, a badass sith? Sign me up!

Agree. Racist misogynists ruining the fun for everyone. As usual.
- Or, perhaps a lot of people just didn't think it was a very good show.
- Are we really still pushing this narrative in late 2025? Andor is a modern star wars show that has diverse characters and a queen relationship and had little to no backlash because of it. Just because you like an objectively bad show doesn't mean that everyone else that didn't like it are suddenly racist/ sexist/ misogynistic/ whatever other term you have for trying to justify why you like the show.
  You are allowed to like bad content, I don't think there's a single person out there that doesn't have at least one thing that they know is bad but still enjoy the only difference is that they're not angry at other people for not liking it too.
- I don't think Acolyte failed due to racist misogynists. I think it had to do with over saturation and a story that wasn't that interesting. There's around 50 Star Wars titles on Disney+ now (7 live-action shows), and its almost a burden to watch them now like how Marvel movies/shows are. And people loved Asoka enough that its getting a season 2 and it had a vocal minority complain its main characters were all women, too. But it was a well written show.
  Marvel is the best example of how Disney ruins things by over-saturating. There are over 50 Marvel movies and over 30 Marvel TV shows. Most are garbage and exist solely to advertise/push the next multi-billion dollar movie. They need to slow the hell down and just make decent content.
- I enjoy Andor, but the acolyte went in a direction that was just so juicy to me. I can't get enough of alternative approaches to the force!
  EDIT: Ok, I remembered the witch singing... It wasn't perfect. But still, I was hooked so hard.
omg yes! i'm SO pissed it's not being followed up on.
tighten up the reins if it's a money issue, but omg it was a great exploration of Force traditions in a cool new era!
uuuggghhhh

Just started watching Star Trek and so far watched Picard, Strange New Worlds and the one with the black chick as the main character and holy fuck is star trek a waaaay better story and franchise than star wars. Star wars fuckin sucks.

I’m struggling to get my head around someone who just got into Star Trek starting with Picard.
I mean, fine - if you enjoyed it that’s great! But it’s a show explicitly about exploring the later life of a franchise figurehead. If you didn’t watch any of the earlier series or movies first you’re missing 90%+ of the context for what’s happening, surely?
Wait until you get to the real Star Trek, the actual good ones. Next Generation, DS9, Voyager, etc. Whatever they're making now is literally garbage compared to what they used to make.
But to be fair, that is exactly the same case as Star Wars. Used to be pretty good, now Disney has run it into the floor.
- Hahahaha theyre all fuckin trash. I tried watching the old shit and its all straight up garbage.

So make new things you dingus.