Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, despite the appeal of the iconic Star Wars franchise, continues to face a difficult reception on Steam. During its second weekend, the game peaked at only 2,247 concurrent players, a 9.8% decline from its already modest launch peak of 2,492 players. This performance highlights ongoing challenges for the title, especially given its delayed arrival on Steam months after its console and Ubisoft Connect debut in late August 2024.
Prompting many to ask what went wrong with Star Wars Outlaws?
To put it bluntly, the underperformance of Star Wars Outlaws contrasts sharply with the strength of the Star Wars brand, which has been known for attracting broad and dedicated audiences. A disparity that raises questions about Ubisoft’s execution, including its controversies over corporate culture and previous consumer dissatisfaction. Publicity issues, combined with the perception of uneven quality in Ubisoft’s recent titles, further eroded trust among gamers.
To put this in context with how poorly Star Wars Outlaws is performing overall and on Steam, one can compare it to Skull and Bones, which was released earlier this year, and was touted as a “Quadruple-A title” by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. A claim that failed to match reality as game sales appear to be poor, though Ubisoft has never disclosed those figures. According to an anonymous source speaking to Insider Gaming, Skull and Bones free trial period saw only 850,000 players for a game that cost anywhere from $650-$850 million to develop. To add salt in the ever-widening wound, on Steam Skull and Bones managed to peak at a dismal 2,615 concurrent players.
For Star Wars Outlaws, it had similar issues as an unpolished game that was immediately apparent to gamers who watched the ingame footage released prior to the game’s launch. One thing that was immediately pointed out in the gameplay footage was the horrible NPC reactions to being attacked and the combat. Add to the fact that PC gamers could watch the game on Twitch or YoutTube which certainly hampered desires for Steam users to buy the game when it finally came to the platform.
Interestingly, there were no significant spikes in Steam refund requests during the game’s launch, like we saw with BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which suggests that initial buyers were primarily dedicated fans and that low sales volume limited refund opportunities. Considering that, before it was released on Steam, Star Wars Outlaws was only able to sell 1 million copies during its first month and, according to Ubisoft, “underperformed sales expectations,” its poor reception on Steam comes as no surprise.
This faltering Steam launch continues a worrying trend for Ubisoft, which has faced criticism for its handling of major franchises and company controversies that have further soured gamers towards it. From comments about game ownership and how “…it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game” to demanding full price for unpolished games such as Skull and Bones, and the controversy around Assassin’s Creed Shadows, 2024 has been the year that Ubisoft went all out to turn gamers against them and certainly played into Star Wars Outlaws’s reception.
In fact, Ubisoft games that were released in 2024 include Skull and Bones, xDefiant, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, and Star Wars Outlaws which have all either failed to meet expectations or were quietly launched or, in the case of xDefiant, recently announced to be shutting down by Ubisoft.
While the game has been out for around four months, one can also look at GameStop’s trade-in values for Star Wars Outlaws as another indication of its underwhelming reception on other platforms. The PlayStation 5 version is valued at $14.30, while the Xbox Series X version is priced at $12.10. Figures that are unusually low for a game so recently released. Factors such as limited sales and low player retention likely contributed to this as demand for pre-owned copies diminishes when a title fails to capture a substantial audience.
Suffice to say, Star Wars Outlaws is just another nail in the 2024 coffin for Ubisoft that continues to highlight the broader and mostly self-inflicted challenges for the publisher that also includes DEI and a woke agenda funded in part by the Canadian government. While the Star Wars brand has suffered in the hands of Disney, and could account for a small amount of lost sales, it is still a potentially lucrative one for video games even if the movie and series brand is faltering that Ubisoft dropped the trackball on.
For Ubisoft, it couldn’t produce a Star Wars game that was polished and appealing for a fanbase of one of the biggest IPs in entertainment and another big flop for the company.
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