During a recent shareholder meeting, Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, was asked several questions about the development and eventual release of Star Wars Outlaws. It’s no big secret that the game didn’t perform as well as expected, and in September, Insider Gaming exclusively revealed that the title had sold just one million copies in a month on the market.
Talking about the issues that plagued Outlaws, Guillemot made a suggestion about the Star Wars brand that hasn’t sat well with some fans.
‘We Didn’t Reach Our Sales Targets’
At the recent shareholder meeting, Yves Guillemot fielded questions about Star Wars Outlaws and how it hadn’t turned around the results expected of it. The sales targets weren’t made clear, but whatever they were, Ubisoft fell far short of hitting them.
To explain the downfall of Star Wars Outlaws, Guillemot first criticized the brand before talking about the game’s technical performance:
For Star Wars Outlaws, we didn’t reach our sales targets. The game suffered from a number of items. First, it suffered from the fact that it was released at a time when the brand, the brand that it belonged to was in a bit of choppy waters. And the game had a few items that still needed to be polished, and they were polished and debugged in the early weeks, but it did affect sales volumes.
We did heavily improve the game by troubleshooting and debugging, and when it will be released on upcoming consoles, such as the Switch 2, it will be the new version of the game.
Star Wars Outlaws was released in August 2024 and failed to gain much traction, even with the assumption that it would sell ‘just because it’s Star Wars’.
It’s tough to say that the brand is in choppy waters, as one of the biggest talking points this year is that Star Wars Battlefront II has skyrocketed in popularity several years after being released, and most of that comes from a renewed interest in the series because of the continued expansion of the multimedia universe.
Why do you think Star Wars Outlaws failed? Let me know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming forum.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Ubisoft thinks monetization makes games more fun
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
The brand is dead they wasted money on the license.
To be fair, Yves Guillemot has a valid point. Ten years ago I would have been part of the key target audience for this game, however the releases of both The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker left me – and many in my group of friends – feeling that Star Wars just isn’t for me anymore. Yves is correctly under no illusion that for core fans of the original trilogy, the Star Wars property has taken a MASSIVE hit in popularity.
Some people were expecting a GTA type game in the Star Wars Universe and it’s nowhere near that. Repetetive side missions, the most frustrating lock picking mechanic in all of gaming, typical ubisoft platforming, and you can’t even pull your gun unless you’re in a hostile area for those who like to blast NPCs. It’s not terrible but not very engaging at all. The very last mission has a sequence that has caused many to rage quit the game and never come back to it. Hard-core star wars people who are casual gamers (I’m a fan) will think it’s the best thing since sliced bread but most gamers will probably wonder why they bothered.
The problem is that it just reeks of being just another generic semi-open world Ubisoft game. The story is painfully bland and takes a long time to go almost nowhere. The faction system is overhyped while ultimately amounting to an under baked system that does very little. Combat is flat and the AI is weak. It’s a lot of half baked pieces that just don’t form an engaging, cohesive game.
Nah the problem was that Ubisoft made it. Yves Guillemot and his parasite family should’ve been pushed out of that company years ago.