Ubisoft Stock Drops After Star Wars Outlaws Release, Investors are Angry
In the wake of Star Wars Outlaws’ release, developer Ubisoft is going down the tubes. Yesterday, Ubisoft’s stock price dropped 7% in one day to €13.67, which is about $15.09. Today, it’s down even further, €13.24, or $14.62. This is almost certainly due to the lackluster performance of Star Wars Outlaws, a major release for the company that received what Ubisoft called their “biggest marketing campaign ever.” This marketing campaign included flying YouTube reviewers to California, giving them lightsabers and other toys, sending them to Disneyland, and even sending them whale watching, which seems strange, but then, I’m not a marketing whiz for a video game company. But all their pampering couldn’t buy them good press, and while some of the reviews couched their criticisms as much as they could, it was clear Star Wars Outlaws was a buggy, poorly designed mess with lousy graphics and laughably bad AI.
Star Wars Outlaws needs a few patches to deal with the bugginess.
Kinda hard to do stealth when stuff like this happens. pic.twitter.com/62n00T4Wx4
— KAMI (@Okami13_) August 26, 2024
Predictably, many didn’t bother with the game, or so it appears. There are no reports from Ubisoft yet – which is indicative of a poor reception in itself; they’d be shouting from the rooftops if Star Wars Outlaws was a barn burner – but other sources indicate a soft release. According to TrueTrophies, which polls the games PlayStation 5 users are playing using a “representative sample of 3.1 million active PSN accounts,” Star Wars Outlaws was #25 in its debut week, well under games like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Moder Warfare II, Elden Ring, Rocket League, and, of course, Black Myth: Wukong, the game journalists love to hate and hate that gamers love. Black Myth: Wukong, which was in its third week of release at that point, was at #4, over twenty spots above the just-released Star Wars Outlaws. This week, Star Wars Outlaws dropped three places to #28! Meanwhile, new release Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions debuted at #10 while Black Myth: Wukong remained at #4. Ouch. Meanwhile, Chris Dring of Games Industry reported that UK sales of Star Wars Outlaws were 55% below those of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
We don’t have digital data yet. And this is just the UK. But… it was a weak launch for Star Wars Outlaws at UK retail. Launch sales are 55% lower than what Star Wars Jedi: Survivor did. It was 15% bigger than Ubisoft Massive’s last game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (GfK data)
— Christopher Dring (@Chris_Dring) September 3, 2024
Perhaps more interesting than the nosedive Ubisoft’s stock took are the reactions of its investors. According to an article from That Park Place (which led me to a lot of the above information), AJ Investments – a real estate investment firm based in Nashville and a “significant minority shareholder” in Ubisoft – sent the Ubisoft board of directors an open letter expressing their “deep dissatisfaction with the current performance and strategic direction of the company” and suggesting Ubisoft either go private, replace CEO Yves Guillemot and the management team, or sell the controlling stake the Guillemot family currently has to other investors, with a proxy fight threatened. AJ Investments seems to be particularly angry with the Guillemots, accusing them and Chinese company and Ubisoft shareholder Tencent of doing all this on purpose to devalue Ubisoft’s stock so they can buy up more of it on the cheap, taking an even larger interest in the company.
Other than the alleged stock devaluation funny business, AJ Investments’ beefs include the “lowered revenue outlook for the Q2 2024” and Ubisoft postponing the releases of “Rainbow Six Siege and The Division into the 2025 lineup.” (I looked this up, and I think they’re referring to two mobile games, Rainbow Six Mobile and The Division Resurgence.) They also point out that Ubisoft’s share prices have “ decreased by more than 40% over the last year.” I don’t blame them for being angry; Ubisoft has made some dumb moves lately. Star Wars Outlaws looks like a leftover PlayStation 2 game that was too buggy to be released fifteen years ago, and their next big game, Assassins Creed Shadows, has had non-stop bad publicity since its first trailer, the results of severe incompetence. And Yves Guillemot didn’t help matters by insulting gamers for being critical of Ubisoft’s games. I can see why they think this is deliberate, but it’s the same thing all these woke companies do.
It’ll be fascinating to see how this potential proxy war plays out and what it means for the rest of the video game industry. There seems to be major pushback on woke entertainment coming from investors due to how much money it costs them. It hasn’t done much in the movie industry yet, but video game investors are coming to play.
Let us know what you think will happen in the potential Ubisoft proxy war in the comments!
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Comments (3)
Shocking. They release an unfinished game where the price of entry is $130 to get all of the goodies and no one buys it. On top of that, the “Day 1” patch erased any of the early progression that people on the PS5 made. Ridiculous!
I thought it was an interesting concept, so I might pick it up on a 50-75% off Black Friday sale. Maybe by then they will get all of the bugs worked out.
Until then, I guess I’ll keep playing Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor.
I watched a clip from Real BBC earlier where Mauler points out some more of the game’s bugs. They really should be ashamed of themselves for putting this on the market as is.
Sometimes, I think this is just the new tactic of centralization. Get businesses to comply with guidelines that destroy the company and then, buy it all up on the cheap, so that central banking can own it all. It’s like this charade of freedom. It ruins things. Ubisoft was once great, but it was Assassin’s Creed: Shadows that destroyed the company, and I do not think they will recover.