Ubisoft once had 12 battle royale games in development, according to an employee

The financial crisis of Ubisoft It also looks a lot like an existential crisis, because the company hasn’t been successful with its games for a long time, neither in criticism nor in sales, beyond the always profitable franchise of Assassin’s Creed.

The worrisome financial results presented last week have caused a collapse in the stock market, at its lowest for 7 years, and the cancellation of three games that had not even been announced (in the summer of 2022 they discreetly canceled another four games).

Many wonder what is happening at Ubisoft, one of the largest companies in the sector, with 20,000 employees spread all over the world, and who are increasingly most dissatisfied with his directive (They have called a work stoppage at Ubisoft Paris).

What Ubisoft made “were not the games that gamers wanted”

Several anonymous employees have spoken to Insider Gaming to offer their inside perspectives. The general consensus is that games are taking longer and longer to make: they eat up years of work from their employees… (an employee says he has been working since 2019 in a game as a service that is not expected to come out until 2025 or 2026)… and then not be what they expected.

One of the reasons there have been so many delays and cancellations is that “many of these games were not what the players wanted“, according to Tom Henderson’s interpretation on Insider Gaming of what employees have told him.

According to an employee, at one point he came to know of at least a dozen battle royale games in various stages of development at the same timebut the fate of most of these titles is unknown.

This discontent with the games has been seen in the QA and testing sessions: most are games we know nothing about and were never announced. But there is more than one real case that support this theory.

Ubisoft has tried many times to succeed with its Battle Royale type games (or online PvP games as a service)… without success. One of them, Ghost Recon Frontlineit was even postponed as soon as it was announced due to the rejection it generated from the fans, and finally cancelled.

If that could have happened with a game that was announced, what wouldn’t have happened with the games that weren’t announced? Ghost Recon Frontline isn’t the only one: XDefiant (which lost Tom Clancy’s signature along the way) has also changed drastically since its original announcement.

Ubisoft is currently doing some testing with “Project Q” and “Project U”, new attempts at making arena shooters that gain some audiences than Fortnite, Apex Legends or Warzone. But it’s not easy at all… even though they want to keep trying again and again.