Ubisoft says that its decision to delay Assassin's Creed Shadows to next year was motivated by "softer than expected" sales of its last big open world game, Star Wars Outlaws.
"While [Assassin's Creed Shadows] is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," Ubisoft told investors today.
The company also announced that Outlaws will come to Steam on November 21, and indicated that it's no longer going to do timed Epic exclusives on PC, a deal it has maintained with the Fortnite developer since 2019. When Assassin's Creed Shadows releases in February, it'll be on Steam on day one.
Star Wars Outlaws released in August, and is a pretty good game by many accounts, including our Star Wars Outlaws review. Another PCG writer went into Outlaws expecting to be disappointed—both by Disney era Star Wars and by today's open world Ubisoft formula—but was pleasantly surprised: "Outlaws is a very good time and a very good Star Wars game," Fraser wrote.
Ubisoft is still hopeful that Outlaws can deliver what it needs in the long term, and says that its dev teams are "currently fully mobilized to swiftly implement a series of updates to polish and improve the player experience in order to engage a large audience during the holiday season to position Star Wars Outlaws as a strong long-term performer." (A long way of saying we can expect some quality-of-life patches.)
Whether delaying Assassin's Creed Shadows was the right response to Outlaws missing its early sales target, I don't know. If Star Wars Outlaws was a pretty good open world Star Wars game but still didn't sell as much as Ubisoft expected, I'm not sure "additional time to further polish" would've changed that—maybe some of the crowd has just moved on from this kind of game. But if the delay makes Shadows a better game, I'm not complaining. And the Steam news is certainly welcome.
