A new hope? France's Ubisoft banking on new 'Star Wars' game

Laser pistols loaded, hover bikes revved up, lizard-faced aliens in the crosshairs -- the latest "Star Wars" video game hits the shelves on Friday with its French publisher, Ubisoft, in need of a rescue mission.

Or at least a new hope.

The game maker has rolled out its priciest promotional campaign for "Star Wars Outlaws", after a topsy-turvy period that saw it slip into the red in 2022-2023 before returning to profit last year.

"Ubisoft is a bit at a crossroads," said Charles Louis Planade, director of international operations at Midcap Partners advisory firm.

The firm has launched plenty of games recently and "there haven't been any big failures but there haven't been any big successes either", he told AFP.

The French firm has announced dozens of job losses this year alone as it struggles with an industry-wide downturn.

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The lockdowns caused by the Covid pandemic led to a boom in video game sales, player numbers and engagement -- and with it came a flood of investment.

But despite many firms continuing to make healthy profits, tech investors are looking elsewhere for quick returns, particularly to artificial intelligence or defence products.

The slump has left Ubisoft and its competitors in need of hits.

'No mega-hit'

And Ubisoft is not stinting on the hype around "Outlaws", developed for more than four years by its Swedish subsidiary, Massive Entertainment.

The group's first foray into the universe created by George Lucas, "Outlaws" is an open-world game featuring Kay Vess, a young outlaw who travels the galaxy far away to pull off the heist of the century.

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Ubisoft's chief financial officer, Frederick Duguet, said in July he expected it to be "one of the biggest games, in terms of sales, in the industry this year and among our best sales ever".

But gamers have been here before with Ubisoft.

While Planade said Ubisoft had "no big failures" in the past year, he quickly added a caveat -- "Skull and Bones", a role-play pirate game that had taken seven years to develop.

Before its release in February this year, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot had dubbed the pirate game "quadruple-A".

But reviews were tepid and sales fell flat, with plenty of complaints about the heft $70 price tag.

Planade said "Outlaws" would probably "do the job commercially".

But he added that early feedback from specialist media outlets suggested it "wouldn't be a mega-hit".

The review website Metacritic posted a score of 77 out of 100 for "Outlaws" on Tuesday, based on 64 reviews.

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The score is solid if not spectacular.

It puts "Outlaws" way ahead of "Skull and Bones" and one point ahead of "Assassin's Creed Mirage", last year's installment of what remains Ubisoft's most bankable franchise.

The next episode, "Assassin's Creed Shadows", is due for release on November 15, and Planade said this would be "by far" the biggest release of the year for Ubisoft.

Ultimately, he said Assassin's Creed was the franchise that would "work better and longer" than Star Wars.

Source: AFP