Ubisoft shares fall: Star Wars Outlaws failed to live up to expectations

The shares of the French video game developer Ubisoft have continued to decline for the second consecutive day.

Today, the company's stock price fell by 2.4% (following a 5.1% drop on Monday), reaching its lowest point since 2015. Since the beginning of the year, Ubisoft's shares have lost over 30% of their value.

Analyst Charles-Louis Planade from Midcap Partners attributes this decline to the lukewarm reception of the game Star Wars Outlaws, released last Friday, and the low interest in the free shooter Xdefiant, which was introduced earlier.

Star Wars Outlaws is one of two key releases for Ubisoft this year. The company is pinning its hopes on the success of this game and Assassin's Creed Shadows, which is set to launch on November 15, in order to strengthen its financial standing after several years of economic challenges.

Despite generally positive reviews from critics, users rated Star Wars Outlaws rather poorly. On the review aggregator Metacritic, the game received mainly unfavorable feedback from players, scoring only 4.9 out of 10.

J.P. Morgan analyst Daniel Kerven notes that the development budget for Star Wars Outlaws was at least 30% higher than the costs for creating Assassin's Creed Mirage, which was released last year. Meanwhile, data from the streaming platform Twitch shows that the new game is approximately 15% less popular than AC Mirage.

Kerven has lowered his sales forecast for Star Wars Outlaws by 2 million copies, estimating 5.5 million units for the financial year ending in March 2025. As for Xdefiant, Planade adds that after an initial surge of interest, there has been a sharp decline in views on Twitch, suggesting this game is likely to have minimal impact on Ubisoft's results in the coming quarters.

Source: Reuters