It seems high-profile game delays are coming in from all sides, as Ubisoft today announced that three of its upcoming releases have been pushed back from their original release windows. The affected games include Watch Dogs: Legion, Tom Clancy"s Rainbow Six Quarantine, as well as Gods & Monsters, which are all now arriving in the next fiscal year.
Watch Dogs: Legion, the next game in the open-world, hacktivist action series, was initially arriving on March 6, 2020. Gods & Monsters, the Breath of the Wild-esque open-world game, was slated for February 25, 2020. Meanwhile, the cooperative shooter Rainbow Six Quarantine had an early 2020 launch window. It"s unclear what is happening with the Roller Champions sports game.
With the delay, these games will now be launching late in 2020 with additional next-generation console optimizations. "While each of these games already has a strong identity and high potential, we want our teams to have more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented so as to deliver optimal experiences for players," said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot explaining the reasoning behind the mass delays.
Guillemot also revealed that Ghost Recon Breakpoint "critical reception and sales during the game’s first weeks" have been very disappointing. Daily playtime per player for Breakpoint is at over three hours according to Ubisoft, but it had been "strongly rejected by a significant portion of the community," prompting the studio to make changes to its production processes.
Although not to that extent, it was confirmed that The Division 2 had also underperformed, even if pre-orders on PC seemed strong. It certainly looks like the decision to delay basically all of Ubisoft"s high-profile games to give the development teams more time to cook the products will be a wise one.