They seem to be very caught off guard by Star Wars: Outlaws' underperformance, and after investor pressure, are trying to massively course correct. This is what happens when you vote with your dollars!
Big shock. This game has had a lot of red flags, and not the good kind one would expect from a Japanese themed game. Everything about this game from the marketing to the merchandising has been bad at best, and outright offensive/borderline racist at worst.
People have been dreaming of a Japan based AC game since the first one. Ubisoft could not have picked a worse game to mess up this badly than this one.
Finally, let me address some of the polarized comments around Ubisoft lately. I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda. We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy.”
I do not believe you Yves. You say you are committed to making games everyone want to enjoy, but your last like 4 games have released to awful sales because basically nobody wanted to play them. If you were committed to making games everyone wanted to enjoy then your sales would not be garbage. Your words and your data do not match. I mean, you literally just said Ubisoft remains committed to the GaaS model for games, thats pretty much the opposite of being player committed.
In xenophobic Japan, a foreigner especially an African is allowed to massacre Japanese people with zero consequences. The same problem will exist if a westerner enters Japan and massacres Japanese citizenry with zero consequence.
It was a very anti-Japanese ( replace Japanese with Jewish or any other ethnic or cultural or minority group ) game centered in Japan. ( Butsu buddha statue is expressly forbidden in Japan from pictorial / digital / non-real-life representations but Ubisoft decided to make a digital 3d model and place it in AC:S) with blatant disrespect and cultural-dissonance.
If it was Yagyu Juubei and Naoe or some similar Japanese main-characters there would be almost no backlash . Edit2: complete rejection as non-immersive and non-Japanese behaviour.
Edit2: Listen to a Japanese perspective to the problems Ubisoft has caused Japan. An entire country offended for greedy corpos and fake DEI messaging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GYauJy9fJ0
Lot's of small disrespectful things too like they use at least one family crest they most likely don't have permission to use and they have it on a flag that has the edges of it cut off, they use some chinese architecture.
They also recently started pre-orders for a figure that features a half destroyed Torii Gate which is a kind religous symbol and on top of that they have a character sitting on the Torii Gate. Any damaged Torii Gate must be taken down or repaired, the only broken one allowed to exist in japan is one that half survived the bombing of nagasaki.
I told the truth and people downvote the truth. It is sad. Somehow pushing "The Message" absolves people of any responsibility to what they are supporting and doing causing problems.