Ubisoft, the company behind the massively successful “Assassin’s Creed” and “Far Cry” series, has been having a rough go of it after a new “Star Wars” game rife with identity politics. On the heels of their latest release, “Star Wars: Outlaws,” Ubisoft’s stock value took a sharp nosedive, reaching a nine-year low after a grim 13 percent drop.
“Outlaws” immediately courted controversy from players when it was revealed the game’s protagonist, Kay Vess, received cosmetic edits from her real-life character model to make her look more masculine. Also, gameplay trailers displayed Vess achieving feats of enormous strength despite her small stature, leading many to assume she would be yet another “girlboss.”
Fears of an overly politicized game amplified when players learned the writing team for “Outlaws” was made of leftist activists including Nikki Foy and Youssef Maguid. Before she put her social media under lock and key, Foy was known for trashing white people and promoting LGBT ideology in gaming. Maguid’s X account hosts a plethora of anti-Israel posts alongside terrorist apologia.
It seemed inevitable that a game written by militant leftists would flop, and flop it did. Exact sales numbers are not public yet, but it’s clear the game failed to meet expectations.
One industry reporter took to X and wrote, “We don’t have digital data yet. And this is just the UK. But … it was a weak launch for Star Wars Outlaws at UK retail. Launch sales are 55% lower than what Star Wars Jedi: Survivor did. It was 15% bigger than Ubisoft/Massive’s last game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.”
The United Kingdom is not the world’s largest market, but the data is indicative of larger trends. The game barely sold better than another flop, and sold fewer than half as many copies as a previous “Star Wars” game. That’s a bad sign.
It also looks like the pain for Ubisoft isn’t over yet. “Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” its newest entry in the nearly two-decade-old series, nearly sparked a diplomatic incident with the Japanese government over its assertion that a black African named Yasuke was a samurai in the service of warlord Oda Nobunaga.
Ubisoft was forced to issue a groveling apology on X: “We share your passion for history and deeply respect your care for the historical and cultural integrity of your rich heritage,” and, “From its inception, the series has taken creative license and incorporated fantasy elements to craft engaging and immersive experiences. The representation of Yasuke in our game is an illustration of this.”
A sprinkling of sexual propaganda further inflamed tensions. Reporting emerged that Ubisoft had hired Sachi Schmidt-Hori to act as a consultant on “Shadows.” In her bio at Dartmouth College, Schmidt-Hori says she is “interested in liteary [sic] and pictorial representations of gender, sexuality, and class in pre-seventeenth-century Japanese narratives … which often depict romantic relationships between Buddhist priests and adolescent boys. These tales challenge a host of normative and moral standards we — academics, non-academics, the far-right, the far-left, and beyond — internalize, including such ideas as ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘transgenerational sex,’ and ‘sexual agency.’
As a result of all this leftist extremism, “Shadows” looks primed to be as much of a failure as “Outlaws” was, which could cause more financial damage to an already wounded brand. A recent gaming expo in Paris featured anemic turnout at the “Shadows” booth, with one commentator noting people were using the benches reserved for the game to watch a Nintendo booth across the way.
Ubisoft needs to pivot, and it needs to pivot now. The data plainly shows that woke games do worse than their non-woke counterparts. The recent apocalyptic failure of leftist darling “Concord” is even more evidence of that.
Gamers have not been subtle about what they want. It doesn’t take a genius to see excising wokeness from gaming results in higher sales numbers. That the decidedly non-woke “Black Myth: Wukong” continues to notch monumental profit is additional proof.
If Ubisoft wants to avoid worse financial damage, the choice is clear. Get back to the basics and cut out the woke stuff. Or else you’re toast.
Douglas Blair is a producer and special correspondent with “O’Connor Tonight” on the Salem News Channel.
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