Welcome back to another depressing super fun roundup of business news from the MMO industry and adjacent climes.
Ubisoft
We don’t cover a lot of Ubisoft titles here on MOP, save The Division 2, but it’s not having a great week. In the release of its updated financial target doc yesterday, the company says it’s delaying multiple titles, including Skull and Bones yet again (hey remember Skull and Bones, which we demoed in 2017?), given the disappointing sales performance of both Ghost Recon Breakpoint and to a lesser extent The Division 2. The studio essentially blames player fatigue with live-service titles and the fact that Breakpoint is kinda grindy, something “strongly rejected by a significant portion of the community.” The company’s stock fell as much as 20% on the news.
Remember back when Google announced Stadia and said it would be opening up its own games studio? The first one is now open for business in Montreal under the leadership of Jade Raymond. It’s not clear just yet what type of games exactly they’ll be making.
SWG Emu
Finally, a strange bit of news from the world of rogue servers: The original SWG Emu team has open-sourced the code underpinning the core3 engine. “As we prepare for a post-SWGEmu 1.0 world, we need to find ways to embrace and collaborate with more developers,” the player team writes. “We are starting a Special Interest Group (SIG) for JTL development, and that team will need to refactor/extend the underlying engine to support space-related gameplay. We are hopeful that open-sourcing engine3 will also encourage new developers to join our post 1.0 effort and create the version of SWG we all wish to build and enjoy together.”
