ByJason Schreier
At 10:22 PM GMT+5:30 on July 22, 2022,
The next Assassin’s Creed game has been pushed back from February to spring by Ubisoft Entertainment SA. This is the French video game company’s second setback in as many days.
The new game, which has the code name “Rift” and takes place in the Middle East, was supposed to be an expansion for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in 2020, but it changed into a stand-alone game to fill a gap in Ubisoft’s release schedule for this fiscal year.
A person who knows about the company’s plans said that the office in Bordeaux, France, which is in charge of making the game, asked for more time because Rift is way behind schedule.
The delay will have an effect on Ubisoft’s balance sheet because the game will now be released in the next fiscal year, which starts in April and ends in March. The game is now expected to come out between May and June. A representative from Ubisoft didn’t have anything to say right away.
Ubisoft said Thursday during its quarterly earnings call that it had pushed back the release of its upcoming Avatar game and a “smaller, unannounced premium” title. The person who knew about the plans said that was a reference to Rift. They asked not to be named because they were talking about private information. Ubisoft hasn’t announced the game yet, but the company has said that it will talk more about Assassin’s Creed in September. Bloomberg says that the upcoming live service game Assassin’s Creed Infinity is also a big part of Ubisoft’s plans for the series.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which is based on the movie franchise and was made in partnership with Disney, was supposed to come out this fall, but Ubisoft says it won’t come out until at least 2023.
The two setbacks have left the publisher with a weak fall lineup. There are only two games that could be big hits: a Mario + Rabbids game for the Nintendo Switch, which is coming out in October, and a pirate game called Skull & Bones, which had a hard time getting made and was delayed several times before finally coming out in November.
This year, Ubisoft shares have dropped about 4.5 percent. This is because investors are worried that the pandemic will delay the release of games. CEO Yves Guillemot said that the industry still has hard working conditions because people “can’t come to the office as often.”
But a lot of other video game companies have found ways to make remote work, and even when they switched to hybrid or fully virtual schedules, they still got work done.
