There's a famous defence Norm Macdonald once gave after his movie Dirty Work flopped in cinemas: "How could it have failed? It made a million dollars!" It's a joke that underlines the absurdity of what we judge to be success, and the vast amounts of money that are spent on creating the various media products the biggest companies churn out for our consumption. I'm reminded of that as reports emerge that since its launch in late August, Star Wars Outlaws has only sold one million copies.
I haven't played Outlaws myself, so can't (and won't be) commenting on its quality. But that in itself is part of the problem. Not that I would have bought five million copies to make the sales figures more respectable, but I play a lot of games across the year. I prioritise larger games that I can write about as part of my job, and from the outside I didn't feel Outlaws looked interesting enough to be worth writing about, nor did there seem to be much of an audience ready to read it.
Star Wars Outlaws Was Fun But Generic
My colleague Jade King, who reviewed the game positively, expects it will be remembered more fondly in time as more people try it out, and I trust her judgement on it. She compares it to Mad Max, and while I liked Mad Max, that's also the reason I haven't bothered with it. Mad Max is good, grungy fun but I don't have much to say about it beyond occasionally reminding people to play it. You can pick it up for under $10. I'm not paying $70 for the same experience in space.
But people would. People do. There are plenty of triple-A games that become successful off a fairly shallow hook that is well executed. I'm excited to see what Ghost of Yotei builds on, but Ghost of Tsushima is an often generic experience with some impressive visuals and a commitment to its theme. I didn't think Outlaws looked too interesting, and wasn't that moved by my hands-on preview, but I saw enough to think the community at large would find something to love.
Norm Macdonald would argue that one million of them did, so it must have done something right. But that is so vastly below expectations it was cited as a reason Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed. So why exactly did Outlaws underperform so dramatically?
Ubisoft And Star Wars Need To Win Audiences Over
Five years ago, or certainly ten years ago, this would have been a guaranteed smash hit. Ubisoft was one of the hottest developers in the world, churning out games that continued to perfect the open world formula it had created and everyone else was following. Add in the unsinkable ship of Star Wars, and you have the recipe for a smash hit. The first open world game in everyone's favourite universe, made by the kings of open world games? Everyone is there day one.
A decade on, the crown has rusted, the ship has sunk. Ubisoft has kept doing the same old thing while its peers have surpassed it, and Star Wars has been milked dry. This might be Ubisoft moving away from the tower-climbing formula for a smaller, richer world. This might be Star Wars going back to its run and gun roots. Doesn't matter. The brand names feel a little tainted, and you now need to work harder to get fans on your side.
One of the big taglines for the game was that it was the first open-world Star Wars game. Factually, that's true. But it doesn't really feel that way. We can roam relatively freely in the Jedi games, even if they are technically more linear Metroidvania-lites. Star Wars is just so huge you'd imagine it must have had a game like this before. The fact that it hasn't is curious, but we've seen every inch of Star Wars through movies, TV shows, and video games that seeing it again doesn't feel exciting. It's not a selling point when you need to remind people that it's even a thing.
We're also quick to disregard the impact of the anti-DEI community, and on games that are destined to be major successes like Hades 2, it's true that their whining can have little impact. But this type of thinking is deeply entangled with the modern Star Wars community. And when no one has anything at all to say about this game, it's easy for the six video a day crowd to fill that void over and over with baseless complaints. When a game has nothing to say for itself, it's far easier for negativity to drown it out.
I don't think the anti-wokeness crowd had a major impact on the game. That's more true of Shadows, where Ubisoft has been ill-equipped to deal with the racist vitriol the game has spawned. With Outlaws, it's more that the game failed to create any sort of identity ahead of launch, or much of one beyond 'yeah it's a Star Wars game' with the one million people who bought it, and that left it exposed, with few defenders ready to champion it.
Ubisoft wants to learn lessons from Outlaws ahead of Shadows, and launching at the same time on PC will help. But it's hard to fix the problem when the problem is you. I don't bear any ill will to Ubisoft, and I like many of its games past and present, but doing the same thing over and over is, as its own game once said, the definition of insanity. We'll wait to see if Shadows bears a different result.
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Star Wars Outlaws
- OpenCritic
- Top Critic Rating:75/100
- Platform(s)
- PC , PlayStation 5 , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S
- Released
- August 30, 2024
- Developer(s)
- Massive Entertainment