Ubisoft Delays Watch Dogs: Legion and Other Major Games

Ubisoft announced on Thursday its plans to allot more development time to three of its highly-anticipated titles. Rainbow Six Quarantine, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Gods & Monsters have all been delayed beyond their initial timeframes and will instead be releasing some time during fiscal 2020-21. Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot said each of the games still has a "strong identity and high potential," they want to make sure the games deliver "optimal experiences."

The confirmation of the delay came from a press release from Ubisoft that detailed the plans for the rest of 2019 and the targets for 2020. Two items were on the agenda for this announcement: Ghost Recon Breakpoint didn't perform nearly as well as Ubisoft hoped it would, and the three games mentioned above have been delayed.

Those two announcements aren't totally unrelated either. After identifying some of the key reasons that Ubisoft believed led to Breakpoint's underperformance, Ubisoft said it's implementing "significant changes" to its production process.

"In this overall context, we have decided to postpone the releases of Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine and Watch_Dogs Legion until 2020-21," Guillemot said in the announcement. "While each of these games already has a strong identity and high potential, we want our teams to have more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented so as to deliver optimal experiences for players. This decision will have a very significant impact on our financial results for this fiscal year and goes against our recent successes in building a more stable development model. However, it is in line with our strategy to maximize the future value of our brands for the long-term benefit of our employees, players and shareholders. We expect it to have a positive impact on our financial performance as from 2020-21."

The decision to delay the games will no doubt come as a blow to those who were looking forward to them, but the delay that puts quality over this fiscal year's earnings for Ubisoft is at least a promising sign.

For reference, Gods & Monsters was scheduled to release for multiple platforms including the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and Google Stadia on February 25th. Watch Dogs: Legion was supposed to release for the same platforms minus the Nintendo Switch on March 6th. Rainbow Six Quarantine did not have a release date besides a 2020 timeframe and is scheduled to release for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.