As Ubisoft enters a new fiscal year, the massive game publisher is betting more on one of its major franchises and a “large game” promised to release over the next year could be the next major Star Wars game launch.
This information comes via the 2022-2023 fiscal year earnings report published by Ubisoft, which also lists the 2023-2024 fiscal year as a “pivotal year” for growing the company’s strategic priorities and “global reach.” A major part of those priorities is investing more in the development of Assassin’s Creed, a flagship franchise for the publisher.
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In the report, co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot said the company plans “to increase the number of talents working on the Assassin’s Creed brand by 40 percent over the coming years.” This would bring the number of employees working on the franchise from roughly 2,000 to around 2,800, according to Kotaku.
This increase, though, follows a significant drop in the overall global Ubisoft workforce. The company announced back in January that it would adopt a “meaningful cost reduction plan.” This included the cancellation of numerous projects and, according to today’s earnings report, the closing of five European business offices and the reduction of total employees from more than 20,700 in September to below 20,000.
Alongside the upcoming Assassin’s Creed releases and other games such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, and various Tom Clancy titles that make up the “key strategic pillars” of Ubisoft’s upcoming fiscal year, the company also promises “another large game.” Kotaku senior reporter Ethan Gach speculated on Twitter that this could be the Star Wars project.
Gach says they’ve “heard development has been going well and the company is eager to get it out [as soon as possible].” The game is being developed by Massive Entertainment, the developers behind The Division series and the previously mentioned but unreleased Avatar game. It will be a collaboration project with Disney and Lucasfilm Games, developed on the Snowdrop engine, and has been described as “a story-driven open-world video game.”
