According to a report from Insider Gaming, Ubisoft is considering a battle royale game in the mold of Apex Legends. This idea sounds costly, questionable, and about five years too late. So yeah, it's perfectly on brand for Ubisoft.
Apex Legends itself appears to be on borrowed time, as I've written about previously. It was once a huge success story for EA. It rose from the ashes of the criminally underappreciated Titanfall games, pivoting from shooter to battle royale and dropping a surprise release, Beyonce-style, in 2019.
But lately, it has been an example of everything EA does wrong with its properties. Cheaters and hackers were running rampant, and in November 2024 Respawn Entertainment decided to drop Linux support for the game. Its reasoning was that Linux's openness paved the way for all manner of cheats and exploits.
That may be true, but thousands of innocent players lost their Apex Legends privileges through no fault of their own. This is happening at a time when the struggling battle royale needs all the players it can muster.
Then, EA announced it would double the price of the game's battle pass, and prevent it from being purchased with in-game currency. It would quickly reverse course, but the PR damage was already done.
Ubisoft itself has had a few failures chasing the battle royale trend. Remember Hyper Scape? Of course you don't. It came and went with little fanfare in 2020, as players still preferred to spend their time playing Fortnite, Apex Legends, or openly weeping at the hellscape wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even Fortnite's most recent innovations are more about expanding its rapidly growing entertainment universe. Yes, the shooter that changed the game is still there, but it's part of a shared universe that features racing, LEGO building, and Lady GaGa concerts. The battle royale component has become more of a side dish than the main course.
Insider's report does say that not everybody at Ubisoft is on board with this plan. The flaws are obvious after the past couple of years the publisher has had. Expensive licensed games such as Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora haven't landed. The recent Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown reviewed well but didn't sell either.
Now Ubisoft management and Tencent are splitting the company into separate divisions for its most popular franchises. One subsidiary will get Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, and Rainbow Six, while the other will get - repeated kicks to the crotch? I don't know what Ubisoft has to offer outside of those three franchises.