Is the Star Wars franchise in crisis? | Opinion

As hints about the sales numbers for Star Wars Outlaws have trickled out through various different data tracking agencies, the depth of the crisis that has engulfed Ubisoft is slowly becoming clear.

It's not the only factor that has sent the publisher into a tailspin, but the game's underperformance appears to be pretty serious, with the – admittedly very incomplete – numbers tracking quite a long way behind both other Star Wars titles in recent years, and other Ubisoft open world titles. The decision to pull back Assassin's Creed Shadows has no doubt been multifaceted, but at its core seems to be a sudden loss of confidence in the company's open-world formula and even in its own capacity to identify quality and potential in its games.

Those are valid concerns, especially if there is any truth to the report that internal assessments of Star Wars Outlaws had hyperbolically claimed it to be the company's answer to Red Dead Redemption 2 – an evaluation so self-serving as to have entirely lost touch with reality.

However, as unusual as it may be to point this out in the midst of what's clearly a crisis moment for Ubisoft: I'm not convinced that the underperformance of Outlaws is actually their fault.

That there are issues with the company's game pipeline is not in dispute; but it seems equally possible that Ubisoft has found itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, standing at Ground Zero as years of mismanagement of the Star Wars IP finally implodes.

It's certainly true that Star Wars Outlaws isn't all that it could have been, given the property and the premise, and the word-of-mouth around it post-launch has been a bit lukewarm as a result. It's equally true that only a few years ago, a game like this would absolutely have sold like gangbusters even in the face of such a lukewarm reception.

Ironically, perhaps, Disney seems to have fallen into the trap of running the entire Star Wars franchise much like Ubisoft designs its open-world games

A Star Wars game on this scale would have been a license to print money as long as it was half-competently executed – and I don't think even Outlaws' biggest detractors would claim that it's failed to clear that low bar. Ubisoft hasn't created a timeless classic here, but it's made a solid, atmospheric, competently executed game that plays around in some of the most fun parts of the Star Wars sandbox. That it has underperformed so drastically could speak to the gaming public suddenly and drastically losing interest in Ubisoft's open world formula – but it seems more likely to speak to a deep problem with the Star Wars IP.

As heretical as it feels to say it, I'm not convinced that Star Wars is an especially bankable property for games right now – and judging from the way Disney is struggling to make any TV or movie projects based on the franchise stick, it's not a problem unique to games, either. It's trendy in various circles to say that Disney has mismanaged the IP as a lead-in to insisting that if only they'd been more receptive to your preferred side of the culture wars they'd have a thriving franchise on their hands.

Others argue, with at least a little less obvious self-interest, that this era of Star Wars is merely getting the cold shoulder from existing fans like the prequel trilogy initially did; give it a decade or so, and the sequel trilogy and its associated media will be seen as beloved classics by a generation of kids who grew up with it. Perhaps that's true – I'm a little dubious, to say the least – but even if so, it would be cold comfort to people trying to make anything around a Star Wars license right now.

All of these takes on the situation, whether they're wrapped up in culture wars or hopeful optimism, tacitly acknowledge the same core issue – Star Wars is currently struggling to find a receptive audience for almost any of its output, and the old idea that Star Wars branding was pixie dust you could scatter on something to instantly make people interested in it has now been turned on its head.

That the brand has been mismanaged by Disney is undeniable – a mismanagement more fundamental than simply saying that the company should have made better quality Star Wars media (it couldn't have hurt, though), or that it should have leaned one way or another on culture war issues, or focused on pleasing one group of fans over another. Certainly, the company seems to have struggled massively with the question of how to deal with Star Wars' incredibly vocal fanbases, flopping back and forth it attempts to placate various groups that ultimately left nobody feeling especially happy or engaged with the property.

But that itself is a symptom of a higher level problem; Disney's whole approach to Star Wars has hinged around the idea that this was an IP that had been massively under-exploited by Lucasfilm, so it was ripe for exploitation by flooding the market with a steady stream of Star Wars properties that would essentially make it into a new MCU. It's not a coincidence that Disney finalised its acquisition of Lucasfilm a few months after The Avengers came out in cinemas; that has informed their expectations of this property from the outset.

Prior to the Disney acquisition, Star Wars as a franchise was comprised of three classic, beloved movies between 1977 and 1983, another trilogy of less well-received movies between 1999 and 2005, and a handful of ancillary bits and pieces (some well-liked games, an animated TV show), and pretty much nothing else bar a bunch of comics and novels for the hardcore fans. There were years, and in some cases decades, when the IP was left fallow and yet remained thoroughly beloved of its fans. Overnight, it then became an IP that had new movies every year and new streaming TV shows every few months, with every nook and cranny of the universe being explored and mined for content.

It's easy to see how in a boardroom that looks like you're simply properly using an IP that had been criminally underutilised by its previous owners; but to a fan, it entirely changes the entire character of the IP itself.

For Star Wars fans, gorged on more media than they care to consume, Outlaws was barely enough to raise an eyebrow

Once, the merest whisper of something new and Star Wars related would have set the fandom ablaze with excitement – just the sound of a TIE fighter or a lightsaber was like a serotonin shot right into the veins of people who had grown up with the movies and loved the franchise. Now, there's so much Star Wars stuff on Disney+ that even pretty devoted fans will admit to picking and choosing, and the announcement of new shows, movies, or games feels like it's adding to an endless backlog, not sparking excitement like the return of a beloved franchise ought to.

Ironically, perhaps, Disney seems to have fallen into the trap of running the entire Star Wars franchise much like Ubisoft designs its open-world games; it has created busywork for its fans, measuring metrics like how much time their eyeballs can spend glued to Disney+ to the detriment of whether they actually still care about the Star Wars universe or its creations. Just like a map filling up with icons in a game you're half-heartedly slogging through, the announcement of new Star Wars media feels like a reminder that you still haven't finished watching the last lot.

No doubt many Star Wars fans can see the bleak humour in this; their younger selves, hoping against hope for a new movie sometime in the next decade or two, would never believe that there could ever be too much Star Wars in the world. In truth, a big part of Star Wars' appeal was that there was a scarcity to it, a sparseness that gave an air of mystery and scale to its storytelling and universe. That's hard to quantify in boardroom terms, but starts to look pretty clear once the golden egg laying goose is splayed on the butcher's table.

Brand and license management doesn't have to go like this – and ironically, Disney is one of the most accomplished companies in the world at nurturing and building value in its own brands, carefully managing the exposure to its core IPs to ensure that they maintained their appeal for decades. There's probably a world where Disney, instead of trying to bottle the lightning that had struck the MCU, treated Star Wars more like it treats its own home-grown IPs and kept the brand's value sky-high. Closer to home, Nintendo is a perfect case of a company that learned (from Disney!) how to maintain value in its brands long-term – and there are plenty of others besides.

For another example of this fortune flowing in the opposite direction, I would point to the incredible ongoing success of Hogwarts Legacy as an example of a licensed IP truly acting as a money printer. It isn't that Harry Potter is a foolproof license – the way that the Fantastic Beasts films dwindled off into total obscurity before being quietly forgotten by the studio shows that that's absolutely not the case. Hogwarts Legacy, however, has done incredibly well, in a way that makes the case for carefully controlled scarcity as a key value in franchise management.

The world isn't awash with Harry Potter media, and certainly not with Harry Potter games; so here was a well-loved franchise (not without its own culture war controversies, but Hogwarts Legacy did a pretty good job of sidestepping and rising above those issues, which also suggests that that's absolutely not the fundamental problem with Star Wars) with a large fanbase for whom a competent AAA game was something to get immensely excited about.

It seems equally possible that Ubisoft has found itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, standing at Ground Zero as years of mismanagement of the Star Wars IP finally implodes

For Star Wars fans, gorged on more media than they care to consume (much of which they feel deeply ambivalent about), Star Wars Outlaws was barely enough to raise an eyebrow, let alone a pre-order.

Franchise management is hard – it involves juggling the demands of investors who want to see big positive numbers every quarter against the nagging sense that you might be milking udders that are already running dry. The temptation to treat IP as a resource to be exploited endlessly until it no longer yields profit is very strong for many companies.

Companies that are really successful in the long term, though, know that managing IP is more like agriculture than like strip-mining; the soil needs to be tended, the most aggressive attempts to increase yields risk leaving the whole farm barren in the end, and sometimes the fields need to be left fallow for a while to recover. It's doable; it just takes restraint.

For now, Star Wars seems to be a lesson in what happens when no restraint is shown – and for all its own internal problems right now, Ubisoft is arguably just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, as a lot of Disney's issues with the management of this IP all come home to roost at the same time.