It would appear that Ubisoft has learnt a lesson from the release of Assassin's Creed Origins – that taking time with game projects is good for all involved.
The French publisher has decided to delay Far Cry 5 from February 27th to March 27th, while The Crew 2 has been bumped from its Match 16th release until the first half of FY18/19.
Furthermore, one of the firm's three un-announced projects has been pushed back from the 2018/19 fiscal year to the following financial period.
This news comes alongside the publisher's latest financial report, which saw good sales for Assassin's Creed Origins. Ubisoft opted to skip the historical action game's annual release window last year, with Watch Dogs 2 filling its shoes. This followed 2014's Unity and 2015's Syndicate, which both launched riddled with problems and negative press as a result.
“This decision is in line with our strategic vision of developing even more engaging and higher quality experiences for gamers," Worldwide Studios executive director Christine Burgess-Quémard said.
"Taking more time with Assassin’s Creed Origins enabled our talented development team to fully express their creative vision. As expected, this had a very positive impact on the game’s quality and largely participated to its commercial success. Taking a similar approach, we have decided to invest additional development time in three upcoming games.”
CFO Alain Martinez added: “Our back-catalog performance throughout November followed the same excellent trends as in the first half of the year and sales for Assassin’s Creed Origins continued their positive launch trajectory. As a result, we are now in a position to both update our financial 2017-18 targets, notably by revising our profitability upward, as well as invest additional development time in our future releases. These positive evolutions, which also give us higher visibility for 2018-19, demonstrate we are successfully transforming our model to make our business more recurring and profitable.”