10 Recent Video Game Bombs NO ONE Saw Coming
9. Star Wars Outlaws (2024)
It's easy to assume that a Star Wars game can't fail. This huge franchise has a chokehold on popular culture as strong as Darth Vader does on his imperial officers. Despite that, Star Wars Outlaws performed incredibly poorly commercially and became a rare flop for this monolithic IP, even though it was a pretty decent game.
Outlaws was the latest in the modern wave of Star Wars games, following on from two Star Wars Battlefront games, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Ubisoft promised players a slick open-world adventure with it, and they mostly delivered, save for a stumble here and there. Yet despite delivering on this promise and going all blasters blazing with a massive marketing push, the game was a failure for Ubisoft.
According to the company's 2024-2025 half-year results (reported here by gamesindustry.biz), the game "underperformed expectations." While there are plenty of reasons this might have happened, like growing fatigue for Ubisoft's repetitive open world games and the Star Wars brand itself, it's still mind-boggling that a series known for all but printing money found itself on the losing end.