Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launched last week and no one is talking about it, except all the peop൲le talking about how nobody is talking about it. Last December there were approximately 15 tweets per minute that said “I don’t know a single person who has seen the new Avatar” while it was making over two billion dollars. We don’t have any idea how well Frontiers of Pandora is selling, but it seems clear that it’s not lighting the sales charts on fire the way The Way of Water blew up the box office.
It’s easy to see why. Ubisoft’s one big open-world game of the year (we can’t call Assassin’s Creed Mirage a big game) was unceremoniously dumped in December, the week of The Game Awards, with little to no advertising to support it. When people say they didn’t even know it was coming out this year, I don&🀅rsquo;t think most of them are Avatar-dunking in bad faith. Ubisoft revealed the game last summer claiming a 2022 release date, then delayed it until this year. It showed a nice lengthy gameplay reveal during this summer’s Ubisoft Forward, and then nothing until it came out last 🐭week. If you didn’t know the game was coming out, that’s because Ubisoft didn’t really tell anyone.
Avatar Has The Best Worꩲld Reveal Since Fallout 3
Avatar has a long intro, but it serves to make the▨ first moment you experience Pandora extra special.
There’s some great marketing for it out there, but you have to go looking for it. Ubisoft’s Youtube channel has a couple of making-of featurettes that explore the music and digs into Massive’s partnership with James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm, which explains how the game seeks to be an authentic extension of the Avatar universe. There’s with producer Jon Landau and several devs about the same topic, and of course there were early previews. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jade King wrote ours and it’s obviously the best one.
But that&r𝕴squo;s not enough exposure to promote a massive, years-in-the-making game like Frontiers of Pandora, and no one knows that better than Ubisoft. When a new Far Cry comes out, it’s impossible to miss it. It shows up on every Youtube ad, every TV commercial, and every annoying pop-up on eveཧry website. It covered high-rises in every major city across the world with Giancarlo Esposito’s face in 2021. Safe to say Avatar didn’t get even a fraction of that red carpet, and it’s easy to see the impact.
Ubisoft isn’t the same company it was when Far Cry 6 launched. Financial hardship and poor leadership has led to multiple mass layoffs, in༒cluding more than 100 last month, and the decision to cancel multiple in-development projects in order to focus on its core franchises. It seems likely Avatar would have been one of those projects had it not been nearly complete. Ubisoft may just not be in a position to support new game launches the way it used to.
What seems more likely though is that the company didn’t believe Avatar would be successful, and decided not to throw more good money after bad. Lukewarm previews may have played a factor, and the middling revꦅiew scores might have sealed it. I don’t think Frontiers was going to light the world on fire with a 73 Metacritic score either, but a lot of games have sold incredibly well with a score like that. Games like Far Cry 6, which coincidentally also has a🥀 73.
Frontiers of Pandora is better than even Ubisoft would have you believe. It’s the best looking game of the year, and it has no competition at all in an empty December. Like Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, if it doesn’t manage to sell well it won’t be an indictment of the ga🐻me or the franchise, but of Ubisoft’s inability to effectively market its ga▨mes.
