A new report suggests that Ubisoft has cancelled Project Q, an attempt at an Overwatch-style battle arena title, before it even made it out of testing.
The report from Insider Gaming indicates that the game was cancelled ahead of a series of upcoming closed playtests, after viewing a developer announcement on the game’s playtest Discord.
Per Insider, the message from the team begins with glowing praise for the community that had sprung up around the project, but the bitter pill comes in the third paragraph.
“All these warm moments make this announcement harder to make: sadly we have to cancel our upcoming closed tests as Project Q will no longer continue development. This also means that we will need to shut down this Discord server.”
The news comes only weeks after it was revealed that Ubisoft had cancelled three major in-development titles as the company tightened its belt. There is no suggestion at this time that Project Q was one of the three games Ubisoft cancelled. It is understood Ubisoft has brought production on as many as a dozen potential battle royales to a close at around this point in development over the last few years. The one BR title that did make it to market previously, Hyper Scape, closed down in April of 2022. It seems Project Q met the same fate.
Little was known externally about Project Q, though the art shared through the game’s official Twitter account gives a small insight. Taking its queues from Overwatch, it seems the game was hero-driven arena brawler designed to compete with Blizzard’s free-to-play sequel and Riot’s Counter-Strike brawler hybrid Valorant.
To say Ubisoft is going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment is an understatement. In addition to the three recent cancellations, Ubisoft was forced to delay Skull And Bones for the umpteenth time. It began 2023 by announcing it planned to cut $US215 million in costs over the next two years after sales in 2022 fell well short of expectations. Only a week later, CEO Yves Guillemot finds himself staring down a strike in the company’s Paris headquarters after comments he made in that announcement drew ire from staff. “The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality,” said Guillemot at the time, “and show everyone what we are capable of achieving.” This, staff feel, lays the burden of rescuing the company’s fortunes directly on their shoulders when, as the CEO, that should technically be his job.
Leave a Reply