Ubisoft's new battle royale Hyper Scape isn't doing well post-launch
The game was immensely popular during the beta, so what seems to be going on?
Image: Ubisoft
Frankly, making video games is like every other business pursuit - you win some, you lose some. Very often the reason for "losing" can be attributed to a sudden shift in economic circumstances, or due to lapses in judgment.
However, there are also cases where the management doesn't appear to have done anything wrong, and yet the product still doesn't perform as well as expected. Case in point, Ubisoft's new battle royale Hyper Scape.
A few weeks ago, after the game's beta test period was announced at the company's Ubisoft Forward event, Hyper Scape seemed like a breakout star. In the next few days, both the Twitch viewership and player activity soared to great heights, and we thought it had a pretty good chance of bringing a breath of fresh air to the battle royale genre.
However, after the game's launch just a day or two ago, it seems things have already taken a turn for the worst. Not only is the game pulling in absurdly low viewer counts on Twitch, but the player base has dipped significantly as well, and for no apparent reason to boot. Accordingly, there's a very big "Why?" floating around here, and if the fault doesn't seem to lie with Ubisoft, then the trend might be due to other environmental factors.
Image: Ubisoft
Perhaps it's due to stiff competition from other titles - Devolver's Fall Guys is pretty darn popular, even among other companies, and Call of Duty Warzone just got its Season 5 update too (which happens to involve Man Utd soccer player Paul Pogba). That adds on to the fact that the battle royale genre is still an immensely overcrowded market at this point in time, and the novelty of "audience integration" into Hyper Scape's formula simply wasn't enough to spur any long-term shifts in interest.
Anyway, there's still some light at the end of the tunnel. After all, this isn't the first time Ubisoft has had to work from ground zero to build a game - they've done it previously with Rainbow Six Siege, and look where that got them. As such, our fingers are crossed that they'll find a way to make Hyper Scape work in the long run - it's still a pretty fun take on a battle royale, and it'll be a real waste to see all that esports potential fizzle out into nothing.
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