One of the most anticipated games of 2017, South Park: The Fractured but Whole, has been delayed again according to Ubisoft.
The delay was announced in Ubisoft’s newest earning’s report which stated that South Park: The Fractured but Whole would see a scheduled release for fiscal 2017-2018. In laymen’s terms, this means that fans won’t be seeing the game in March as expected but rather anytime between April 2017 to March 2018.
This delay doesn’t come as much of a surprise considering South Park: The Fractured but Whole had been delayed once before. On Sept. 15, 2016, Ubisoft announced in a blog post that the sequel game to the hit South Park: The Stick of Truth, wouldn’t meet its initial December release date.
“The development team wants to make sure the game experience meets the high expectations of fans and the additional time will help them achieve this goal,” Ubisoft said.
Ubisoft’s newest report also mentioned two of their other games, Watch Dogs 2 and Steep. The publisher stated that the launch for Watch Dogs 2 wasn’t as dynamic as expected and that Steep had a higher than expected performance. As for Ubisoft’s sales, the publisher saw a 5.7 per cent dip in sales from €561.8 million to €529.9 million for the third-quarter of 2016-2017. Ubisoft now expects their fiscal 2016-2017 sales to come in between €1,455 million and €1,495 million instead of €1,610 million and €1,670 million and this is taking into account that South Park: The Fractured but Whole is delayed and their sales figure for the third-quarter 2016-2017.
At this time, Ubisoft has yet to give a concrete explanation as to the delay however, during Ubisoft’s earnings briefing today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, teased a few of the publisher’s upcoming games for the Nintendo Switch. Just dance 2017 will be one of the Nintendo Switch’s launch titles and that they would release multiple other games for the Switch in 2017 that will be “Very strong for the machine.” This may imply that the delay is because of they are working on a Switch version of South Park: The Fractured but Whole.
