Ubisoft's first-quarter bookings came in slightly above their own guidance, and they're holding firm on their full-year financial outlook. That's the good news out of Reuters' coverage yesterday. The less good news, depending on how you read it: several of their bigger titles just got kicked down the road to 2028 and 2029.

We're talking about games that were already sitting somewhere on a vague horizon now sitting even further out. Two to three years further out, in some cases. Ubisoft didn't name specific titles in the report, which is always a little frustrating, but the message is that their pipeline is getting stretched thinner.

I've been watching this publisher since the original Rayman landed in 1995. Back then Ubisoft was scrappy, a mid-tier player with surprising range. They'd publish a platformer one month and a weird tactical shooter the next. Over the decades they grew into one of the biggest publishers in the business, built on franchises like Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy's everything. But growth comes with its own problems, and we're seeing them play out in real time.

When you're operating at that scale, with multiple studios across the globe all working on massive open-world projects, delays compound. One slip pushes another. A game that was supposed to fill a fiscal quarter gets bumped, and suddenly the whole calendar needs reshuffling. Square Enix went through something similar in the early 2000s, where several big titles moved in cascade and left their release schedule looking pretty thin for a while. I want to say it was around the FF XII era, but my memory's fuzzy on the exact lineup. The pattern feels familiar.

The fact that Ubisoft is maintaining its outlook despite the delays tells you they're confident in what they have landing this fiscal year. Q1 bookings beating guidance, even slightly, suggests their live-service games and back catalog are still generating revenue. Rainbow Six Siege, by all accounts, continues to perform well for them. Assassin's Creed Shadows apparently performed well enough to keep the numbers healthy. The machine keeps running on what's already out there.

But you can only lean on the back catalog for so long.

What matters now is what those delayed titles actually are. Without names attached, it's hard to gauge severity. I'm speculating here, not reporting. But if one of those delayed projects is a new Splinter Cell, well, that stings, though we've been waiting on Sam Fisher for a long time at this point. Blacklist came out back in 2013, if I remember right, and fans have been waiting ever since. If it's something further along in development that just hit a wall, that's a different conversation. Ubisoft's been investing heavily in ambitious projects, and ambition costs time.

Nina and I were just talking about Square Enix's similar strategy of pushing titles to get them right rather than rushing them out broken, and how that's become the norm for big publishers now. The days of cramming games out the door to hit a fiscal quarter are mostly behind us, at least at the major label level. The trade-off is longer waits and release calendars that look like deserts.

What I'll be watching for is whether Ubisoft names any of these delayed titles in their next earnings call. Vague timelines are fine when you're managing investor expectations. They're less fine when your audience is trying to decide whether to be excited about anything in your pipeline. Give us something.

For now, Ubisoft is stable. Revenue is holding. The outlook holds. But 2028 and 2029 are a long way off, and gamers have short memories and long grudges. Ask me again in eighteen months how many of these delayed titles still have release windows that hold.