Ubisoft halts Starlink toy production as franchise sales ‘fell below expectations’

Ubisoft has confirmed it will longer be manufacturing the physical toys that accompany its toys-to-life franchise, Starlink, after reporting sales for the game “fell below expectations”.

“Thank you so much for the warm response to the new Starlink content announced during the February Nintendo Direct,” the Starlink development team said via a statement on the official website. “With the announcement of new content arriving this April, we felt that it is important to provide an update on the topic of physical toys. Starlink: Battle for Atlas has been a passion project for us from the start, and we are incredibly proud of the modular Starship technology we have developed, and how well players have responded to it.

“Despite the immense and continuous support from our players, the sales for Starlink: Battle for Atlas fell below expectations.” the statement continued. “Consequently, we recently made the decision to not release any additional physical toys for the Spring update and in the future. As part of our effort to do right by our passionate and dedicated community we are currently hard at work on our biggest update to the game so far and are pleased to tell all of you that there will be new digital ships, pilots and weapons to collect.”

The post adds that despite these changes, there “will be a ton of free content” to expand the game with additional missions, challenges and new activities. The update is expected to deploy later this month.

“I’ve been in the industry 13 years now and I’ve never seen this kind of wide-open mandate, it was incredibly liberating for our team and incredibly terrifying – having so few constraints in place to come up with something brand new,” Matt Rose, a producer at Ubisoft Toronto told MCV last year, reflecting on how Starlink came to be.

“We brainstormed and prototyped. We rinsed and repeated. And that way we made dozens of prototypes across different genres, different platforms, different technologies, and some of them were pretty cool.”