Rumours began to circulate over the weekend that Ubisoft were planning on cancelling their free-to-play fantasy sports game Roller Champions. The rumours grew to the point where Ubisoft have commented on them to say: nuh-uh. In a statement posted on Twitter, its developers say “Roller Champions isn’t getting cancelled, and Ubisoft fully supports it.”
Here’s the tweet and full statement:
Hello Champions! Let’s clear it out of the way first, Roller Champions isn’t getting cancelled, and Ubisoft fully supports it.
You can rest assured we’ll keep you updated as we roll forward.
Full statement: pic.twitter.com/U8mfQRZRoH
— Roller Champions (@RollerChampions) July 25, 2022
(Someone tell the games industry’s social media managers that you can help accessibility by adding alt text to all these statements they post as images on Twitter.)
After confirming that Roller Champions isn’t cancelled, the statement goes on to explain some changes being made to its update roadmap. “What the Roller Champions dev team is doing is making sure we focus on what our players have told us needs improvement, and that supersedes all other priorities,” it reads. To that end, Roller Champions’ current season, called Disco Fever, is being extended and its next season is delayed while developers “take enough time to solve the issues our players have voiced as irritants before we release our new season.”
In a recent earnings call, Ubisoft announced the cancellation of a handful of other projects, including a free-to-play battle royale game called Ghost Recon Frontline, Splinter Cell VR, and two other unannounced projects. Roller Champions was mentioned during the same call as, in terms of retention and revenue, “tracking ahead of Hyper Scape.” Given how doomed Hyper Scape was, that seemed like faint praise.
Ed, Ollie and Liam all strapped their skates on to take a look at Roller Champions, and all had a great enough time with it to be immediately afraid for its long-term prospects.