Kotaku 'Liked' Star Wars Outlaws. 834 Steam players on launch day had other plans.
The Original Review
“Walking through Mos Eisley and seeing hundreds of aliens milling around made me feel like I had just been transported into a scene from the movies.”
Before we begin: Kotaku doesn't do scores. They do 'Liked' and 'Disliked.' This is the journalistic equivalent of a restaurant replacing its health inspection grade with a thumbs-up emoji. It makes accountability impossible and aggregation meaningless, which — and I want to be very clear about this — is the point.
Now let's talk numbers, since Kotaku won't. Star Wars Outlaws launched to 834 concurrent players on Steam. Eight hundred and thirty-four. You could fit every single one of them in a mid-size wedding venue and still have room for the open bar. The game needed roughly 10 million units sold to break even. It moved 1 million in its first month. That's a 90% shortfall, which in any other industry would trigger a congressional hearing.
Ubisoft slashed 25% off the price before the Steam launch even happened — a discount applied to a product that hadn't finished launching yet. That's not a sale. That's triage. By 2025, the game hit 50% off, its sequel was reportedly scrapped, and Ubisoft's CEO went on record blaming the Star Wars brand itself for the failure. Not the game. The brand. A franchise worth $70 billion was apparently not strong enough to carry Ubisoft's open-world template for the 47th time.
Meanwhile, Zwiezen's review calls walking through Mos Eisley 'one of the coolest things' he's experienced in gaming. The review lists stealth missions under 'Disliked' — the same stealth that constitutes roughly a third of the gameplay — and still lands on 'Liked.' That's like reviewing a restaurant, noting the food was bad, the service was slow, and the bathroom was flooded, but giving it a thumbs up because the parking lot had good vibes.
The Liked/Disliked format exists to avoid exactly this kind of scrutiny. No number means no Metacritic entry, no aggregate comparison, and no awkward screenshot when the game is in the bargain bin eight weeks later. It's a review system designed by someone who saw accountability coming and changed the locks. Sponsored by the truth.
