Ubisoft is gearing up to cancel its free-to-play roller sports game Roller Champions after only three seasons according to recent rumors. Roller Champions has been suffering from a major decline in interest since its release, which may be a contributing factor to its early cancellation.
Roller Champions was announced at E3 with an early demo back in 2019, although the game would not see an official release until three years later. Due to a series of delays, Ubisoft's free-to-play roller derby-inspired sports game has only recently been made available and was met with a mostly positive reception. The game involves two teams of three players skating in laps while using tackles and passes to throw the ball through the hoop for points. Like many live service games, Roller Champions employs a standard cosmetic-only microtransactions system to generate income and features a "roller pass" battle pass divided into both free and premium reward tracks.
During a recent episode of The Xbox Era podcast, journalist Jeff Grubb of the popular Giant Bomb gaming website relayed a message from an unspecified source that "Roller Champions is going to be canceled after Season Three." No further information has yet come to light regarding the validity of the source, but Jeff Grub remarked that this is "breaking news" and it can be assumed that he wouldn't have broached the topic if the claim was unsubstantial. Ubisoft has not made any comments so far about the possibility of an early cancellation for Roller Champions.
At the time of writing, Roller Champions maintains a paltry Twitch viewership of around 200 average viewers across 14 channels, ranking 473rd in terms of viewers. For comparison, the top viewed games on Twitch host hundreds of thousands of viewers on average on a regular basis. If Twitch views are any indication, Roller Champions is struggling to hold the interest of players and spectators. It's highly possible that Ubisoft has determined that the game is more costly to operate than is financially feasible for a free-to-play game, as Ubisoft made a similar call when it canceled free-to-play battle royale Hyper Scape after a brief run.
Roller Champions' cancellation would not be surprising after Ubisoft just canceled four other games including Splinter Cell VR, Ghost Recon Frontline, and two other unnamed works-in-progress in the name of cutting costs. With all the recent cancelations and the delay of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora until 2023-2024, Ubisoft is going to need to deliver something truly impressive to regain the faith of the gaming community.
Roller Champions is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: VGC