It's no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development's spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing "forever game", the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever. It's a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially.

By 2004, video games were well into their adolescence. The war between Sega and Nintendo that defined the early 1990s was in the rear-view mirror – the PlayStation had knocked both of them off their perch, and Microsoft had released the Xbox. The critical and commercial hits of the day were not cartoon platformers but operatic space shooters (Halo) and anarchic crime games (Grand Theft Auto). There were lots of guns, and most games were embracing increasingly cinematic cutscenes. Nintendo, meanwhile, had fallen into third place with its Game Cube home console – but it still owned the handheld game market with the Game Boy Advance.

You can strike one game off of the busy fall 2024 calender. Ubisoft has delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows until February 14. It was originally supposed to hit PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Mac and iPad on November 15. You can probably guess the main reason why Ubisoft is pushing the latest entry in the saga back by a few months. While all of the features are largely set, the company needs more time to iterate on them and to polish the game as a whole.

Ubisoft has announced its highly-anticipated upcoming game Assassin's Creed Shadows has been delayed until next year. Instead of releasing it on 12 November as previously planned, it has been pushed back to 14 February 2025. It follows the disappointing performance of another of the firm's major titles, Star Wars Outlaws, and concerns from some about how Ubisoft is being run. The game's executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote said the developers "need more time to polish and refine the experience". "We understand this decision will come as disappointing news," he said.

About 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's forthcoming open-world adventure, lead character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, worn-down city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone hovels and metallic sci-fi buildings, crammed with flickering computer panels, neon signs and holographic adverts. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids glide past twittering to themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky doorway, and just to the side is a dimly lit gambling parlour. As you explore, robotic voices read out imperial propaganda over public address systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least as far as this lifelong Star Wars fan is concerned, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of the original trilogy.

For the best part of 15 years, every June I would get on a plane to Los Angeles to cover E3. It was the giant video games conference where most of the major games and consoles of the past few decades were first shown, from the PlayStation to the Wii U, Fallout 4 to Final Fantasy VII Remake. Alas, the pandemic killed E3, and so this year we have a cluster of loosely affiliated and competing events instead: Summer Game Fest, run by Geoff Keighley of the Game Awards; the Xbox Games Showcase; indie-driven event Day of the Devs and many more. It all kicks off tomorrow, 6 June. The Guardian's journalism is independent.