Watch Dogs isn't necessarily one of Ubisoft's flagship IPs when compared to heavyweights like Assassin's Creed or even Far Cry, but the success and influence of the series shouldn't be underestimated. In a comparatively short period of time and with only three mainline releases, Watch Dogs has generated significant sales revenue for the publisher, with the first two games in the series both topping 10 million units sold worldwide.
The future of the franchise, however, seems a little uncertain at the moment. Following the news that the third release in the series, Watch Dogs: Legion, would no longer receive updates beyond Season Five: Stripes, there is speculation that Ubisoft might be losing faith in their open-world hacking simulator.
What is most striking about new of Legion's discontinued online support is how quickly it came. Legion only launched in late 2020, meaning that it didn't even make it to a year and a half worth of updates before Ubisoft pulled the plug to focus its efforts on more successful properties, most likely the upcoming behemoth Assassin's Creed: Infinity. Perhaps players shouldn't be overly surprised, though. Legion was plagued by bugs and issues from the beginning, not to mention the lukewarm commercial and critical reception that marked it out as the lowest-rated game in the trilogy.
While Legion promised to build on the success of its predecessor, most felt that the game was little more than a missed opportunity. Ubisoft thrives on maintaining large, recognizable IPs for as long as they remain profitable. With no other games on the market or in the pipeline, there seems to be no room for Legion in the French behemoth's future plans. The question now is what the future holds for what is still one of Ubisoft's relatively underused AAA properties.
There are still so many opportunities that could evolve and expand the franchise. Live service and Infinity-style propositions aside, one feels that the purely narrative and mechanical elements of Watch Dogs still have a great deal of potential for a series struggling to find its feet. The series has already taken players to Chicago, San Francisco and a futuristic, dystopian London, so there would be little tying things to one particular location if the devs sought to expand the Watch Dog playground.
As DedSec essentially operates as a global online network of hackers sharing information across national borders, there's nothing limiting future games from going pretty much anywhere, both geographically and temporally. Added to this the potential for a host of new characters, a deficiency that many felt undermined Legion, as well as the infinite possibilities of hackable worlds and cutting-edge tech, and it seems that there should be plenty of places for Legion to go in the future.
Then there is the issue of the changing face of the industry. The rise of the live-service model is hard to ignore, especially for large AAA franchises, and Infinity will pave the way for Ubisoft to realize this ambition in its most ground-breaking form. Tying multiple gameplay and narrative strands together into one continually evolving hub makes a degree of sense for a franchise known for jumping around a variety of historical settings. Whether Ubisoft could or would want to make such a model work for Watch Dogs may depend on the success (or failure) of Assassin's Creed: Infinity.
Watch Dogs has always been a hard series to judge. The first title forged a path for the new console generation, but its colossal hype only served to leave many fans disappointed with the end result. Nevertheless, its massive sales, combined with the surprising success of Watch Dogs 2, resulted in a franchise seen as highly profitable, and one that likely remains so even after Legion. With Ubisoft looking to focus on other properties and experiment with new formats and media through which to present them, it may be a while before we see a new Watch Dogs release. Whatever the case, fans of the series will hope that any potential forthcoming break isn’t a terminal one.