Remember the Xbox 360 era? Back in the 2000s, publishers tended to have heaving release slates, mixing oddball ideas with more established formats. But as development budgets have spiralled in the decades since, with games taking longer and longer to produce, the big publishers’ release slates have shrunk dramatically. Ubisoft, for example, published just four games in 2025. In 2000, it published more than 60.
