looks like fatigue is already setting in on far cry I don't know why they're pushing these out as much as assassin's Creed while ignoring other good IPS like watch dogs and splinter cell. The fact that splinter cell missed out this entire console gen is an absolute crime.
Watch_Dogs 2 was in 2016. Watch_Dogs is more or less modern day Assassin's Creed under a different brand. Watch_Dogs 3 is almost certainly releasing this year. That's a standard 3-4 year deveopment cycle. Another Splinter Cell is in development. They put Splinter Cell on ice for several years because Blacklist underperformed pretty badly. If people bought Splinter Cell games, they'd make more of them.
There was a four year gap between Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5. In between, they had the experimental spinoff Far Cry Primal. Sold much worse than the other games, but become a cult favorite. The next mainline Far Cry will probably arrive in 2021 or 2022. New Dawn is the standalone expansion to Far Cry 5. Much lower budget, much lower expectations. Never forget that the reason Rockstar stopped making singleplayer DLC was because sales were disappointing. These kind of games are a fickle sell. Sometimes they sell well, sometimes they sell soft.
IIRC, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider sold around 30k in its first week at UK retail. Similar ballpark to New Dawn. These kind of standalone expansions typically sell far worse than the main game. But they sell better than story DLC attached to the base game. And if you sell them for $40USD the margins are way better. This is a game designed for people who finished Far Cry 5 and want to know what happens next. Which is less than 50% of players at best.
Far Cry 5 was one of the best selling games of 2018. It still continues to sell rather well. However, some of its design choices were very divisive. The resistance meter and abduction system, for example. The ending caused widespread anger and outrage. Fantastic ending, but some people don't take kindly to that kind of spit in the face. New Dawn solves a number of design problems with Far Cry 5 (although a lot of people seem unaware of this with heaps of people asking, "Do you still get abducted"?), while being based on an ending that royally pissed of a couple of million players to the point they wanted nothing to do with Far Cry anymore. It was like Mass Effect 3 but with with 10x the moral indignation.
Far Cry as a series has created expectations of being super bloated and 50+ hours long. New Dawn is much shorter. 20-ish hours for 40 dollars is unacceptable for a lot of Ubisoft fans. When the game gets discounts it'll likely pick up in sales. When they start bundling FC5 and New Dawn together, it'll sell more copies. Ubisoft seem quite adept at handling soft launches.
I do wonder whether giving the game to people who had the Season Pass, Uncharted The Lost Legacy-style might have smoothed over the "How dare you sell me the game's ending as a standalone expansion" outrage.