Prior to E3 starting on Monday, GamesIndustry attended a Ubisoft dinner, where they were able to listen in on CEO Yves Guillemot as he answered a bunch of different questions from the press.
With Watch Dogs already a successful new IP, and The Division getting tons of hype before its scheduled 2015 release, Ubisoft’s been investing in new franchises lately. As Guillemot puts it, however, they likely won’t be creating many more:
It depends. The goal is to have more diversity, more brands. We want the brands that we create, like Child of Light or Rayman, to continue. They’re profitable, they’re of big interest to the creators – things that don’t take two or three years to create. You’ll continue to see that. On the big brands, we won’t be creating too many more. We’ll still have teams with new things on the way, but we’ll probably be doing less new things if the ones that we’ve created are successful. When a brand is successful you need more people taking care of it. Either you expand, or you focus. But, you never know. Those teams can be interested in new opportunities.
Over the last few years we’ve reduced the number of products we have on the way. We stopped five or six developments that had a chance to succeed, but were risky. That happens, but that’s more than usual.
With Assassin’s Creed: Unity coming to the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, Ubisoft has said PS3 and Xbox 360 owners won’t be left out when it comes to a new Assassin’s Creed title this year. Yves teased that very fact when he talked about Watch Dogs:
What we heard from Sony is that it really improved sales of PS4 a lot, it brought a lot of newcomers – perhaps not to the industry, but to the platform. I think we’ll continue with the games that are coming this year – Watch Dogs will continue, and we have two more Assassins, Far Cry is also very different and interesting. The Crew, too. All these products should give more opportunities to move to the new gen and to [bring in] gamers. There are also lots of people playing on mobile. If we can appeal to them on mobile, we can bring them into the core business as well.
He also dropped an interesting piece of Watch Dogs info, revealing that “we had a big percentage of Watch Dogs sales on next-gen; we thought we would have more current-gen. Those customers are quickly moving to the new generation.”
Yves finished up by saying “we will have something on [VR] machines, we’re working on it. We will be there.”
Are you OK with Guillemot’s statement or would you rather Ubisoft try and create new IPs whenever they can?
