Michel Ancel: Ubisoft Lives to Create New Things

Kotaku UK recently published a fantastic interview with Rayman creator Michel Ancel. In the interview, Ancel touched on a number of exciting topics. Of note was why Beyond Good & Evil 2 was never close to being cancelled, Ubisoft’s ambitions as a company, and how he splits his time between various projects (he says Wild takes up about half of his time).

One of the most interesting parts of the article was when Ancel discussed why Ubisoft makes games. Here’s what he had to say:

They want these kinds of games to exist. When they wake up in the morning they don’t want to make money – they’ve got money for ten lives if they want to stop. It’s not a question of power or money now. What reason has this company to live: Is it to beat competitors? No, [Ubisoft’s] already in the top three. It’s being able to create things that have never been created before. [Yves Guillemot and Serge Hascoet] are the ones that want to make this happen. They ask the creatives ‘You want to do it? We can do it.’

Ancel also contributes Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot and chief creative officer Serge Hascoet as the reasons why Beyond Good & Evil 2 was never cancelled. Ancel says that the sequel had never been moved into full production, but hope was also never lost. He says that with the additional power of current consoles that his vision for BG&E2 can fully be realized and that the first game felt compromised in several aspects (such as travelling between planets).

These comments are also particularly interesting due to the threat of a hostile takeover by Vivendi. If anything, that threat has certainly united Ubisoft’s employees and they certainly don’t want such a drastic change.

(Source: Kotaku UK)

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