Ubisoft Compares Assassin’s Creed to Franchises like Mario or Resident Evil

Ubisoft has talked about its extremely popular Assassin’s Creed franchise and defended the annual installments that have been released in the series, comparing it to other properties like Nintendo’s Mario or Capcom’s Resident Evil, which have seen plenty of new releases throughout the years.

Assassin’s Creed 1 came out back in 2007 and signaled the start of a new trilogy for Ubisoft. It was followed in 2009 by Assassin’s Creed 2, which reached massive sales and quickly prompted the French publisher to delay the release of the third full-fledged game in order to launch multiple spinoffs in 2010 and 2011.

This wasn’t a bad thing, at least according to Assassin’s Creed 3’s Creative Director Alex Hutchinson, who talked about Ubisoft’s position to CVG and mentioned that the success of the series means more money to invest in other properties.

"If people want these massive triple-A blockbusters, people will have to accept that we have to make our money back somehow," he said. "It's rare that you'll make your money back on the first one. Assassin's Creed 3 is a huge undertaking - we went back to basics on a number of things, including tech."

"Any revenue that a publisher can get to make riskier projects is cool with me. People say it's the dark side of capitalism but it's more like communism; we have big projects whose success pay for the little projects.”

Hutchinson also compared Assassin’s Creed to other established franchises and promised that he and his team would continue to reinvigorate the series in future installments.

"The way we see Assassin's Creed 3 now is as a franchise, like Mario or Resident Evil, that will have its ups and downs. It wasn't the original plan to be an ongoing series, no, but it became the plan. The curse of success, for want of better phrase. But if you can keep a series interesting and fresh then I don't see why it shouldn't go on. Nintendo has been great at reinvigorating their franchises, as have other Japanese companies, so we feel we can too."

Assassin’s Creed 3 is definitely looking like a step in the right direction, offering all sorts of new experiences, from a new protagonist, to a fresh historical setting and much more.