14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has talked a bit about his company's future strategy and how the publisher has even stopped the development of certain risky intellectual properties in the triple-A segment of the industry in order to focus on smaller projects with less potential to fail.
Ubisoft is still struggling to reach the level set by large publishers like Electronic Arts or Activision, even if it has quite a lot of different major franchises, starting with Assassin's Creed, and plenty of original new titles currently in development, such as The Division or The Crew.
While talking about the company's growth plans, CEO Yves Guillemot told GamesIndustry that Ubisoft has to take risks and create even more new properties in order to rival the likes of EA or Activision.
"We have to grow; to grow you have to take risks. That's what we're doing with this diversity - creating more brands to reach more people, establish the company in more fields to reach [EA or Activision] level."
However, most of the new brands coming from Ubisoft will be smaller in size and scope, such as Child of Light, for example, as the company no longer wants to risk things on triple-A projects with a high chance of failure that could end up costing a huge amount of money.
"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."
Guillemot even went so far as to admit that the publisher has stopped "five or six" games that were in development and even had a chance to succeed. Apparently, the projects were risky and in the end the company decided it could have allocated the resources to other existing projects.
While such decisions may seem harsh, apparently it's the nature of video game development.
Watch Dogs, the latest gamble taken by Ubisoft, will become a franchise, as Guillemot has already said that the company is going to take its time with the sequel.