14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft Toronto will become one of the most important studios for Ubisoft, according Jade Raymond, the managing director of the outift. She said that her team was aiming to grow to a staff of 800 employees in ten years and to work on five major triple-A projects in the future. The developer is currently working on the next Splinter Cell title, as well as another unannounced game.
Speak with Develop, Raymond declared that the new studio would be a great workplace for game developers. “The biggest draw we have is all the great things about a startup,” she said. “If developers have ambition to make triple-A projects, and want to have their place in what is a thriving start-up, the Ubisoft Toronto is the place for them. We have all that great stuff but much less of the risk, because we’re fully backed by Ubisoft and already have veteran staff.”
Both Ubisoft and the local government have invested a lot of money in the studio. The French publisher will stake 500 million Canadian dollars over a period of time. The Toronto administration will be contributing 250 million Canadian dollars because of the potential job openings and to allow the region to become a popular destination for game developers like Montreal and Edmonton are right now.
Raymond also talked about Ubisoft’s current strategy of creating triple-A games using multiple studios at once. The idea is to spread the workload to as many teams as possible and drastically shorten the development cycle. This is normal, according to Raymond, mainly because of the size of the projects. “Games are growing into huge-scale triple-A projects. If you look at any big brand like GTA, the games are being done across multiple studios and multiple teams,” she said. “Once your team reaches over 200 people – even if they’re in the same studio – you need complex management methods to make sure everything is held together; the feature development, the communication, and everything else.”