In recent years, Ubisoft has somewhat changed the direction of development of some of its franchises, focusing on large open-world games. And the other day, the head of Ubisoft, Yves Guillot, said that the company was going to continue in the same spirit, and explained why.
If you recall the recently announced and last released games from Ubisoft, you can easily notice an important similarity in them: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, The Division 2, Far Cry New Dawn, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Watch Dogs Legion and even the cartoon Gods & Monsters – all these are games with a large open world. Of course, this is no accident.
In a conversation with Games Industry, the head of Ubisoft, Yves Guillot, explained that this was no accident: the company is deliberately expanding the scale of games, and it is not going to return to more chamber stories like Assassin’s Creed Unity. More precisely, Ubisoft will tell similar stories, but not as separate games. According to Yves Guillot, why release a game for 15 hours if you can release a larger project for 60 hours, which will include the same 15-hour story?
Relatively speaking, now Ubisoft seeks to make games such that inside Odyssey you can find your Unity – and several other stories and stories besides it. Among other things, this is due to the fact that the company wants players to get more content for the money invested in the game. So, in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, players spend an average of 60 hours – while in Unity content was only enough for 15 hours.
According to Ubisoft, most gamers like this approach: in recent years, the number of players in Ubisoft projects has been steadily growing. Such popularity and relevance of large games give the company additional funds that it allows to create post-release content for already released projects, which allows to further increase their average “value” for the player. For this, Ubisoft also uses microtransactions – when you purchase some kind of jewelry in the store, you give developers the opportunity to release another update for the game with additional content.
Yves Guillot believes that in recent years the industry has changed a lot: games have become much larger, their life cycle has grown significantly – that is why Ubisoft is ready to invest more in their projects and make them bigger than before, because the company knows that gamers will continue to play their projects and investments will pay off in the end.
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