Ubisoft learns lessons, will focus more on experimental projects
Watch Dogs released in 2014 after spending several years as one of the most anticipated games of recent times thanks to a number of impressive trailers and showcases at events such as E3. Despite being a commercial success, the title garnered plenty of negative press and criticism from players who believed that they had been misled as to the visual effects that would appear in-game as well as the graphical capabilities of Watch Dogs.
In an interview with The Guardian, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has revealed how the French publisher has now learned lessons from the mistakes it made with Watch Dogs and other titles and would now focus on showing the players how games play on typical machines rather than the ultimate visuals on high-performance machines.
“With E3 2015 we said, OK, let’s make sure the games are playable, that they’re running on the target machines,” said Guillemot. “When we show something, we ask the team, make sure it’s playable, make sure gamers can immediately see exactly what it is. That’s what we learned from the Watch Dogs experience – if it can’t be played on the target machine, it can be a risk.”
Guillemot later went on to explain how Ubisoft Reflections, the internal development studio based in Newcastle, UK started work on the platformer Grow Home without informing executives. She stated:
“[Managing director] Pauline Jacquey said ‘we’re going to do a game that’s so cheap we don’t need your approval – we have something that’s already good enough’. When I saw it for the first time it was 60% done. I like that approach. When a project costs more than $5m we need to look at it because it can go wrong. But when it’s €200,000 to €300,000, they can make all the decisions they need to make it happen.”
This type of new pitching process as well as a widening of the company’s focus to not just AAA releases, means that games like Child of Light and Valiant Hearts: The Great War are able to be developed without too much interference from the upper echelons of the publisher. This is something that appears to have helped those games immensely too, as each has been a commercial and critical success.