Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, flexed some of his corporate muscles and stated that Ubisoft is ahead of the pack in next gen game development because it invests more in this area than any other game company, in comments made to Eurogamer TV.
According to Guillemot, Ubisoft,s continued success will be due to its continued commitment to new research and development. "I think it’s our investment in the next-gen consoles. We invest more in the next-gen consoles than our competitors so we will create better quality games. We now have 2,900 people in our creative studios, and the goal is to keep opening new studios in new countries and increasing the size of some of the studios we have, we can continue to grow quite rapidly.”
This strategy of growth is in direct contrast to the majority of the game companies in which cutbacks and downsizing has been the norm.
Guillemot was extremely sanguine in his company,s prospect of expansion. “We want to continue to grow this year even if the market is going to go down, we expect, seven per cent. We expect to do more than five per cent growth, so over-perform the market by 12-15 per cent. In Europe we were number three [last year] and we want to be number two quickly; and in the US we were number five last year so we want to get as close as possible to the number two position. This year we hope we can gain one step in being number four.”
Ubisoft is planning to develop games in the sports and RPG categories. To date, much of the Ubisoft game catalog is heavily represented by shooters and military war games. The move to produce games outside of these areas is an attempt by the company to diversify and create a more balanced offering of game titles for consumers. Last year, Ubisoft purchased the assets of Microsoft Games Studio,s sports titles. Guillemot addressed Ubisoft,s entry into these different game genres by stating,
"We are interested still by sports and we are working on that, but we can’t say much now because it’s quite difficult to get in – but we will be there at one point. We are also very interested by RPG. And the RPG segment is really very close to the action-adventure segment where we are, so we think we can get in there quite quickly. In the future MMO will also be a big component but in the short term the RPG is really the kind of products we want to create."
While other game publishers continue to sink much of their development money into franchise titles, Ubisoft is taking the opposite route by researching and developing new material such as the games Assassin,s Creed and Red Steel. The decision to innovate may very well lead to Guillemot,s goal to see Ubisoft as the number two game publisher in the US.
