Ubisoft are potentially becoming a force to be reckoned with…
Something has become pretty noticeable at E3 over the last few years. A new convention has arisen which assumes and anticipates Ubisoft to reveal a surprise new IP at their conference which will be as mind-blowing as it is unexpected. This began with Watch Dogsin 2012, continued with Tom Clancy’s The Division in 2013, and has just again proven to be true with the reveal of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Siege. These surprises are just one part of the increasingly strong Ubisoft E3 conferences of late, which show off a wide variety of much anticipated games every year, and reflects the company’s rising status as a powerhouse of the gaming industry.
In March 1986, five brothers of the Guillemot family founded a computer game publisher, Ubisoft, in Carentoir, a small village located in the Brittany region of France. Today, Ubisoft is a multinational game developer and the 3rd largest video game publisher in the world, with branches across the globe and a plethora of immensely successful franchises under its belt. But what explains their success? Well, as with everything in the industry, it’s all to do with the games.
One thing that separates Ubisoft from EA is that the former has much less stigmatism, perhaps unfairly so, with corporatism and greed than the latter. This is thanks to Ubisoft’s willingness to consistently develop new, exciting and creatively fuelled games, alongside their more stable franchises (which coincidentally were all at one time these same new, exciting and creatively fuelled games). Whilst EA can always be relied upon to produce regular instalments of Battlefield, Fifa and The Sims, Ubisoft have brought us a range of games from small, indie-styled titles such as Child Of Light to those aforementioned new IPs such as Watch Dogs, all alongside their blockbuster franchises of Assassin’s Creed and the like.
Let’s remember that Ubisoft certainly doesn’t hold the perfect track record. This is the company that gave us plenty of mediocre movie-licensed games, Battle Tag and (*gasp*) “Mr Caffeine”. Even today, they’re still making PR blunders with the underwhelming and out of touch unveiling of Shape Up and their embarrassingly obnoxious statements concerning the latest Assassin’s Creed. They also have a tendency to announce games far too early, when they’re nowhere near ready for reveal. This results in delays, over-promising, and under-delivering; as seen in the case of Watch Dogs. Indeed, whilst Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Siege looks great, it should be noted that it is a rebuilt version of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Patriots, which was revealed all the way back in 2011. But what cannot be denied is that Ubisoft are always improving as a publisher and developer, as reflected in the rising quality of their E3 conferences.
Indeed their conference on Monday marked a new high for Ubisoft’s prescence at E3. Far Cry 4 looks amazing, Valiant Hearts appears not only to be utterly unique but lovingly hand-crafted out of pure melancholy, and frankly I think it’s a testament to Ubisoft’s quirkiness and individuality that theirs was the only conference in which their host Aisha Tyler so casually dropped the f-bomb. Ubisoft is a company which seems to be successfully walking the line between achieving business efficiency and allowing creative freedom. As a result, its popularity, reputation and success are as of now reaping the benefits.
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