Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says that they will be pursuing open world games for the forseeable future, while making sure that if you want to spend less hours playing a title you’ll still feeling satisfied with the experience it offers.
In an interview with GI.biz, Guillemot was asked if Ubisoft would ever focus on smaller adventures like Assassin’s Creed Unity again.
“No,” he said. “Our goal is to make sure you can have a Unity within an Odyssey. If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories. You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue. You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences.”
Guillemot reasons that live service games are more profitable for the company, which also means the titles are cheaper to buy up front, even if You The Gamer ends up spending more later on.
“It is sustainable, because the world is big and the number of players that can play our games is immense,” says Guillemot. “What we’ve seen in the last few years is the number of players that play our games is constantly growing.
“New markets are opening up and games live a lot longer than before. So at the moment we see that we can continue to increase the investments because we know we can have a return on investment that can be quite long-tailed.”
Ubisoft is releasing two new open world games in 2020 – Gods & Monsters and Watch Dogs Legion – and purchasing extra content to continue playing them will be key to their longevity and success.
“Our teams don’t stop after launching the game,” Guillemot explained. “We have huge teams that continue to create content for players to stay in those universes they love to be in. The fact that we have some players buying items in these games is giving our teams the chance to continue creating that extra content.”
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