Above: Early on Uplay, Ubisoft’s digital download platform.
GamesBeat: It’s interesting to see some strategies from people who have started out spreading everything across all platforms – especially larger companies – and now they seem to be honing in on particular platforms that work. EA is doing iOS exclusives for who knows how long, like Plants Vs. Zombies 2. They went that route on consoles, too, with exclusives for Microsoft. Is Ubisoft at that stage as well, where you’re just focusing on the platforms that work?
Early: We absolutely do focus on platforms where there’s a known market. But not to the exclusion of new platforms and new ventures. Ubisoft has a long reputation for being experimental. You look at how much we had on the Wii U. You look at how early we were on Kinect. You look at where we were on 3DS. We bet big on new platforms. How do we make an Ouya game? We were on Android. We talk to a lot of people about lots of things. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes it looks like we’re geniuses because we were there at the right time.
The genius is that we’re doing a lot of things on all kinds of platforms. We’ll continue to do that. In the day to day business, as we look at where we apply the bulk of our resources to develop, it’s a business decision. Is there an audience? Is there adequate distribution? Is there buying behavior?
GamesBeat: Some of these look like brand-new IPs on digital. Valiant Hearts — is that one of them?
Early: Valiant Hearts is a brand new IP. What you’re seeing, probably, and one of the things we’re looking at highlighting today, is that there are triple-A brands Ubisoft has that are doing amazing things digitally. And there are equally unknown, unheard-of IP that are someone’s creative passion. From my perspective, it’s great to see a company that can foster that. Ubi can say, “You can be as creative as you want to be. Build your passion. You don’t have to do that somewhere else. You can do that within a company that provides you with the support systems here and still make that creative game you want to make.”
GamesBeat: And you can also pull out these old IP and make them seem new. Dust off the old favorites that people have come to miss.
Early: Right. It’s different than just dusting off, though. We’ve definitely done that with PC back catalog sales or whatever. But most of the things you’re seeing here are reworkings of old IP. Endwar is faithful to the concepts of the original Endwar, but now it’s a massively multiplayer game where there are lots of people playing together. Might & Magic: The Duel of Champions takes some of the most beloved factions that people have played with over the years and puts them into a card game app. It’s a mechanic that people know and enjoy. The IP is set up unintentionally well for that, because of the breadth of characters and factions.
I would classify that more as, we look on a constant basis at the IP that we have. Have we done work on them? Have we created a lore around them? Is there a bible on it? Will they work with an existing or a new mechanic to bring that back to players?
Panzer General is a great example, doing Panzer General Online. That was a great game by SSI for many years. Then it went away and nothing was happening. We did an arcade game, which did okay, but not ideal. Now, the current execution is great.
Above: Ubiart
GamesBeat: A lot of these reimaginings seem to be in the areas that are working well, like card games.
Early: Part of what do is, whether it be with Ubiart or with the card game engine, when something is working, where do we go from there? How do we leverage that? That’s just good business. Far Cry Blood Dragon used the Far Cry 3 engine. It’s kind of overkill when you think about it from an arcade game perspective. You wouldn’t go out and develop a whole engine to make an arcade game. But now that we have it, you can make that game pretty easily and it ends up being a lot of fun.
GamesBeat: There seem to be areas where you could make some more calculated moves, into things like user-generated content or e-sports. What is some of the thinking in these kinds of areas that could be hot?
Early: We’ve flirted with eSports over the last year. We did a lot around ShootMania with IPL and some other partners. We’ve been doing things with Duel of Champions, a lot of physical events at GenCon and PAX and the whole Paris tournament. The learning that we’ve seen there has brought us to create The Next Level.
I would say that our titles aren’t structured, today, to be super hardcore eSports competitive. They’re not going to be popular at that level. Yet there are plenty of fans for each of these franchises. The concept we’ve come up with – this decathlon of gaming side of things – tends to make it approachable. I could never go compete in eSports. But I might be able to compete at this type of level. I might be able to dance better than the guy who can play Assassin’s multiplayer. [laughs] So that’s a little bit about how Ubisoft has gotten involved in the eSports space. A lot of that has come from where we’ve grown.
Mobile is another one of those spaces. The world mix of free-to-play versus premium games is like 90-plus percent free-to-play, probably. We’re still closer to 50-50, because some of the things our studios know how to do are more along the premium lines. Those games make money. They’re good games. You’re seeing us move toward that.
You also probably know, from watching Ubisoft for a long time, that we’re not a huge acquirer of companies. A lot of our focus has been on how to build that expertise internally. That tends to make us a little slower sometimes in some spaces, if it’s not something we were working on already.