Keep playing, keep paying: Ubisoft seeks games with “longterm engagement”

For a long time, Ubisoft was known for cranking out annual or near-annual releases in popular franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Far Cry, the Tom Clancy games, and more. Now, though, the company is signaling it is in the middle of a major change in direction, focusing on fewer big-game releases that draw long-term support from both developers and players.

“New releases now only represent a part of our business, which is now focused on longterm engagement with our player communities,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot writes in a sprawling 256-page annual report released this week. “Our players not only play for more hours at a time, but do so over a period of months or even years. We are thus able to offer them new experiences and content, thereby extending the lifetime of our games.”

Guillemot points to Rainbow Six: Siege as the primary example of this new focus; the game saw its player base double between February 2016 and February 2017. But continued developer refinement and player engagement with online-focused titles like The Division, For Honor, and Steep also reflect the company’s focus on “live” games, Guillemot says.

Ubisoft’s new focus doesn’t come entirely out of left field. For years now, the industry as a whole has been gravitating toward a “games as a service” model that prizes continuing support for existing games. Now, though, Ubisoft is being quite explicit in moving to “a model which is less dependent on releasing new games” and more focused on “developing numerous multiplayer games… which have dramatically increased player engagement.”