Keynote speech – Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft
Focusing on the upcoming challenges for Ubisoft – the second biggest player in the industry after EA. Almost entirely positive, which is a good thing for a keynote, but in my opinion dwelled a little over-long on the things that Ubisoft were doing rather than taking a more general industry-wide view.
The overriding theme was that of large market growth (backed up in a later talk quoting 68% growth of income in 2006). Ubisoft see the growth as being driven by 3 things: the new generation of console (increased power -> improved immersion -> increased sales). Not sure about that, but my cynicism relating to the new generation is well known. Also driving growth: accessible games, as evidenced by Nintendo DS and Wii. It definitely felt like Ubisoft view the Nintendo platforms as only good for family friendly, casual fun and learning titles, and the traditional AAA blockbuster titles are reserved for the 360 and PS3.
Finally, they echoed the sentiments from last year that user-generated content is driving growth too. Frankly, this rings hollow for me – where are the increased sales from this sort of content. Perhaps I’m too disconnected from the reality of mass marked gaming these days, but I’m just not aware of where this obsession with user generated content is coming from, or what evidence has appeared since last year to convince us that this new way of making games is actually here. I can understand wanting to build good community tools to improve the way people play their games and interact, especially in multi-player titles, but I’m not sure how that ties in to user generated content.
Onto Ubisoft’s actual strategy – for accessible titles on the Wii and DS, they’re focusing massively on usability and polish, and implied much smaller teams, and much smaller titles, developed quickly.. Fthey’re going for the big team, big cost approach for their AAA titles (200+ experienced staff is their idea of a ‘good size’ for teams). They know they need to increase sales to amortise their costs, but I’m not sure that they have any real way of doing that effectively. However, they do have the economies of scale, and the intelligence to try and maximise re-use of tools and engines to minimise their development costs.
Crucially, they know they face recruitment issues with such massive teams, not to mention the cost implications. As such, they are building whole teams (note, crucially they’re not outsourcing to independents, they’re building Ubisoft Studios), but in places where the cost is far cheaper.
Well, it must be nice to be such a big fish, but I’m not sure just how relevant that sort of strategy is to us, the little fish in the pond.