Ubisoft’s Guillemot not trippin’ about franchise fatigue
Ubisoft’s current focus to iterate its “major franchises” seems to expose its key brands to franchise fatigue and, with it, dwindling sales — just look what happened to sales of Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk when Acitivsion implemented a similar strategy. However, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot remains unconcerned about so-called franchise fatigue, as he emphasized today that the publisher’s goal is to “increase and come out more often” with games.
Speaking during a financial earnings call for investors, Guillemot expressed his belief that Ubisoft has taken plenty of time to develop the next installments in the Driver, Ghost Recon, Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell franchises — development time that will ultimately result in more iterations in less time, in turn improving brand visibility and training consumers to expect these franchises more often, and plan their gaming budgets accordingly. He also pointed out that sales of these upcoming titles should boost sales of their franchises’ legacy games.
Of course, with that said, Guillemot re-emphasized that quality is still important and that the company has invested (and continues to invest) in building game engines and tools that can be used for the next 10 years. The CEO noted that Ubisoft development teams our given enough time to ensure very high quality work, continuing that Ubisoft “takes those elements into consideration.”
Tags: development, driver, Gaming, ghost-recon, sequelitis, splinter-cell, ubisoft, yves-guillemot
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 16:35 and is filed under Gaming, PC.
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