What Is Ubisoft's 'Ambitious PC Project'?
Poor old Ubisoft has taken a few money-knocks, admit its latest financial results, which involved a $74.1m / £45.5m loss for the last fiscal year. This has, sadly, led to the cancellation of several unnamed games. Everyone's praying it's not Beyond Good & Evil 2, of course, but it'll probably be a while until we find out what definitely faced the axe. However, a piece of good news for RPS-types is that the reorganisation (which is a word that sounds like it's positive but actually means lay-offs, closures and cancellations) resulting from these bad times has lead to Ubi looking more confidently at the PC as a gaming platform...
Said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot in a press release, "In the coming days, we will officially announce an ambitious project on PC based on one of our top gamer franchises that will illustrate our capacity to take advantage of new business models."
Which sounds like a) an MMO sorta thing b) A Facebook kinda thing c) a free-to-play kinda thing. Or all of the above.
Top gamer franchises? Let's see, we've got Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy's Whatever Else They Want To Put There, The Settlers... Any and all of those would make for pretty fascinating online-centric projects in their own right. BUT WHICH?
Ongoing rumours of an Assassin's Creed: Revelations, fuelled by some ARGy stuff and quiet name-slips, have led to speculation this PC title is its true identity. Maybe. I know Brotherhood did exceptionally well on consoles though, so I'd be enormously surprised if they turned that franchise away from console.
Always good to hear of any publisher recognising the superiority of the once and future king of gaming platforms, eh? STRONG LIKE OX. Oops, got a bit fervent there. Must calm down; I'm a 32 year old man, I should be beyond such behaviour.
It's not all doom and gloom for Ubi, by the way- while its income was a net loss, its sales were up some 19%. Which basically means they're selling truckloads of games, but not earning enough money from them. Earn more from your games, publisher!