Over the summer, French publisher Ubisoft kicked off a new digital publishing division to take advantage of the growing digital games sector. Spearheading the division for the Americas is Chris Early, a former Microsoft games veteran with a wealth of knowledge about the industry.
IndustryGamers recently sat down with Early to get his take on the growth of digital, Ubisoft's position, and the impact of new technologies like cloud computing, motion controls and 3D. Our full Q&A is below.
IndustryGamers: How did the opportunity to join Ubisoft come your way? Why did you join, and what is your primary goal on the digital side now?
Chris Early: I’ve had a long-standing respect for Ubisoft being progressive in the online space. I worked with them on a project six or seven years ago, Shadowbane, and saw their advances then. Of course, during my time with Mplayer and Gamespy and the online space, they were always a great publisher to work with. Over time, I talked with [CEO] Yves [Guillemot], I talked with [Ubi North America President] Laurent [Detoc] about where they were going in the digital space and this position came of those conversations. I’m pleased to be part of it and helping a great publisher with great brands bring their stuff online and involve people in maybe some new ways. That’s really what digital publishing is all about – focusing on everything that is destined for digital delivery, whether that’s our Assassin’s Creed games that are destined for digital delivery across consoles or across the PC, all the way down to a simple Facebook game that’s designed around our brands or something else that Ubisoft does. It’s all focused on that digital delivery: Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, iPad, iPhone, web-based games, and so forth.
IG: It seems like Ubisoft has been a little bit behind some of the other publishers in that digital push. EA has been very, very focused on online and pushing out digital, and of course they acquired Playfish, so that helps.
CE: I think Ubisoft was really strong, and has always been an innovator in platforms and technologies. You kind of see that a little bit with the stuff around Kinect, and if you look back in time Ubisoft was very strong in multiplayer, originally. They even came out strong in the MMO space when they did Shadowbane and Myst Online... And they did okay with those games and they kind of retrenched a little bit. If you remember, some of the Tom Clancy games were some of the best tactical multiplayer games for a while, and they kind of stepped away from that for a while, and while that did put them a little bit behind from some of the online space, it also kind of saved some of the bruises along the way as a number of other people saw. Now, I think what we realize is we have something that we can bring to the table easily, which is great brands and great gameplay experiences. To bring that across the board in all the media types that are available now is going to be a challenge for us. Yeah, we have a little catching up to do, but it’s not around the great games or the great brands; it’s about getting that onto Facebook or getting that on the iPad or getting our Arcade games out there. The thing is that we have many studios across many countries that are making great games, and my role here is to focus on the Americas: North America, Central America, and South America, and to bring those great games to people all across the digital landscape.
IG: Is there any one particular digital platform that you see as a bigger opportunity than the others? For example, the iPad or the iPhone - do you see that as a better opportunity for Ubisoft’s products than Facebook, or is it all sort of equal ground for you?
CE: I think that the real challenge is we have a lot of opportunities on all those platforms because, frankly, millions of our players play on those platforms. The real challenge is delivering a play experience to our players that lets them play or experience the brand wherever they want to. When you want to play a Might and Magic game and there’s one on the iPad, you can, or if you want to play something about Assassin’s, and there’s a Facebook game about that, then you can. I think of it like baseball. I’m sure you know people who love baseball.
IG: Yeah, I’m a huge baseball fan myself.
CE: Then you know: you’re at games, you talk about it with people at work, you read about it in the paper, you may even subscribe to some magazines. You get to experience your passion in a whole variety of places. Right now, one of the drawbacks, I think, in video games, is that many times I can only experience that passion in one place: in my living room in front of the big screen. I want to take that further, and not just on a fan site where I read about something, but in a way that is meaningful to my gameplay and where I can interact.
IG: It almost seems that on the digital side with the social games that the IP actually is not as important. You could be very successful in that space with some new IP that nobody’s ever heard of. It seems like with Ubisoft, obviously, they have a great wealth of intellectual properties and it’s your role to bring those properties over to these digital platforms. Do you see that necessarily as an advantage? Does it really give you a leg up or does it not matter? I’ve seen conflicting opinions on that.
CE: In the long run... it’s true that you can succeed with a no-name IP, and that's because it’s about the play; it’s not about the IP. At the core of everything, it’s got to be fun. If it’s a fun game with no IP, then it’s still fun to play. When you combine the fun game with a good brand, you get very much of an accelerant effect, because then you’ve got a good brand which draws people and great gameplay. So, we’re always better off with great brands, but it needs to be a fun game. It needs to be a great game for that to work. I don’t want to name any names, but I’m sure you can name some big brands that have been utter flops because the game on the fourth or fifth or sixth iteration, or whatever, is not a good game anymore.
IG: When you look at the growth path for the new digital division that you’re heading up, how do you outline the steps? What, in your mind, are the next steps for Ubisoft’s digital dominance?
CE: Dominance? I don’t know, we’ll settle for ten percent of the market share for a while, and then we’ll go from there. The real steps are, for us, communicating with our players. It’s establishing that one-to-one relationship with our players. We’ve begun to do that with a program we call Uplay; you may have heard about it last year. This year is the beginning of a relationship that we’re establishing one-to-one with our players. Not just that somebody’s bought a game, played a game, and they’re gone, but now they buy a game, they play a game, [and] they have a reason to stay connected with us that transcends game-to-game. It’s making those players aware of the different offerings that we have in different places. Not everybody playing one of our games today is going to think about looking on Facebook, or looking on the Arcade, or to look on the iPhone for games that might relate as well. So, we have an education process ahead of us, and we have a content process as well. The folks in Paris, the editorial team, need to focus on, “how do we look at all of these platforms as a place to develop our brands across?” And when they think about a game's strategy, they have to consider it as that whole family of opportunities that are there, not just maybe the core of, “I’m going to have it be an Xbox and PlayStation 3 game, but I’m also going to have the elements that affect it in a whole variety of other places.”
IG: Is there a certain percentage that you would anticipate digital becoming of Ubisoft’s overall business revenues?
CE: (laughter) No, I can’t comment on that.
IG: In terms of the different types of platforms, do you see the social and mobile audience as being quite different from the traditional console/PC gamer? It does seem to be more female or middle-age female. I guess there are people in my age group or hardcore gamers that do play those social games or iPhone games, but there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between the two sectors.
CE: Two things. I think you’re right that the different platforms have different primary demographics that play on them. When you talk about Facebook, there certainly are a lot of people who fit the demo of female and over 35 who play a lot of the social games. On the other hand there’s over 500 million people on Facebook, so there’s big numbers in any demographics. I’m okay with even the smallest slices that are there. The other side of it is when you look at Ubisoft’s brands, we’re a very broad-based company. We absolutely have hardcore games with all the Ghost Recon games... but we also have a very casual or broad focus as well. When you look at games like Your Shape or the Rabbids franchise, or things like that, there’s a breadth that we have here. It’s one of the great reasons that I feel happy about joining is because there’s a bunch of tools to work with. We really can make a game that appeals to a bunch of people on a bunch of platforms.
IG: Do the new technologies like Kinect, Move or the 3D push have any impact on what you’re doing? Does that factor at all into your focus?
CE: Well, eventually, when Kinect is available for Arcade, it will. Microsoft has chosen not to make that technology useable by Arcade games yet. So yes, certainly from the standpoint of the digital versions of those core games as they release. That’s what I’m supposed to do is help bring those games back to a digital download version so you don’t have to necessarily get it through the disc-based version.
IG: So I guess that would also follow then whenever Sony gets into more digital releases of PlayStation Move compatible games? Ubisoft can be right there?
CE: That’s right.
IG: What is your overall viewpoint on some of these new technologies and the growth of the industry? Do you think they’re going to be major accelerators for the games business?
CE: I’m excited about them because I think it opens the market further. Any time that you take and make anything easier to access, you’re opening up the marketplace for broader usage. Now, whether that’s going to drive console sales or whatever, I’m not the guy to tell you what the numbers might be, but just from an overall perspective, I’m looking forward to being able to take advantage of all those technologies in all the games that we’re making that address all those different platforms. It’s certainly a lot easier, when you think about it, if it’s already all there, to use gestures as an interface as opposed to buttons as an interface.
