TheRetroArcade
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Alex Hutchinson diagnoses the downward trajectory of his former employer.
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It's been a rough few years for Ubisoft. Skull and Bones became a $200 million folly, one of several failed attempts to capitalise on live-service popularity; staff are revolting due to layoffs, studio closures and a mandatory return-to-office command; and after years of trying to curtail the influence of Tencent, the Chinese publisher now controls more than 26% of newly-formed Assassin's Creed subsidiary Vantage Studios.
Alex Hutchinson, who served as Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3's creative director, before leaving Ubisoft to found Typhoon Studios in 2017, believes the company's fall is down to several factors, which have been hammering the publisher for a while now—it's why he left.
"It's a shame," he tells us. "I think a bunch of things happened. The style of development we pioneered was being able to manage big teams by letting them be individual groups with ownership of their own thing, to allow us to make bigger games faster. But then I think with the recent boom, there's been a weird five year boom in private equity and investment from people which we hadn't seen before ever. So a lot of senior people left Ubisoft and started studios or splintered off. So there was this talent drain that went out."
Hutchinson was among them. He co-founded Typhoon in 2017, which released its first game, Journey to the Savage Planet, in 2020. Unfortunately, Typhoon was acquired by Stadia in 2019, and when Google decided its experiment in cloud gaming had failed, Typhoon was one of its casualties.
With so much talent leaving, Hutchinson reckons, the massive scale of the company "suddenly became a noose". The pandemic only made things worse.
"If you have a team of 800 people," he says, "it's really hard to manage, even if they're in the same building. If they're not coming to work, how do you police them? How do you make sure what's going on is going on? And then juniors don't learn because they like working from home, and they don't like asking questions. So I think they lost that momentum as well."
Back when Ubisoft was fighting fit, it released Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Assassin's Creed 3 and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag in a mere six years. But in the last six years, we've just had Valhalla and Shadows. Mirage, too, I guess, but that was originally meant to be Valhalla DLC.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Fewer sequels isn't ...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
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From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
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It's been a rough few years for Ubisoft. Skull and Bones became a $200 million folly, one of several failed attempts to capitalise on live-service popularity; staff are revolting due to layoffs, studio closures and a mandatory return-to-office command; and after years of trying to curtail the influence of Tencent, the Chinese publisher now controls more than 26% of newly-formed Assassin's Creed subsidiary Vantage Studios.
Alex Hutchinson, who served as Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3's creative director, before leaving Ubisoft to found Typhoon Studios in 2017, believes the company's fall is down to several factors, which have been hammering the publisher for a while now—it's why he left.
"It's a shame," he tells us. "I think a bunch of things happened. The style of development we pioneered was being able to manage big teams by letting them be individual groups with ownership of their own thing, to allow us to make bigger games faster. But then I think with the recent boom, there's been a weird five year boom in private equity and investment from people which we hadn't seen before ever. So a lot of senior people left Ubisoft and started studios or splintered off. So there was this talent drain that went out."
Hutchinson was among them. He co-founded Typhoon in 2017, which released its first game, Journey to the Savage Planet, in 2020. Unfortunately, Typhoon was acquired by Stadia in 2019, and when Google decided its experiment in cloud gaming had failed, Typhoon was one of its casualties.
With so much talent leaving, Hutchinson reckons, the massive scale of the company "suddenly became a noose". The pandemic only made things worse.
"If you have a team of 800 people," he says, "it's really hard to manage, even if they're in the same building. If they're not coming to work, how do you police them? How do you make sure what's going on is going on? And then juniors don't learn because they like working from home, and they don't like asking questions. So I think they lost that momentum as well."
Back when Ubisoft was fighting fit, it released Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Assassin's Creed 3 and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag in a mere six years. But in the last six years, we've just had Valhalla and Shadows. Mirage, too, I guess, but that was originally meant to be Valhalla DLC.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Fewer sequels isn't ...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?