Ubisoft from 2003 to 2011

So far now. In our last episode, which if you haven't heard, I recommend you do listen to that, I talked about how a group of brothers, the Guilement Brothers, founded a video game software company after the family business of selling farm equipment started to lou Steen, we walked through the early days of the company and how most of the titles aren't really well known outside of Europe until you get to Rayman, which in turn was more

popular in Europe than in North America. We learned about Ubisoft expanding, opening up numerous development studios, first in Europe, then later in China and then Montreal in Canada. And we heard about how UBI Soft acquired a company called red Storm out of North Carolina that had a license

for Tom Clancy's intellectual properties. We concluded just as the company was rebranding, turning UBI soft, which was two words, into ubi soft one word, and getting the swirl logo that would be associated with the company for more than a decade. Okay, that was the super short version of episode one, but go back and listen to it if you haven't heard it yet, because there's a lot in there. Now, let's pick up where we left off. Ubisoft's acquisition of

Red Storm paid off in lots of ways. First, there was that access to licensing Tom Clancy properties, which would prove to be quite popular. Second, the development team had the skill set to create types of games that the rest of Ubisoft just hadn't really tackled before they didn't have those skills, and a big part of that skill set was based out of multiplayer gameplay elements. Microsoft's Xbox

console opened up new options for multiplayer games. While multiplayer was already going strong on PCs and had been since the old Land party days. Land stands for Local Area network and even earlier in the days where you know, two people would share a single PC to play multiplayer games, there were only a few consoles that had attempted to work in multiplayer modes over the internet, you know, beyond the living room experience where you would just play on

the same couch. In fact, if I recall correctly. The Sega Dreamcast was really the only real console of note that also supported play over a modem, and the Dreamcast didn't really sell that well, so there wasn't much action on those networks. Microsoft launched the Xbox Live service one year to the day after the debut of the original Xbox on November two thousand two. Ubisoft wanted to embrace

multiplayer formats. They suspected that these would play a much larger role in video games in the future, so the company leaned very heavily on red Storm to make that

dream a reality. An early game that demonstrated this capability was Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, a game that the Red Storm team had begun developing shortly after Ubisoft acquired them in two thousand and Originally, it was for the Windows PC platform, and red Storm under Ubisoft would bring this to the Mac, uh, the Xbox, the PS two, and

the GameCube. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the splinter Cell game merged the Tom Clancy license with game elements that were built for an abandoned project act called

The Drift. It originally started in a New York studio that had been shut down and then kind of migrated to Montreal, UH and they had additional features added in to create a stealth based game in which players were encouraged to take to the shadows and and move with stealth in order to achieve mission goals in each level. The game was a commercial and critical success, bringing in numerous awards like the Game Developers Choice Award for Excellence

in Writing. Likewise, the Prince of Persia game that came out in two thousand three would bring home a ton of awards, including eight Interactive Achievement Awards. But while teams were celebrating big successes and pulling over a couple of failures as well, there was a bit of a crisis brewing. In two thousand four, Eve Guilmant, one of the five brothers who founded Ubisoft and the company's CEO, received a

phone call from an Electronic Arts representative. Now, I've talked a lot about Electronic Arts or e A in recent episodes. For example, in an episode about the three D O gaming system, I talked about how e A founder Trip Hawkins, took a huge risk that ultimately didn't pay off to found a new company, and how e A eventually did him dirty and kicked him when he was already down,

or at least while he was sauntering vaguely downwards. To steal a quote from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Well, e A has a long history of making moves that rubbed other people the wrong way, and this was another example of that. Eve was told by the representative that

Electronic Arts had quietly acquired shares in Ubisoft. Of those shares so one fifth of the company, in fact, which made e A the largest shareholder outside of the brothers themselves, and with that kind of steak, e A could potentially throw its weight around to help determine Ubisoft's direction. The brothers and the leadership within Ubisoft talked about the move and determined that they would reject an outright acquisition offer

if such a thing were to follow. Behind this announcement, the concern was that e A was at the time to business oriented, and they had a reputation for quote not caring too much about creative end quote that was according to even an interview he gave with Game Informer magazine. Now just a side note here, as I think that comment is really interesting. See when Hawkins first founded e

A many years earlier. It was all in a reaction to how other video game companies, namely Atari, at the time, we're churning out product while not crediting the people who were making the actual games. The original ethos at e A was that games were a type of art, and that the developers were artists who deserved recognition and acknowledgement.

In fact, at one point, e A was hoping to create something like a personality driven business model, and that gamers would gravitate towards specific game titles because they would associate the particular creators of those games with stuff they liked, whether it was, you know, a style of gameplay or a particular gift of story or whatever. But over time the ethos changed at e A, and what had been part of the founding principles of the company was largely discarded.

Anyway back to Ubisoft. Generally speaking, the mood within Ubisoft was largely anti e A around this time, with lots of people saying that they would rather leave the company entirely than become a part of Electronic Arts. The message

was loud and clear. The management team, already determined to prevent a takeover, really buckled down once it was clear that the feeling at large within the company was against any sort of e A merger, but it meant that they needed to be extra careful in how they did business to avoid, you know, opening up an opportunity for e A to take control of more shares than get possession of the company through you know, a proxy battle.

According to the management team who spoke in that game and former interview I've mentioned, this meant that Ubisoft had to pump the brakes a bit when it came to expansion plans. Ubisoft itself would put decisions about acquiring other companies on hold, or at least slowing them down slightly. As we go through this episode, it will become clear that Ubisoft has always been expansion hungry. EA for its part,

wasn't making any aggressive moves at the time. In fact, Eve has said that the people from e A with whom he spoke they were all quite nice. And in two thousand seven, a former e A executive who had left e A and then returned and became the new CEO of eight spoke out. His name is John Richie Taylo, and he reached out to Ubisoft and he let them know that he had no intention of making any sort of acquisition moves without the express approval of Ubisoft. There

would be no hostile takeover. In other words, and in t e A would actually sell off its shares and thus in the potential for a hostile takeover. But the possibility hungover Ubisoft for six years. EA never really pushed for anything more, but it was still a looming cloud. In the end, it did more to shape Ubisoft's corporate culture and again slow down plans for expansion rather than any other kind of outcome. So we know that that

story turns out okay for Ubisoft. But let's get back to what else was going on at the company while this specter of a potential hostile takeover loomed over everyone. And this wouldn't be the last time this would happen to Ubisoft, by the way. That's what we call foreshadowing, and we'll learn more a about that in the episode that follows this one, because this is a big story. One thing that happened with Ubisoft was a collaboration with another games studio called cry Tech c R y t

e K. That company has its headquarters in Germany. The company developers had created a game engine called cry Engine. You'll you'll get a lot of crying in this episode for multiple reasons. And a quick word about game engines. These are software development environments that contain the various tools and operations that allow developers to build games inside the game engine without having to do all the lower level

programming themselves. You can do stuff like define the draw distance and tweak physics and so on, and the game engine essentially relays those changes to computer hardware in such a way that you get the end result you want. Now, that's a super high level overview of what a game engine does. It moves the starting point for game development further along than zero, though there's always a ton of stuff left to do. I don't mean to say like the game engine magically does all the work for you.

It's it's just a helpful environment within which you can build games. So anyway, cry Tech builds out this game engine and also creates a demo to show off what this engine could potentially do, which included some fairly impressive

stuff like rendering large outdoor spaces. This can sometimes be a tricky task and one that requires a decent amount of processing power on the game's machine, which led earlier game developers to rely on, you know, a little cheats, kind of like using fog to limit the draw distance of an outdoor area. You know, you'd think, oh, I should be able to see much further, but because it's foggy, I can't. Well, that helps you get around this technical issue.

Cry Tex demo, which was called x Isle Dinosaur Island, impressed people at Ubisoft when they got a look at it at an E three conference a few years earlier. The two companies work together with Critech building out a full game using this game engine, and it was called

Far Cry, which Ubisoft would publish. Far Crime is a first person shooter game in which the player controls the character named Jack Carver in the first game, and he's attempting to locate a person he believes as a journalist who is on an island after the two of them have become separated at the very beginning of the game.

And it's kind of a one against many style of game in which the player can make use of the environment and try to you know, hide and use stealth to help even the odds against all these enemies that are on screen at once. And the game had several features that critics really liked, including the capabilities of the game engine with those large draw distances, and the enemy AI,

which seemed realistic. In the batties would sometimes call for reinforcements, or they would run to get behind cover, or they would attempt to split their forces so that some of them could flank you, and so on. The story is kind of a mixture of a Rambo movie and the

Island of Dr Moreau with some sci fi elements. That Play and Ubisoft would publish the Critech developed game in two thousand four, and subsequently Ubisoft purchased the intellectual property that and that build of the cry engine as well. So at this point, the cry Engine splits into two pathways. The cry Tech path continues to be the original cry engine,

and then they upgrade that over time. The UBI Soft path would eventually be renamed the Dounia Engine, based off the original cry Engine, but then tweaked by UBI Soft and Ubisoft Montreal would become the primary studio in charge of developing future far Cry titles, and I'm sure we'll chat about a couple of those further along in these episodes. The franchise has been a pretty strong performer in the market overall, although some entries have received um more love

than others. As for cry Tech, that studio is still updating the cry engine. It's still developing games, most notably the Crisis series c R Y S I S. I guess you're picking up on the naming convention by now with cr Tech, cry Engine, Far Cry and Crisis. The company has opened and frequently closed studios in various cities around the world, and maybe someday I will do a full episode about them. But let's get back to Ubisoft. In two thousand five, the company opened up the first

UBI Soft campus, and this one is again in Montreal. Now, this was actually part of an overall expansion of the Montreal studio, and it was helped considerably by some rather generous support from the Canadian and Quebec governments. Ubisoft received millions of dollars in grants and tag incentives, and in return, the company was creating more jobs in the Montreal area and was building out a learning center to teach coding and game development. And we would see this happen again

and again with UBI Software. The company would expand, but it was doing so very strategically, expanding in places where they could get these sweet kind of incentives to put a studio there because those studios were employment centers. So there was this mutual beneficial relationship, and Ubisoft was very good at picking places where the company was benefiting not just through expansion but getting this help through incentives, etcetera.

So the company also established a developer studio in Quebec City, Quebec, which is about two KOs or about a hundred fifty

miles away from Montreal. The early work of that studio was largely in support of projects from other Ubisoft studios, you know, like porting games that have been develop for one platform for other platforms, or developing DLC that's downloadable content material for established franchises, and they would later produce full titles in one of the company's most popular franchises.

More on that to come. Around this same time, Ubisoft Montreal was working on a new game engine of their own, and it was originally called Scimitar, though it would later change names and become Anvil, followed by Anvil Next, and the intent was to create a foundation for a Prince

of Persia sequel. This was around the time when the next generation of video game consoles was on the Horizon, the next generation in this case being the Xbox three sixty which came out in two thousand five, and the PlayStation three and Nintendo we both of which would come out in two thousand six. Ubisoft was hard at work building the tools they would need to develop, you know,

games for those platforms. The team gradually came to the conclusion that the engine they were building would allow them to create an all new i P that is, intellectual

property if they could get buy in from leadership. Sara Jaskaway, the head of creative, would come on board fairly early on, and Haskaway had been reading the novel Alamute, a novel set in the Middle East in the eleventh century and featuring the historical assassins not just assassins, but assassins with a big a. The team built out a concept video for a game they had in mind in which the

player would control an assassin in an ancient setting. The video was pre rendered, but it showed off a concept of what the gameplay would look like, including how stealth could be used in a game, along with acrobatic stunts, kind of similar to what they had already done with Prince of Persia, and the video ended with the protagonist

riding out of a city on horseback. The team pitched the idea to Eve Guilmant, who was impressed, and he agreed that they could build out a new I P and that was the beginning of the very first Assassin's Creed game. I'll talk about more after we take this quick break. Okay, first things first, While I am not covering every single entry of every single game ever produced or distributed by Ubisoft, because that would take forever, there

are literally hundreds of them. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge a two thousand six title that came out for a Nintendo we before we go back to Assassin's Creed, and that is Rayman Raving Rabbits, which introduced us to these weird little rabbit critters that acted like manic antagonists and they're kind of like a rabbit

version of the minions from the Despicable Me franchise. While they began as a spinoff of Rayman, they in turn would fuel numerous games, include ing a crossover game called Mario plus Rabbids Kingdom Battle, in which rabbids and characters from the Super Mario series would appear together and that game is a tactical role playing game, as you probably

would guess from the mixture now. I mentioned it here because while Kingdom Battle would come out much much later in it was just remarkable to me that Ubisoft created some characters that would ultimately crossover when Nintendo's beloved and heavily protected i P. That's something Nintendo does not typically do. It is very rare for Nintendo to allow their first party characters to appear with characters from other companies like that,

outside of like a Smash Brothers game. Before I jump into more Assassin's Creed, let me also talk about intellectual property and why the decision to make a new i P was actually a really big deal and a lot of the is intuitive, but I think it's good to just cover it now. When it comes to i P,

you've got to weigh risk versus reward. When you're building out a brand new i P, you have no idea if it's going to catch on with the general public, or, in the case of video games, with the game playing public. So you want to create something that's going to capture the interest and attention of your audience, whether it's gamers or a TV audience. Or movies or whatever. And again, all this is intuitive, So the i P needs to make people want to experience the thing like the game,

and sometimes this can be tough to judge. For every game franchise that becomes a big hit, there are dozens of games that, for one reason or another just didn't catch on, and some of them are just bad games, and that in itself is a problem. You have to make sure that the actual game is good or even the coolest concept is going to fall short cough the order eight six cough. On the other hand, if you manage to establish an i P, then developing a new

game in that series represents a much lower risk. At least initially, you know that there's already a built in audience for that game. So if you're deciding where to dedicate resources like talent, money, and time, all of which you have in limited amounts, you have to weigh all of these decisions. Do you take a risk and try to make something new without knowing if there's an audience for it, or do you go with the slightly safer route then try to give people more of what they've

already loved. Now, the danger of going with option two is that you can overstay you're welcome, or you can create a development cycle that proves to be unsustainable, things that you could argue would apply to the Assassin's Creed series at a certain point where a new title was coming out essentially every year. So getting the approval to build a new I P was actually a really big deal, and once the team behind Assassin's Creed got the green light,

they dove into deep research. They were determined to represent the historical setting and the assassins accurately, since this was a game about the historical Assassin's not simply about an assassin with a little a According to the developers, they even had representatives who trace their lineage back to those historic first assassins centuries ago, and they visited the studio

to make sure that the representation was accurate. I imagine knowing that you have the descendants of the original assassins looking over your shoulder is a little intimidating. The team admitted that actually building an open world game, one where the player has freedom to explore regions of the map without having to follow a linear pathway, and they can go vertically. You can climb up buildings and swing on polls, and all this kind of stuff. All of that presented

big challenges. They would later say that the research part was actually easy compared to making the game mechanics work within the setting they had designed. In all, the development for the first Assassin's Creed game would take four years, so they would finally release in two thousand seven. On top of that, the team came up with an idea that would mean the game wouldn't just be a straightforward historical fantasy game. There was a science fiction element to

it too. Now, according to Sair jasco A, a French Canadian developer named Patrice de Sel was well the one to insert the science fiction elements into the Assassin's narrative. So let me give you a very quick overview. Within the Assassin's Creed universe. There are multiple storylines that are all unfolding in different eras. In the present day of the game, which is a present that has technology more advanced than what you would find in our real world.

Engineers have created a technology called the animus. Now. This allows users to enter into a virtual representation of their genetic memory. This means that you can relive the memories

of one of your ancestors. So the parts of the game set back in history are in fact virtual representations of genetic memories, and it would turn out that the conflict you lived out in those historical eras, which is a conflict between two ideologically opposed factions, those being the Templars and the Assassins, that conflict is still going on in the present day, with the storylines from history interweaving into those in the present, and it all gets really complicated,

involves a lot of science fiction technology, it involves in ancient race of human noids that predate humans, and odd mythology, and honestly, I lose the thread after a while. It's super complicated. Now, in my personal opinion, the modern day parts of the game aren't that fun for me, and I don't really care for that story. I like them being kind of more episodic, where they're just self contained

stories within the historical era. But I also know a lot of people who really love the lore and story of the game, So again that's just my take. Then again, the more complicated mythology woven into the history of humanity also gets so convoluted. But I am a simple man incapable of following such complicated plots, So that's probably on me.

Desla would go on to become the early creative head of this franchise, because, in case you didn't know, Assassin's Creed would in fact become a full series of games. I figure it's a good idea to sort of follow up with his own personal story with the company here, because I don't think I'm going to return to it that much in the rest of the episode, so we're

just gonna find out what happened with right now. He had worked on several titles, including Prince of Persia of the Stands of Time before Assassin's Creed, and he would also serve as the creative lead on Assassin's Creed two, and he would work on Assassin's Creed Brotherhood before he made the decision to leave Ubisoft. He would go on to work at a different game developer called th h Q, a company that I definitely need to cover in a

future episode of Tech Stuff anyway. Desill would work for a th h Q for just a couple of years because the company was already on unsteady ground when des joined in two thousand eleven, and less than two years later, the company had to declare bankruptcy and it's sold off. It's Montreal office, which is where desl was working. And guess who bought it? You got it, It was Ubi Soft.

So de s leaves Zubi Soft, only for Ubisoft to come back and scoop up the company he had been working for, so or at least scoop up the assets of that company. So de se and Ubisoft could not come to an agreement regarding his re employment, and so the two parted ways. Now. According to de Sile, the parting was rather brusque and he was escorted off the premises without the opportunity for him to say goodbye to

his co workers. And he would go on to found another video game company of his own called Panash Digital Games, which just last year released a game titled Ancestors the Humankind Odyssey. That game has mixed reviews. Anyway, let's get back to Ubisoft. The company really got behind Assassin's Creed as the game prepared to launch in two thousand seven on the next generation of consoles again, the Xbox three sixty,

the p S three, and the Wii. The PR and marketing efforts aligned behind the creative team and there was a big push for it. The four years of development also happened to coincide with a relatively quiet period in the video games market, at least when it comes to launching new I p There were a lot of sequels

coming out, but not a lot of new stuff. So Assassin's Creed would benefit from the fact that there just weren't many other new ideas hitting the market at that time, and it helped the game stand out among the various sequels and spinoffs. The reception for the game was largely positive. It was a commercial success, and the development team was already at work on the sequel, which took a big gamble.

So the first game featured a modern day character named Desmond, who then gets put into the animus and he goes through the genetic memories of his ancestor named Altaire. This character lived in the late twelfth and early thirteen centuries. He actually, in lore lives to the right old age of ninety two, which is not bad for an assassin.

The two thousand nine sequel, Assassin's Creed Too, would still follow Desmond in the present day, but the historical setting of the game would center around a different genetic ancestor of Desmond's. This would be a Florentine named et Ceo, who lived in the fifteenth century, and so the historical setting of Assassin's Creed two was in the Renaissance, giving the game a different style and opening up new possibilities

for the development team. Assassin's Creed two and the games that would spend off of it would go on to become a critical success and a commercial success, and was seen by many to be a truly superior st worry

to the original Assassin's Creed. The franchise would become a backbone for Ruby Soft, one of the most popular ones in their arsenal As I record this episode the most recent chapter in the saga Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which follows the exploits of a Viking as the historical setting component, has broken sales records of all previous games in the

Assassin's Creed series. Now, I'm sure I will pop back to Assassin's Creed a bit as we go on, but just in case I don't, my own personal favorite entry was Assassin's Creed for Black Flag because it was set in the era of piracy, and pirate games are some of my favorites. Now, all that being said, I also have to admit I have not played most of the Assassin's Creed games. I've played like four of them, so

my experiences with them is still extremely limited. Jumping back a bit, while the company was working on the first Assassin's Creed game in two thousand and six, it also bought some i P from another company. That other company was Atari, which was a very different company from the one that had produced the Atari Jaguar console. If you remember from our last episode, that was the console that served as the launch point for Rayman, and that in turn was a very different company from the Atari that

had created the game console. But that's a story for a different podcast. In fact, Chuck Bryant of stuff you should know, and I did a whole series about Atari, because that that is a complicated history. The i P that Ubisoft purchase from Attari was for a game franchise called Driver, and the deal was valued at around twenty four million bucks, a princely some but not a prince of persian ly some. The UK studio behind the i P, called Reflections Interactive, was part of the deal and became

Ubisoft Reflections. So they didn't just get the intellectual property, they got the development studio responsible for it. Interestingly, the Reflections Studio traces its history back to the mid nineteen eighties, the same time that Ubisoft itself was taking shape. But while I'm tempted to give a rundown of Reflection studio zone history, I figure I should probably restrain myself and

stick with UBI Soft. So also in two thousand six, Ubisoft would release Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for the Xbox three sixty. This game would break company records for most copies sold in the first week than any other Ubisoft game up to that point. That would go on to get positive reviews and awards as well, making another success in the Tom Clancy licensed material that came

out of the Red Storm studio. Ubisoft opened more development studios as well, including one in Bulgaria and another Chinese studio, this time in Chengdu, and the company continued to expand as well. It honestly amazed me to learn about all the development studios around the world that Ubisoft overseas. I knew that Ubisoft was a big company, I had no clue how many different studios are under the corporate banner until I researched these episodes. The company just opened up

offices everywhere and acquired so many other development studios. Within Ubisoft Montreal, a group of developers were hard at work on the next Far Cry game, and they were tweaking that old Cry engine and converting it into the Dounia engine. This game would incorporate some new elements, namely destructible environments,

which is always a fun addition to video games. There's nothing like seeing your actions are actually affecting the game world around you, as opposed to games where you know you can do something like fire endless clips, say into a table, and maybe you'll see a mark up here on the table, maybe where it shows where the bullet hit, and maybe that mark will even stick around for longer than a minute or two. But Far Cry Too would let players do a lot of collateral damage, which is

just kind of fun to watch. Far Cry Too also went a little further toward the open world sandbox concept than its predecessor did. None of the characters or the setting from the first game would make an appearance in the sequel, and in fact, this would become mostly a feature of the Far Cry series. Each game, along with the DLC for each game, would be it's obtained story.

Occasionally you get minor characters from one entry of the series that might pop up in another entry, and some features included in Far Cry too, like weapon degradation, would be discarded in future entries of the series. When we come back, we'll look at how the next few years unfolded at Ubisoft. But first let's take another quick break. Okay, so it's two thousand eight. Assassin's Creed has been out for a year and it's a hit. Far Cry two has just come out, and it too would be a

success for the company. Meanwhile, Rabbids are raving all over the Wii and laying the groundwork for their own line of games and spinoffs. Ubisoft would continue its bid for world domination one acquisition at a time by scooping up studios like Sunflowers, which was a German video game developer, and Hybride Technologies, which was actually better known as a visual effects studio that created effects for movie and television projects.

Hybride was responsible for effects on films like The Faculty and Mimic and Battlefield Earth, though they also worked on Since City three hundred and the movie that was better as a meme than as a film. Snakes on a plane. Now I'm poking a little fun here, but the studio has legit done incredible work and these days you'll see results of their efforts and stuff like the house with the clock in its walls, which actually has a connection

to my family, but that's another story. Uh, the Watchman TV series which was legit amazing, and the Mandalorian series,

among numerous other famous projects. Not first glance, a video game company purchasing a VFX studio for film and television really seems a bit odd, but the general messaging was that Hybrid would continue to operate as a traditional VFX studio, which it has, and Ubisoft and Hybride would be able to share technologies between the two that have been developed for either video games or for VFX, and then repurpose those tools for the other industry whenever it made sense

to do so, which is kind of a cool concept. Ubisoft would also acquire a game studio in India that had previously belonged to game Loft. Now, those of you who have been paying attention in this series know that Game Lofts founder was Michel Guilman, the brother to Eve Guilmant,

who was the CEO of Ubisoft still is. And I guess this is where I mentioned that while researching these episodes, I came across a couple of instances in which Ubisoft would acquire assets from another company that had been founded by one of the Gilman brothers. With this example, it was just Game Lofts, Indian studio. It wasn't. The rest of game Loft was just that one studio. The rest of game Loft remained untouched for the time being anyway,

but we'll get to that. That being said, I find the instances where a big, publicly traded company, one that trades on the stock market, founded by a group of brothers, then acquiring assets from smaller companies that were also founded by at least one of those brothers. That's a little

let's call it unorthodox, to put it kindly. In addition, Ubisoft acquired a couple of other studios, one called Digital Kids out of Japan and one called Massive Entertainment out of Sweden, and they also opened another studio of their own in Kiev, Ukraine. While the company had enjoyed licensing privileges with Tom Clancy's i P through the acquisition of Red Storm years earlier two thousand eight would mark the year when Ubisoft would officially secure all i P rights

to the Tom Clancy name for video games. So two thousand and eight was a big year as Ubisoft expanded dramatically, and this is also toward the tail end of that era I was mentioning earlier where e A was looming over Ubi Soft as a possible hostile takeover opponent. They also would publish and distribute tons of games in this time.

Really in the span between two thousand and two thousand ten, the list of games that UBI Soft published or distributed is enormous, because you know, you had the games not just from Ubi Soft and it's dozens of studios around the world, but also games that Ubisoft was publishing on behalf of other developers. In two thousand eight, Ubisoft Montreal

had a couple of games come out. One of them was Lost via Domos tie into the television series Lost, and another one's Rainbow six Vegas too, so another Tom Clancy title and a continuation of the popular Rainbow six shooter series. The Rainbow six Vegas shooter series in particular

is really popular. In two thousand nine, Ubisoft announced it would open a studio in Toronto the following year, so the studio would open in The studios in Quebec were successful, prompting Ubisoft to expand again in Canada, but this time of course in Ontario rather than in Quebec, and initially most of the employees of Ubisoft Toronto were transplants from Ubisoft Montreal and the first title that the studio would take on was another Tom Clancy property, splinter Cell Blacklist,

which wouldn't be ready until but they were hard at work in. Ubisoft would also acquire a French game developer studio called Nadio, which was the company behind a series of multiplayer car racing games that were really popular in Europe. I had never heard of them before, but they are big news in Europe and was when Michelle on Sell, who was the creator of Rayman, began development of Beyond Good and Evil, to the sequel to his critically acclaimed

but commercially disappointing game from two thousand three. So development on this project started in the company wouldn't announce anything until e three sen giving a a sneak peek at this prequel game, and now in the game is still not out. Game development cycles frequently take several years, particularly as game scope increases, and then developers have to deal with problems like feature creep, where a creative lead will add more elements to a game after it was already

supposed to be kind of feature locked for development. But going more than a decade in development is a little unusual unless you're you know, Duke Newcomb or Star Citizen or something. Oh. Shots fired. In the next episode, we will follow up on the Beyond Good and Evil saga, as well as what happened to michel on self because but for now, we'll wrap up this episode with a few other points. We're now up to eleven and at this point e A had divested itself of the shares

that it had once held in Ubisoft. That allowed everyone to kind of breathe a sigh of relief for the time being. As we've learned the company had started to expand aggressively over the last couple of years, and would be a continuation of that trend. For one thing, Ubisoft would make its own film division called Ubisoft Motion Pictures. In the goal of this division is to take I P from the various video game franchises that Ubisoft owns and then convert them into television and film projects. I'm

sure I'll talk more about that in the next episode. Also, Ubisoft acquired a studio from Finland called Red Links, which is most famous for developing the Trials series of games. Uh. Those are a kind of side scrolling, motorcycle racing and stunt games. So big shout out to Jack Potillo from Rooster Teeth who loves those games and he's wicked good at them. Ubisoft has continued publishing the Trials series since

they acquired Red Links. Red Links, by the way, that's l y in X, not l i in k s. Ubisoft acquired a Paris based studio called Alliant in Alien's specialty was developing free to play games, and this marks an important turning point in the general scope for the games industry. The transition had begun probably about a decade earlier, but it was a very gradual and slow transition, and

this is generally the idea behind it. So traditional games are essentially pay once and then play forever kind of things, or at least play as long as the game or hardware that you're playing on continues to work. So you would go and you would purchase a game, and that

would be the end of the monetary exchange, right. Game studios would have to balance out the budget for the games they were working on with whatever expected number of copies they thought they were going to sell, and the more ambitious the game, the more copies you would need to sell in order to recoup your investment. You'd be spending more time and money developing the game, so you need to sell a lot of copies to cover your

costs and make a profit on top of that. At least in the older days when we were all using physical media exclusively, game studios also had to contend with the fact that some of their games were going to be in the resale market. People would play them and then sell their used games to a store, which would then sell them off again. The game studio would see

none of that money, so that complicated matters as well. Now, as you can imagine, it wouldn't be very difficult to reach a tipping point where the amount you were spending to develop a game is more than you would ever earned back from the sales of that game without i don't know, selling a copy to literally everyone on the planet, or raising the price of the game beyond the normal market value for games and hoping that that doesn't turn people away. But the free to play model takes a

different path. Now, as the name suggests, it is entirely free to play these games, but within the games are elements that entice people to spend real world money in order to enhance their playing experience, and there are a lot of different approaches to this. You might offer up items within the game that give your character certain advantages, and that kind of falls into the derisively nicknamed paid to win category of games, which is generally frowned upon

by gamers, particularly for multiplayer titles. Then there are items that are just purely cosmetic, which allow you to customize the look of your player character or avatar or whatever. And then there are games that have a limited number of turns per day or a cool down associated with some aspect of play, and these often allow gamers to spend real money to get another turn or bypass the cool down or limit. And a game can have any combination of these things. Now, that last strategy can be

particularly profitable if you make your game tempting enough. So think of a game like the Civilization series. Civilization is famous for creating a just one more turn mentality, leading to endless gamers just staying up all night while trying to nullify that total jerk. Gandhi. Seriously, Gandhi in the Civilization games is a homicidal maniac because of an error that has made in an early game code for the first game in the series, and since then it has

been made a feature of the series. Now Gandhi is homicidal in all the games because of a mistake from an early game. Alright, so imagine you've got a game that is addictive like Civilization, only you put up a gate on the number of turns each player gets to play per day, and if that player were to pay a small amount, like a dollar, they might get a few more turns. Now, these are called micro transactions because each individual transaction is very small, but they can also

accumulate quickly. So the game itself is free to play, but there are incentives in the game to encourage players to spend money to continue to play the game. This doesn't have to be insidious. I play a couple of free to play games, and I have spent money on one of those, not so much to get an advantage in the game, but rather to reward developers who created an experience that I really enjoy. I'm like, this is

something that's worth paying for. I got it for free, so I'm going to go ahead and put some money toward it. But it's also easy to abuse this model and create a parasitic relationship with gamers. So this model would later find its way into paid games as well, namely in the form of stuff like loot boxes, in which players pay real money to get in game rewards, and those rewards are randomized, so you're not even buying a specific thing, you're buying the chance to get that

specific thing, or you might get one of numerous other things. Ubisoft, like a lot of game companies, has used lootboxes to create an ongoing revenue stream after people have already purchased a game, so now games revenue is not solely dependent upon those initial sales. There's a long tail stream of revenue as well. And you could argue that this has become a necessity with video games growing so large and so complicated and so expensive to develop. Those costs have

skyrocketed over the last few years. You could also argue, and many people have, that the practice of loot boxes can exploit people who get addicted to the cycle of

rewards that loot boxes create. There's a longer discussion to have about this topic, and I will likely do a full tech stuff episode about the history, the psychology, and the potential harm of loot boxes, not just on people, but on the game's industry itself, plus a discussion about perhaps alternatives we could take when it comes to game design,

but that'll have to wait for another episode. The point being that this was sort of Ubisoft's entry into that world, and that those philosophies would find their ways into future Ubisoft titles. Uh. The big title from al Leon being howerse It's a horse game where you would raise horses and take care of them until and I am not making this up, the horses would die in the game and then you would get to see them go to horse Heaven. Yeah. Okay, maybe that one's a Taylor made

for the McElroy brothers. Alright, guys, that wraps up this chapter of the UBI Soft saga. In our next episode, we will continue, I'll try to get up to present day. I'll be packing a lot in because I know there's a lot that's going on here, and uh, within that tale, we'll hear about another potential hostile takeover bid, and we'll also hear about a massive scandal that ran through all

of UBI Soft. It's still unfolding as I record this, and how the company is handling that, uh in some cases not so great, but we'll get to that in our next episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's another company, a specific technology, a trend in tech like the loot boxes trend, or whatever, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. M.

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