Ubisoft willing to delay an Assassin’s Creed game if it’s not of the highest quality
Yearly Assassin’s Creed releases have been a regular thing now. That doesn’t mean Ubisoft would stick to the schedule if it’d mean sacrificing quality, however.
Ubisoft’s North American president Laurent Detoc told IGN that the publisher would hold back an Assassin’s Creed game if it doesn’t meet its expectations. Bringing out a “70 percent Assassin’s Creed game” would hurt the IP’s brand, Detoc said.
His comments in full:
If we think we’ve ended up with a 70 percent Assassin’s Creed game, we’re not going to ship it. That damages the brand. I’m not going to give you the names of products, because you know them as well as I do, but if you start to make games at 70 percent, even with a big brand, eventually people are going to change their mind about that brand. They won’t want it anymore. That’s what saves the recurrence. There are 30 million people or so who have been playing Grand Theft Auto. Last year, to pick a round number, we had about 10 million people playing Assassin’s Creed. When we come up with an Assassin’s Creed the next year, there’s another 10 million brand new people who might be interested in the new setting, because of the new history, or the new naval battles and the pirates. It’s a variation on gameplay from even last year.
You bring something fresh, but you have to bring quality too. There’s a lot of people who can play your game. We have fans who come back to the franchise and we’re very thankful for them, because we think we’re giving them a good game to play, and they give back to us when they buy it. But there’s a lot more people out there who we can sell games to.
I like to think that we don’t delay everything. It’s the reason for the delay that really matters. It’s a lot easier to predict the release of an Assassin’s Creed, because we understand what it takes. It’s a lot easier to predict a franchise that has more recurrence, for sure, than a new IP.
