Former director of Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry reveals that Ubisoft became “very allergic” to making new games: “It’s a shame.”

Ubisoft, the French video game company that has brought us hits such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time since the beginning of the millennium, is currently at a huge financial crossroads, with numerous layoffs, resignations, and canceled projects. In this complicated context, a key former employee has spoken about the company’s creative drift, considering that it became extremely reluctant to embrace new ideas, instead betting on games as a service.

A key former Ubisoft employee denounces the company’s situation in recent years

In the early 2000s, Ubisoft became one of the most reputable and beloved video game companies among gamers, thanks to both its numerous releases and their high quality. Titles such as XIII (2003), Beyond Good & Evil (2003), and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (2004) were etched into the minds of gamers, cementing the prestige and reputation of both the company and its numerous studios. However, in the mid-2010s, a drastic shift in its content strategy became apparent, with a focus on live service games with aggressive in-game monetization systems.

PC Gamer recently interviewed Alex Hutchinson, creative director of Assassin’s Creed 3 (2012) and Far Cry 4 (2014), titles developed and released in the years immediately prior to this radical change. “It’s a shame. 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,” he revealed.

Hutchinson believes that, with so much “talent drain,” the operational size of Ubisoft’s development teams became a huge financial burden, something that became clear during the COVID era. “If you have a team of 800 people, 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.” Regarding the policy on sequels and live service games, Hutchinson revealed, “[Ubisoft] always had a history of sequelizing the franchises, but also having a couple of new things coming along. They became very allergic to the new things, and so they killed a bunch of our ideas,” he said.

This interview is particularly relevant because it sheds some light on Ubisoft’s current situation, allowing us to understand how such an entertainment giant finds itself in its current predicament, with Tencent injecting capital, share prices plummeting, and highly anticipated projects such as Prince of Persia Remake being canceled. Furthermore, the perception that there is a significant degree of recycled ideas in its latest releases is no longer limited to the public: it is something that has been confirmed by a former developer who has firsthand knowledge of the company’s internal dynamics.

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