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Publisher Ubisoft has had a tough time of it of late. Between layoffs, continual restructuring, and big releases such as XDefiant, Skull and Bones, and Star Wars: Outlaws failing to find their audience, the company's got some ongoing problems. Alex Hutchinson, a developer who led Far Cry and Assassin's Creed games, believes these issues are exacerbated by risk-averse internal-philosophies.
"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," he explains to PCGamer.
"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," he adds. "So a lot of senior people left Ubisoft and started studios or splintered off. So there was this talent drain that went out."
Including himself, who, after serving as creative director on Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3, co-founded his own studio, Typhoon Studios, in 2017. One game, Journey to the Savage Planet, and an acquisition by Google Stadia later, Typhoon was shut in February 2020.
While it didn't work out, it's the kind of creative risk Ubisoft allows less of now. Hutchinson notes that even though making regular installments of the likes of Far Cry and Rainbow Six has long been the corporation's MO, there's been a dearth of inventiveness. When something fresher is introduced, like Immortals Fenyx Rising, it's a big triple-A swing that has trouble recouping the investment.
"They always had a history of sequelizing the franchises, but also having a couple of new things coming along," Hutchinson comments. "They became very allergic to the new things, and so they killed a bunch of our ideas, like when I was working on Pioneer. They had nothing new to come through."
Pioneer was meant to be a No Man's Sky-esque space game of some description. It was teased in a side quest in Watch Dogs 2, but quietly bounced around behind the scenes, with its current status unknown. Hutchinson suggests that many minor quirks contribute to the overall disarray. "There's a million tiny things," he adds. "They're essentially a packaged goods business, and they had trouble figuring out digital as a whole platform."
We haven't had a new Far Cry game since 2021, and now that the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake's been cancelled, Assassin's Creed has become the bastion of Ubisoft's output, remaining consistent through Valhalla, Mirage, and Shadows. But even that's taken a hit, since the director of the upcoming Hexe just left. Whatever's happening over there, it seems a change is needed, and probably soon.
