those stories get the most attention. My own analysis is that there are few industries in
the world that have a greater disconnect between the customer and the supplier than ours. We routinely see both developers and executives obsess over things that ordinary gamers care nothing about (or even actively dislike) and that cannot lead to success. Having said that, there are still the occasional mega-hits that in some ways gloss over the malaise that the industry is in more generally. When GTA VI sells millions of copies on day one, that won’t mean the industry is suddenly healthy. I won’t make any bold predictions about the future,
beginning, rather than in full swing. However, at a company like Ubisoft you are doing
your part in the “AAA Machine”. The most you can hope for is a “career” there. Our ambitions are to be creators. Our home is the
arena. We’ll have to see what comes of that, but we were never not going to make our own games.
AA indie games are becoming a larger and larger part of the video game release calendar at the minute, and people are giving them a lot more attention. Why do you think that is? It’s because AAA gaming has never been in a worse state. I think a full examination of that reality is beyond the scope of this interview, but I suppose if there is a silver-lining to that, it is in the increased interest you mentioned in independent developers. I will also add that I hope you are right and players are
giving more attention to AA and indie, and perhaps as a result, more investment might follow.
Do you think that things will continue to shift in that AA direction over the next few years, or do you think a combination of AAA and co-dev will reassert itself as top dog? I think there have been a number of recent notable failures in AA also, and that shouldn’t be overlooked. But of course, when you have situations like Concord, Skull & Bones or Dragon Age: The Veilguard … then
but I think the pattern is fairly obvious, with games like Space Marine 2 far exceeding all expectations and games like Star Wars: Outlaws falling far short.
What transferable skills have you brought with you to AA development from your years in AAA? Communication and collaboration is unintuitively very difficult. Navigating personalities, conflicting desires, incompatible ideas, etc. that inevitably arise in any size team while working in very large teams at Ubisoft has helped us enormously. If I could share one lesson I learned, it’s that
inexperienced teams require processes, and experienced teams require as little process as possible. In most teams you have a mix of experience and inexperience, so creating a balance in how you work with everyone is the most important aspect of leadership in my view. If you force an experienced dev into a strict process,
you’re just going to annoy and stifle them. If you leave an inexperienced dev with no process to follow, they will have no idea where to even begin. The most common mistake I have seen is a leader
developing a process that worked fantastically well for them and believing as a result that they had cracked the code and could apply the same methods in all future teams, when in truth that entirely depends on who you are working with.
16 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2025
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54
