Ubisoft explains new hardware push

Ubisoft sales and marketing Senior VP Tony Key shares thoughts on Ubisoft's tendency to develop for new hardware, and his observations about the Kinect market.

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Ubisoft isn't shy about jumping on new hardware. It produced several launch games on Wii, 3DS, and Kinect. These games met with varying degrees of success, but it does show that the company is eager to try out the latest tools. Now in an interview, Ubisoft's sales and marketing Senior VP Tony Key has explained the corporate culture that's so eager to test the latest.

"We love new hardware," Key told Gamasutra. "Ubisoft has always had a reputation as a creative company, inside and outside. Our production teams love tinkering with new hardware, and so when new hardware comes along, there's always a line of people who want to try it and want to get in there and say 'Can I make one of these?' and try out a 3DS system, or a Vita system, or a Kinect system or whatever else.

"It's no secret, right? We love to tinker with new hardware. Because it's in our DNA, we tend to have a lot of products at the beginnings of the cycles. And by the way the hardware companies like to have that kind of support at launch. So they generally come to us when they're launching new hardware and say hey, what can you make for us?"

This has made Ubisoft one of the companies leading the charge on Kinect, which currently seems to be lulling in the casual arena. Addressing whether it will imitate the temporary success of the Wii, Key says that no one "figured out" how to make core games like shooters better on the Wii, and now developers are facing the same puzzle with Kinect.

"But I think the thing that the Wii didn't have that the 360 has is it has the graphics that the shooter fans are used to," he said. "The fans are already there. So I think there's maybe a better opportunity to figure that out on the Kinect than there is on the Wii because there's more of a will to do it on the Kinect. That 360 shooter fan, we know that's a huge audience."

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    October 5, 2011 5:00 PM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, Ubisoft explains new hardware push.

    Ubisoft sales and marketing Senior VP Tony Key shares thoughts on Ubisoft's tendency to develop for new hardware, and his observations about the Kinect market.

    • reply
      October 5, 2011 5:25 PM

      Insert joke re: Ubisoft having no interest at all in new PC hardware.

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      October 5, 2011 5:58 PM

      Why did I read this as "PC hardware"... This is actually the opposite (focus on easy gimmick sales)

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      October 6, 2011 3:13 AM

      New hardware and they don't metion PC-hardware at all?
      360 is still the same shitty hardware it was 6 years ago so nothing new at all.

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        October 6, 2011 4:50 AM

        This is my reaction as well.

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        October 6, 2011 5:03 AM

        I think you either completely missed the point or didn't even bother to read the blurb above, possibly both.

        They mean new platforms and peripherals. The whole point of the article is that they've been pushing out launch titles for kinect, 3DS, vita, etc.

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          October 6, 2011 7:30 AM

          Yeah, there is no such things as a launch title for the PC. Long gone are the days of at least a launch title for some new kind of hardware (Roland MT-32, Noise Blaster, AdLib, Sound Blaster, Voodoo, EGA, VGA, etc.) That was about all we had in terms of launch. Funny that Sierra was the main company to give these hardware releases semi-launch titles (except the 3D stuff).

          Sigh, we don't even get launch titles for new versions of DirectX and matching hardware any more. Game (software) tech is always 1.5-2 versions back. I bet a survey of released games should 90% are still DX9. (then again, that also has to do with Win XP still having such a large market share)

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