The Guardian currently has an interesting interview with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. The focus of the interview is on free-to-play, digital gaming and Ubisoft’s strategy for these new business models — but Guillemot also expands on what he expects from next generation consoles, and how Ubisoft will adapt to the change.
“With next gen consoles, it’s going toward bigger games, and yes, we will make less of them,” he said.
We can expect similar upgrades to what we had in the past, combined with a new outlook gleaned from other types of hardware.
“I think what happens this time will be like what happened in the past,” said Guillemot. “Generally, next generation consoles pick up what’s interesting in the world around them – they look at what the PC experiences are, what the mobile experiences are, they look at the social elements … and then manufacturers come up with a unit that you can put in front put the TV but that takes advantage of all the innovations that have happened since the last generation, and at a price that is accessible. So for sure, the machines will be more powerful, but we can expect this generation – because they took quite a long time! – to actually come with something really new, really interesting that will boost the market enormously.”
It’s interesting that Guillemot expects next generation consoles to come up with something “really new” — I always believed that next generation consoles have taken so long because we’re clearly in this difficult transition phase, a middle ground, and releasing something static in this environment is supremely risky.
It’ll be interesting to see precisely how the next Xbox and PlayStation navigate those risks.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot on the future of digital gaming [The Guardian]
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