Ever notice how many new projects are coming out, billed as being made by ex-Ubisoft devs? Many have – but apparently, nobody has noticed this more than Ubisoft itself. People leave the company, and keep leaving, because they just really don’t want to work there anymore.
Ubisoft suffers from many internal issues, but one insider takes special issue with a company that’s become “very allergic to the new things”. This “insider” would prefer to be called Alex Hutchinson, creative director of Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 4; but that wouldn’t have fit as easily into this article’s title.
In Hutchinson’s experience, higher-ups made a habit of shelving fresh ideas, like Pioneer – a game he was also supposed to direct. “They killed a bunch of our ideas, like when I was working on Pioneer,” Hutchinson said in an interview with PC Gamer.
Pioneer remained in Ubisoft’s hands after Hutchinson left. Originally, the project had more of an exploration focus, and is suspected to be cancelled, but it’s also reportedly been turned into a co-op shooter. Either way, the original vision for Pioneer is long gone.
A large “boom” in “private equity and investment” caused the company to shrink how much freedom they offered to individual devs, Hutchinson says. They used to “manage big teams by letting them be individual groups with ownership of their own thing, to allow us to make bigger games faster.”
When that policy left, several devs went along with it. And when you start hemorrhaging top talent in a big company, certain problems tend to develop.
Ubisoft Suffers Under Its Own Weight
Hutchinson describes the sheer scale of the company as a “noose”, crushing a company that’s forced to put a lot of weight on the shoulders of project managers & devs who lack the experience of their now-absent senior members.
“If you have a team of 800 people,” Hutchinson explains, “it’s really hard to manage, even if they’re in the same building.”
“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. So I think they lost that momentum as well.”
Ubisoft’s leadership has also struggled to shift into a world that’s becoming more and more focused on digital game purchases. “They’re essentially a packaged goods business,” Hutchinson says, “and they had trouble figuring out digital as a whole platform.”
There’s about “a million tiny things” that all contribute to the current state of Ubisoft. It’d be hard to cover everything, so Hutchinson’s interview didn’t. There’s many subtle things pushing devs away from the company, though with Ubisoft acting the way most game companies are in this era of mass layoffs, non-subtle approaches are clearly on the menu too.
According to this interview, Ubisoft’s continued approach to ‘safe’ games – that signature Ubisoft style – has slowly started to shift into a danger for the company. Things may change once executives start feeling the heat, and if devs keep leaving and if players keep looking to other entertainment sources, that may yet happen.
