Ubisoft Moving Away From Licensed Games Avatar
Author: Arthur Ricky // Category: Upcoming Games
Avatar the movie is making tons of money and breaking all sorts of records. Ubisoft’s Avatar the game, on the other hand, is not. In light of the game being projected to sell 2.5 million copies across all platforms — a figure well below the expected number of somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million copies — Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed to investors recently that Ubisoft will begin focusing more on their franchises rather than spending more on licensed titles like Avatar.
“Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,” Guillemot said in an investor call, reports GamesIndustry.biz. “So the goal is to reuse the investment and licenses and put more emphasis on the making of our brands bigger and make sure they can come more often with high quality. So it doesn’t mean we will stop but we’re going to spend less in licenses in the future.”
Given the success that the movie has enjoyed, it’s surprising to discover that the videogame hasn’t done better — particularly when considering that it was released on six platforms. But given the quality of many licensed titles out there, it might be for the best that Ubisoft instead shifts some of its efforts towards it franchises, which include Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Prince of Persia, and Assassin’s Creed. Ubisoft has released more than a few games based on licenses in recent years, including Surf’s Up, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lost, King Kong, and Naruto.
Although Avatar didn’t lose money for Ubisoft, Guillemot seems to think that there’s more money to be made by focusing on their own high quality titles — or at least ones that don’t require them to fork over a whole lot of cash in licensing fees.