Ubisoft love the Wii

Ubisoft in the past have had problems supporting Nintendo products, with the Gamecube essentially getting no third party games at all and the early days of the Wii were problematic too. Yet, in the past 5 years the tides seem to have turned significantly with Ubisoft not only fully supporting the Wii, but are also planning to be supporters of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. That is, if their CEO has anything to do with it.

Speaking in an interview recently, Yves Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft, explicitly stated Ubisoft’s ongoing support for the Nintendo platforms. This is likely to be due to the huge success that Ubisoft have managed to achieve through the Wii, something that not all third party companies have been able to do.

The appeal with the Wii U is obvious, as the Wii U is meant to be more powerful than current generation consoles, it will allow Ubisoft to push all of their high end content onto the system, whilst making the best use of out of the novel Wii U controller. This will allow them to capitalise on the core gamer and casual gamer market at the same time.

This is a step up from the Wii, where the majority of Ubisoft games are casual titles. With games like Just Dance selling in the millions, so much so that Wii games on the whole are 45% of Ubisoft’s business!

Yet the concern regarding audience remainss:

“Now to [what audience] will it be addressed? We don’t exactly know yet,” he conceded. “But the potential of the machine, and the tablet [controller], I think is a good way to improve the potential gameplay. What we see is the ease of play is a part of the revolution we are seeing today. The fact that it’s easier to access games is what can make more people play. Maybe they can do a good job there.”

So it looks like Ubisoft will have a lot of life early on in the 3DS and Wii U, but we might start to see it fall away if the units don’t shift.

Source: Gamasutra