Johnny Minkley 15:23 (BST)
20/07/2006

Guillemot: "We invest more in next-gen than rivals"

Ubisoft will have the quality advantage in the next generation, claims publisher boss

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has thrown down the gauntlet to his competition, claiming superior investment in next-generation development means the French firm will have the best titles as it focuses on becoming number two games publisher in the west.

Guillemot laid out Ubisoft's aggressive corporate strategy in an exclusive interview with our sister site Eurogamer TV, coming off the back of a critically-lauded E3 showcase, spearheaded by hotly-tipped next-gen action-adventure Assassin's Creed.

Asked what differentiated his company's titles from rivals, Guillemot said: "I think it's our investment in the next-gen consoles. We invest more in the next-gen consoles than our competitors so we will create better quality games."

This investment will drive a rapid expansion of Ubisoft's development resources, with Guillemot pledging to "grow our studios by 600 people per year".

"We know have 2,900 people in our creative studios, and the goal is to keep opening new studios in new countries and increasing the size of some of the studios we have, we can continue to grow quite rapidly," he added.

Indeed, since the interview was conducted, Ubisoft has further bolstered its resources with last week's acquisition from Atari of UK-based Driver developer Reflections, bringing a further 80 staff into the fold.

"We want to continue to grow this year even if the market is going to go down, we expect, seven per cent," Guillemot revealed. "We expect to do more than five per cent growth, so over-perform the market by 12-15 per cent.

"In Europe we were number three [last year] and we want to be number two quickly; and in the US we were number five last year so we want to get as close as possible to the number two position. This year we hope we can gain one step in being number four."

In late 2004, the world's biggest games publisher, Electronic Arts, purchased a near-20 per cent stake in Ubisoft, a move the French firm viewed as hostile. And 18 months on, Guillemot is maintaining a 'business as usual' approach on the matter.

"I would say we speak [to EA] from time to time. They bought shares and they made a good profit with those shares," he offered. "We don't know what they want to do next. What we know is that our focus is to create very high quality games and we feel the best for us it to work hard in creating the best games and to continue like that as long as we can."

Elsewhere in the interview, with little evidence of the new sports range promised by the firm after it acquired Microsoft Games Studio's sports assets in February 2005, Guillemot called for patience, while revealing the RPG genre is the major new area Ubisoft's wants a foothold in.

"We are interested still by sports and we are working on that, but we can't say much now because it's quite difficult to get in - but we will be there at one point," he maintained. "We are also very interested by RPG. And the RPG segment is really very close to the action-adventure segment where we are, so we think we can get in there quite quickly. In the future MMO will also be a big component but in the short term the RPG is really the kind of products we want to create."

The full interview is now showing on Eurogamer TV.