From Rabbids to Creed

As a week of games industry business begins in Lyon, first with GDC Lyon and then with Game Connection, GamesIndustry.biz continues its series of interviews with key figures from both events.

This time it's the turn of Fabrice Pierre-Elien, business development manager at Ubisoft, who talks to us about the importance of Game Connection to Europe, the art of balancing original and franchise titles, and why Ubisoft was keen to support the Wii from the start.

It's very important for us, for many reasons. Firstly, the timing - back when we used to have a big E3 we'd meet there, but that didn't really happen this year. So now Game Connection allows us to meet a large number of people in a single environment - plus there was E3 in the summer, and Game Connection is in the winter.

With E3 this year, I didn't go myself and while Ubisoft had a number of people there it was mainly for the US contacts. But Game Connection I think has increased its grasp on the market this year.

It also helps that it's only a business event, so there are no hassles - they take care of everything, so you just go there and do business.

Yes, that's true. Game Connection started as a French-only event, which grew to allow more Europe-wide developers to attend, and now there are guys from the US and Canada among others - but they've really succeeded in capturing that European flavour.

It's a very good, very exciting time for us. We have very big internal studios, with a lot of people working on games. We've had some great stuff coming out on the next-gen platforms, such as Assassin's Creed, as well as titles coming out for the Wii and DS platforms.

But it's also a very good time for us in terms of third party business - we have grown that over the last few years. We weren't very big in that particular segment, but now we have the means to work with bigger studios externally, and that's a part of the business we want to continue to grow.

So that's why we're interested in going to Game Connection as well - to show developers that we have a big internal studio focus, but also that we're interested in external studios as well.

We want to work with the best third party developers and explain our portfolio to them.

Yes, we have studios almost all over the place, and we're direct in terms of distribution in most of the territories as well, which is a very good position for us - we can put or goods directly into the market, and that gives us a better understanding, so that we can then make better games. It's a good cycle - not just for European gamers, or American gamers, but for everybody.

One of our corporate goals is to create new IP, and we've been very successful in launching some of them in the past few years. It's something we're very keen on, at a global corporate level.

So our studios are creating new IPs, we're also creating new IP with excellent partners - we feel it's important to have some fresh air in the portfolio.

Just to churn out sequel after sequel, we have done that in the past as well, and we are still very keen on establishing franchises - but we take the time in between those sequels to make the best possible game, not just another title of which the previous edition was out twelve months ago.

The more franchises you have, the more time you can take to make sure the next one is as good as it can be.

Yes, so it's very important for us to make sure the consumers are very happy with what they are playing. It takes time to make games, so the more franchises you have, the more care you can take in developing them.

It is very important for us - we try to be present on platforms like that very early because it's very important for us to capture market share, which is always good for the company, as well as understanding the platform better on a technical level and also, for the Wii, on a gameplay level.

Because the Wii has introduced new means to play games, and that control method isn't just something you can make work with any kind of game. You really have to tailor your game, your gameplay and everything, to make the most out of this control style.

Being early on to there kinds of platforms allow you to try new stuff, and to make sure you're always ahead of the game, ahead of the competition in terms of what you bring with those new control concepts, and that's always good for us.

Oh yes, that's a sure thing. Yves Guillemot was very positive about the Wii from the get-go, and I think that most other companies only realised what the potential was for that console much later, when we were already working on many titles.

We saw that at Christmas last year, when we had a very big market share on the Wii, the biggest after Nintendo. Other companies hardly had anything.

But now I think everybody is back in that race, to make sure that they have titles for the Wii, so this Christmas will be interesting. There will be a lot more games, not all of them will be great titles, so we have a good role to play there because we have the expertise and the talent to develop those games.

We've very positive about this coming Christmas.