Ubisoft sees potential in VR, working on bringing its big titles over
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Ubisoft sees potential in VR, working on bringing its big titles over
Despite having one of the buggiest games ever launched in their lineup last year, Ubisoft seems to be banking the big bucks. At their recent quarterly earnings meeting, they reported that they made a profit of US$1.65 billion for their last fiscal year, an increase of 45% over the previous year's earnings. While it's nice to see that Ubisoft is financially stable, the meeting also revealed other interesting tidbits.
The main one being that the company sees VR as a bullish prospect. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was quoted as saying, “We are developing a certain number of games that are going to take advantage of these new possibilities.” Guillemot further elaborated on that comment adding, “What we are doing is working on the different brands we have to see how we can take advantage of these new possibilities, while making sure we also don’t suffer from what comes with it, which is the difficulty to play a long time with those sorts of games.”
While he didn't name specific titles, it's probably safe to assume that the company's big guns (Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and the Rabbid games) will be coming to VR soon.
It's interesting to note that Ubisoft is endorsing VR wholeheartedly and openly while the rest of the gaming industry's big names are still taking a wait and see approach. Despite the HTC Vive coming this year, followed in Q1 2016 by the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus, none of the gaming industry's big third party names have shown much interest in developing exclusive games for any of the announced headsets. Activision (publisher of the Call of Duty games) was once rumored to be working on an exclusive Oculus Rift game but there's been no word on that for a while now. Even Sony, creators of the Project Morpheus headset, has yet to announce what titles will be available for Project Morpheus.
While things will probably change at this year's E3, as of right now, it seems like no big gaming company (other than Ubisoft) is willing to dip their toes into VR without it having proven itself. VR experiences like the virtual Batcave from Batman: The Animated Series might be enough to attract initial interest in the fledgling technology, but without heavy gaming support, VR might just go the way of the dodo.
Source: Gamasutra
