From first-person shooters to 'Petz'

Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

After 17 years of marketing shooters, Ubisoft’s Laurent Detoc says he’s psyched to make games for girls who want to raise a virtual hamster.

It’s a seismic shift for the company that makes the “Splinter Cell” shooter series. And it took a little getting used to, says Detoc, who runs the French company’s North American business.

“We understand the 25-year-old guy who wants to shoot stuff,” he says. “It’s a lot more difficult to understand the 12-year-old girl who wants to pet a cat.”

Clearly, they’re doing something right. Titles from Ubisoft’s casual “Games for Everyone” business accounted for 25 percent of the company’s revenues last year. Gamers bought 8 million games from the Ubisoft's “Petz” brand, which has gamers adopt and raise furry virtual critters. And its “Imagine” brand, which is aimed at young girls, has sold 4 million units since its debut just nine months ago.

This success has led to some flush times at Ubisoft. The company reported that its 2008 fiscal year earnings were up an impressive 43 percent, spurred in large part by its wins in casual games and with "Assassin's Creed," one of last year's best-selling games.

But Ubisoft’s not the only company having a great year. As I’ve written in previous columns, the whole industry is going like gangbusters — and Detoc predicts these good fortunes will continue for the foreseeable future.

“Do you know why we’re doing well? Because the (console) cycle is in a good moment right now — and probably will be for the next two or three years — and because we’ve reinvented ourselves,” he says.  “Nintendo is a big driving force for that.”

At this year’s E3, video-game conference, Ubisoft rolled out a slew of upcoming releases, including a new “Petz” title (featuring monkeys and animal cross-breeding) for the Nintendo DS, a Shaun White snowboarding game that takes advantage of the Wii Balance Board and the new “girl power” brand, “Ener-G.”

But there was plenty to placate hardcore gamers, too. The company showed off sneak peeks of its new “Prince of Persia” title and the latest “Far Cry 2,” as well as a teaser trailer for “I Am Alive,” an adventure title set in post-apocalyptic Chicago.

During a sit-down at E3, I asked Detoc about creating new intellectual properties such as “Assassin’s Creed” and  “I Am Alive,” whether he thinks the industry can continue its blistering growth rate and whether there’s any truth to the rumors that Ubisoft is for sale. The following features excerpts from that conversation.

Ubisoft Laurent Detoc, who runs Ubisoft's North American business, attributes much of the game industry's growth — and his company's recent success — the the rise of casual gamers.

You announced a new intellectual property at the show — “I Am Alive.” Ubisoft is a company that invests heavily in new IPs versus licensing properties. Isn’t that a costlier way to do business? Why do you approach it that way?

It’s not a cheap way to do business. It’s a commitment to invest your resources and money as needed. When you buy something, you spend the money up front and you have a guarantee that it will be doing some numbers, because there’s an awareness that you’re going to benefit from. The problem is that when you do that, you’re buying somebody else’s property. You’re borrowing it. Whereas, when you create it, it’s yours. So if it’s a success, it’s yours. We prefer to do that, as a company, because we think there’s more value in the long term.

Ubisoft is known throughout the industry for having pretty big development teams. Is that sustainable? In an industry where not every game is going to be a big seller — and in order to recoup your costs — you need to sell a lot of games.

So far, so good. It’s working. Part of the reason why it’s working is … we don’t necessarily have a large team during the entire length of the project. More important is our strategy is of development in more affordable places. So when I talk about Romania or China (where the company has studios), the cost of development over there is not as costly as it is in, say, England.

But I would say, as a whole, our costs for development, as a company, is less than the other ones because we’ve been making conscious efforts to go into places where we could get subsidies, like we have in Canada, or we try to keep our costs low.

Are you personally alarmed by the ballooning costs of making games? I heard that Rockstar spent $100 million making “Grand Theft Auto IV,” and the average cost is something like $15 million.

If you sell enough units, you can spend $100 million making a game. When we’re going to make — if that ever comes out — a sequel to “Assassin’s Creed,” our expectations in terms of units is going to be very high because we know we have something very compelling already. The brand is extremely strong … so we know we’re going to sell a lot of units. The investment in the game is proportional to that expectation.

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