From first-person shooters to 'Petz'

You launched that game in probably one of the most hit-filled game seasons that I can remember.  Were there any white-knuckle moments when you thought about the fact that you were going to be launching “Assassin’s Creed” at the same time as all the other great titles that came out around the holiday season?

I’ve been doing this for 17 years and it’s white knuckles every Christmas. And January. And March. We always worry, but that’s the fun of all this — it’s a very intense competing environment.

Does the holiday season really matter anymore? Or is there enough of an appetite, in your opinion, to sustain releases throughout the year?

Yes, and we’ve seen this lately more than ever. We just shipped “My Weight Loss Coach.” When is the best time to ship “My Weight Loss Coach”? In November? Not really. Typically, you’re going to be in that mode in January or April because you’re going to feel guilty about Christmas, or you’re going to start wanting to lose weight before summer. So, there’s a product that fits very well in the first half of the year as opposed to the back half of the year.

Do you think that the game industry is recession-proof?

Right now it is. It’s soaring. It was in 2000 when we had the same phenomenon. We arrived in the (console) cycle and the bottom fell out of the dot-com industry. We didn’t see a blip. And if we did, it was minor in comparison to that momentum that was created by the cycle. What I’m saying is, right now, we have the cycle and the creativity of the industry to invent itself a new direction for grabbing more business.

There’s a lot of consolidation going on in the industry right now. There’ve been a few happy marriages, but there have been some less-pleasant dealings, and I’m referring specifically to EA’s purchase of 20 percent of Ubisoft’s shares. I’d read that an outright acquisition was something that (Ubisoft) was considering.

First of all, they don’t have 20 percent, they have 15. They bought 20 percent initially, but dilution, over time, brings them to about 15 or maybe even less.

I would not speak about what we’re considering because I’m not the one making that decision. That was a long time ago — I don’t know what the future holds. We like to be Ubisoft, that much I can tell you.

I also wanted to follow up on a rumor that Ubisoft might acquire Take-Two.

And Take-Two may acquire Ubisoft. I don’t know. We are in the same business, so everybody talks to everybody. Last night, a lot of executives were having a cocktail party, hosted by Microsoft, and in that evening, we talked to Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Microsoft, Tecmo, THQ, Disney … until something happens, it’s all speculation. Other people want to buy us, by the way.

Such as?

There’s certainly a trend right now for the more mature entertainment companies to want to get into the games space because they see how much potential there is in there. So, Warner Bros. certainly has enough money to buy Ubisoft. Now, whether Ubisoft would want to sell to Warner is a different question.

You’ve got the core games, which you’re obviously still investing in heavily, and then you’ve got games for mainstream. I’d argue that Ubisoft is one of the only third-party publishers that has managed to do both successfully. Was it a tough sell, internally, to move into these spaces?

Not everybody’s going to want to work on the fashion-designer game because that’s not what they want to do, and you have to respect that.

To me there’s no such thing as bad business. What’s more important is that we have to make content that’s relevant and that’s good … we make content for people who didn’t exist before, so they came to us. And that’s how we grow also as a company.

We’re going to make sure that we have content for that customer, that underserved customer that is somewhat new to the business, and if they’re not new, they’re consuming more than they used to because there’s content for them.

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