After the poor sales for The Division 2 and Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Ubisoft is shaking things up.
Talking to Video Games Chronicle, Ubisoft has announced their plans to change the structure of their editorial team. The group will be expanded and reorganized. "We are reinforcing our editorial team to be more agile and better accompany our development teams around the world as they create the best gaming experiences for player," Ubisoft told VGC.
For two decades, the creative direction of Ubisoft's games and IPs had been overseen by the editorial team, a group of around 100 signers and producers who would advise on everything from game design to script writing. While the team did not create the games themselves, they had a huge impact on development teams across the company. It was this team that drove the company towards open-world and systematic games, pushed online elements, and insisted on narratives that had a thematic basis in the real world.
One of the main reasons that these changes are being made has to do with gamer's complaints that all Ubisoft games feel the same. This seems to be the reason that Ubisoft delayed three of its most anticipated titles: Watch Dogs: Legion, Gods and Monsters, and Rainbow Six: Quarantine. An anomynus source told VGC: "In the previous system, that editorial had, there were often the ideas of just one or two people getting put into every game. That's why you tended to see such similarity, because it's the same taste and opinion being replicated."
Under the new system, chief creative officer Serge Hascoet will continue to lead editorial. There will be several vice presidents who will report to him, each of whom will lead their own franchise, with the authority to make their own independent decisions on future directions. It is believed that by spreading editorial's responsibilities across a group of leaders, the team can bring a more distinct identity to their respective games. VGC was also told that expanding the group's resources, as well as giving it some presence outside of Paris, could have as much of a positive impact.
