If there’s one thing that you’re guaranteed when listening to the words of Ubisoft’s creative director Alex Hutchinson, it’s a little bit of controversy. It’s only a couple of weeks ago, after all that the man said that games journalists of exhibiting a ‘subtle racism‘ in favour of Japanese games developers. More recently, he declared that adding Easy modes into games can ruin their core design (a statement that I used to question whether so many games should feature an ‘Easy’ mode).
In another pretty out-there comment when being interviewed by EDGE, Hutchinson came out and said that ‘monster triple-A’ games are dying out, and that the Assassin’s Creed developers are ‘the last of the dinosaurs’ when it comes to big-budget games employing huge teams. He went so far as to say that Assassin’s Creed 3 is probably the last time that such a big team will be used to put together a game at Ubisoft:
We really felt like this was a rare opportunity We had an experienced team, who had worked on the franchise for a while; we had the full backing of Ubisoft to make something huge; we had almost three years to do it, which is a rarity these days; the tech and the hardware platforms were both mature, which allowed us to start running instead of building base features; and the installed user base for all platforms is massive.
Many of these factors are about to change, by choice of circumstance, so a lot of us truly believed this was a once in a career opportunity.
The first question that this raises is, ‘Really Alex? Do you really think that, or are you simply trying to build up an image around yourself as an outspoken naysayer?’
The natural reaction towards this statement is understandably scepticism. Just one look at the monstrous sales of games like Modern Warfare 3, Skyrim and FIFA 12 (and, inevitably, FIFA 13), and, surprise surprise, the Assassin’s Creed series, show that the big guns of the industry can most likely weather the current global economic storm.
An interesting point he does raise, however, is the idea that
There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out.
Batshit bonkers though he may seem, Hutchinson may be onto something by talking about the fallen middle. The fact is that gaming genres are no longer the smorgasbords they used to be, with the major genres coming to be defined by just a couple of blockbuster titles. Remember the times when you’d have dozens of football franchises to choose from, not just FIFA or Pro Evo? Or when first-person shooters (Perfect Dark, Timesplitters) aimed to be a little more than attempts to replicate – as meticulously as possible – the bleak nature of modern warfare?
The tough financial times have led to the fall of many a fine game studio such as Free Radical, Midway and, most recently, 38 Studios; the co-developers behind Kingdoms of Amalur (evidence that making a high-quality game on your development debut isn’t always enough in the current climate). This has inevitably led to a narrowing of the market, and in this sense many of Hutchinson’s figurative dinosaurs have indeed died out.
Certainly, there are good things to come out of this generation of gaming. Innovative small-studio games are thriving in places like the Xbox Marketplace, Playstation Store and Steam, and Steam’s recent Greenlight system is a further sign that Indie gaming is on the rise, but should we spare a thought for the disappearing mid-size studios?
So Hutchinson is right to an extent. The playing field has got a hell of a lot smaller, with many middling studios falling by the wayside as the big boys continue to dominate. The big irony, of course, is that Hutchinson, Ubisoft, and their ever-reliable Assassin’s Creed franchise definitely count among the big boys, so they’re pretty much excluded from this dinosaur analogy.
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