Electronic Arts and Zynga have bought up a number of studios with the purposes of picking up the talent contained therein. Ubisoft’s vice president of digital publishing Chris Early takes pride that his company has taken the opposite route and promoted from within.
“We’ve taken a route with Ubisoft of building our talents from within. We haven’t gone out and spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying a company or something along those lines. We’ve used our 26 studios around the world that we have; we’ve found out who’s interested in making these kinds of games. Some were interested at one point but aren’t anymore because they realize it takes a different mentality making a console game than it is making a game that’s a service, like a Facebook game should be,” said Early. “Yet there are some studios that are doing it well – that like it. They’ve helped us move forward with that. It’s been a learning process for us, both from a development standpoint and from the operational side of things.”
“About half of the games we make are made internally and about half of them are made with external partners,” Early continued. “What that really brings us is the ability to develop the talents internally – from a development standpoint and certainly from an operational standpoint – and still get the freshest amount of influx that we can from people who are experts in the field. In the case of Loot Drop, I think we’re very fortunate because we have a company that has solid social gaming skills and has a deep background in hardcore games. For us, they were the perfect match.”
Source: Venturebeat
