Ubisoft CEO: Lack of Innovation Due to Long Console Cycle

Assassin's Creed 3

As much as some of us rail against the impending onslaught that the games industry collectively refers to as “the next generation”, there’s not much we can do to stop it. It’s coming, whether we like it or not.

But according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, the next generation should have already been here. In fact, if it was here, we wouldn’t see the industry in quite the state that it is, lacking innovation and in need of a shot in the arm. Here’s what Guillemot said in a recent interview with Polygon.

We need new consoles and at the end of the cycle generally the market goes down because there are less new IPs, new properties, so that damaged the industry a little bit. I hope next time they will come more often… Everybody who is taking risks and innovating is welcome because there are lots of hardcore gamers and those guys want new things, where the mass market will be more interested in having the same experience.

Call me crazy, but I’m just not clicking with this comment. Don’t we see some of the generation’s worst games early on in a console cycle? It’s not until developers get their feet under them in regards to the hardware that the industry really starts hitting its collective strive, all around the same time. It’s weird that Guillemot feels this way — nobody’s stopping Ubisoft from creating new IPs in the middle or latter end of a console cycle… so why wait?

What do you guys think of this? Is Guillemot crazy? Am I the crazy one? Does lack of innovation stem from lack of prettier graphics? Go!

Source – Polygon