Remember when I was excited about Ubisoft trying the nearly unheard of thing for games industry of launching new IPs at the 2013 edition of E3. However, that excitement might be a little short-lived.

In a recent interview with A List Daily, Ubisoft’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Tony Key, says that the developer and publisher is only interested in launching new IPs if they think that they can turn them into franchises and release sequels.

Here’s the key part of the interview with A List Daily:

[a]list daily: You want Watch_Dogs to be the foundation of a big franchise, then?

Tony Key: Absolutely. That’s what all our games are about; we won’t even start if we don’t think we can build a franchise out of it. There’s no more fire and forget – it’s too expensive.

The interview goes on from there to talk about Watch Dogs (always stylized as Watch_Dogs with is needless) but the heart of the interview is right here.

Ubisoft isn’t creating new IPs to fill a massive void of missing creativity caused by publishers hell-bent on playing it safe to make money. Ubisoft is creating new IPs to do the same thing because they are still trying to build up a franchise catalogue to compete with the EAs of the world.

So Watch Dogs is the start of a franchise. Assassin’s Creed is now an annual franchise. What does this mean for The Crew and The Division? Given their online emphasis, they seem almost MMO-like. Are they going to get new iterations on a regular basis to make money when expansion packs or DLCs would probably be better for the product from a creative standpoint?

I like Ubisoft but maybe I should make that a past tense statement. They almost seemed like the good guys in a cynical, money first industry. But they’re certainly acting like they need to operate like EA to beat EA. That money first attitude gets you less love from gamers. I think that’ll be the first area Ubisoft competes with EA.

Source: A List Daily

Related: E3 2013: Ubisoft Does What They Do Best – New IPs