I’ve often lamented the lack of new IPs and new ideas coming out of the games industry’s big studios and news like this doesn’t help matters. In an interview with Games Industry, creative director of the upcoming Child of Light, Patrick Plourde, said that when he was pitching the game to Ubisoft, they told him that making Beyond Good & Evil was a mistake.

While Ubisoft is a big publisher, they always seemed willing to try new ideas and take risks on new IPs. However, in a July interview, the company’s sales and marketing VP said that the company was only interested in launching new franchises rather than one-off games in order to make more money.

Money is the reason why Ubisoft considers Beyond Good & Evil to be a failure. While the game received great critical reviews and is popular among those who played it, Beyond Good & Evil didn’t sell as well as hoped. The game’s sequel is currently in development but how close it is to release is currently unknown.

What I really take issue with is Ubisoft referring to Beyond Good & Evil as a mistake. It was a great game. The consensus among those who played it is that they loved it. A mistake would be spending millions on a commercial and critical disaster.

While the goal of a business is to make money, it’s disheartening to see a business essentially write off a product because it didn’t meet expectations. A good business should ask what went wrong with the product. Were the expectations unrealistic? Did they do a poor job of marketing or selling the product? Was the product just poor? Okay, in the case of Beyond Good & Evil, the latter’s not the case but the question should be asked as part of the process.

Ubisoft, or any company, calling a game a “mistake” just because it didn’t sell well enough does a disservice to both developers and gamers. A mistake would be giving up on a great game or franchise because it didn’t do as well as hoped. A well-run business doesn’t just shrug its shoulders and move on when something doesn’t go their way. They learn from what went wrong and become better as a result.

I can understand why Ubisoft hasn’t gone back to the well of Beyond Good & Evil but I am disappointed that they don’t want to learn something from their experience. I guess it’s easier to just pump out annual franchises than actually take lessons from the past.

Source: The Escapist