Ubisoft game designer and managing director Jade Raymond says she’s aiming to make games not only PC-friendly but smartphone and tablet friendly as well.
AUSTIN, TEX.—There was some hope that Jade Raymond might provide a wee peek into the numerous, top-secret videogame projects being developed in Ubisoft’s Toronto studio during her appearance at South by Southwest Interactive on Sunday, but alas it was all smoke and mirrors.
Or pixels and bleeps, to put it more accurately. The 38-year-old game designer and managing director of Ubisoft Toronto – as close to a bona fide celebrity as gaming peeps get and a rare recognizable female face in an industry that’s very much still a boys’ club – drew a sizeable crowd away from the nearby SXSW Gaming Expo for her fireside chat with Spike TV host Geoff Keighley at Austin’s Long Centre and coyly promised them a sneak preview of what’s going on inside the software company’s recently expanded space in the Junction. Alas, all the potentially revealing sights and sounds in the video tour of the office were completely pixelated and bleeped out to admittedly humorous, but ultimately maddening effect.
No one left any the wiser as to what’s up at Ubisoft Toronto, only that there are five titles being developed there right now and that two of them are co-productions with other gaming studios. Continue your wild speculation, gamers.
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“There are definitely a lot of plates spinning,” confirmed Raymond, best known for producing the wildly popular Assassin’s Creed series for Ubisoft’s Montreal office. “None of them have been announced.”
The room did get some insight into what Ubisoft’s future might hold in a more general sense. More blockbuster, “triple-A” franchises tied in with movies and comic books and the like are definitely on the way to follow films already in development based on such Ubisoft titles as Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed and the forthcoming Watch Dogs – although Raymond, acknowledging that the history of game-to-movie/movie-to-game crossovers is a horrendously spotty one, promised that the studio’s focus will remain where it should despite the growing move to “transmedia” properties.
“Our business is making games, so we have to make sure we’re making good games, first and foremost,” she said. “I don’t think we can think out the gate, ‘How is this going to be a good movie?’ I don’t know anything about movies. I’ve never made a movie in my life.”
High, too, on Raymond’s list of future priorities is diversifying the Ubisoft library to include games built not simply for consoles and PCs, but also specifically tailored to devices such as smartphones and tablets. As she put it: “A good game on those devices is different from a good game on consoles, so I definitely believe they deserve their own franchises.”
Games with a strong “social” element allowing users to interact with each other and express themselves during play are also likely to grow more prominent in the years ahead, she predicted.
For now, mind you, Raymond is having a hard enough time finding any time during the average, busy day to do any actual gaming herself.
A mother of two young children – she was eight months pregnant with her first daughter when she was first offered the Ubisoft Toronto gig in 2009 – Raymond now finds herself fighting over the videogame console at home with her eldest daughter.
“I play during my lunch break at the office,” she confessed. “Anytime (my daughter) sees me at the console she wants to play her game, and she doesn’t understand why it’s mommy’s turn to play. I actually just bought an AlienWare laptop so I can play in bed because I can’t use the living-room console anymore.”
Ben Rayner is
a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s
Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner.
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