Assassin’s Creed 10? ‘I hope so,’ says Ubisoft’s Detoc

Even if each game is great, I feel like I’d eventually get burnt out on the series (characters, gameplay, etc.). Halo games have been pretty solid for the most part and I’m finding it hard to get interested in Halo 4. Eventually you just need to let a franchise go when it’s on top. Uncharted did a very good job of doing this.

The core market isn’t shrinking, says Ubisoft North America executive director Laurent Detoc — it’s just there’s only room for high-end games. And if you own one of those brands, as Ubi does with Assassin’s Creed, there’s no such thing as too many sequels.

Does that mean the company would make an eighth, ninth, tenth installment in the prolific Assassin’s Creed series? “I hope we will,” Detoc told Gamasutra at E3. “I also hope we’ll be able to branch out from within the franchise. It’s very simple to me: There’s no such thing as not being able to annualize a franchise. If it’s good, people will come.”

He also says the company’s mobile and social strategy must be very prescriptive, and embrace the idea that what consumers want from a game experience is contextual and situational. Detoc likens it to film and television, where sometimes one might want an ad-supported 30-minute program at home, and at others one might be ready to pay for an experience at the movie theater.

The game industry has an advantage, though, in that it can leverage one product across multiple platforms (Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier has a Facebook companion in Ghost Recon: Commander). “We can make these games collaborate and communicate and use one to help the other,” Detoc says. “But we also need to concentrate on making these products that stand on their own.”

Ubisoft says it’ll lend as much support to Nintendo’s Wii U and other new technologies as it has in the past; having had a strong Wii strategy paid off for the company earlier this generation, and getting a jump on new hardware maximizes the time developers have to learn a platform.

via Game Sutra