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A Ubisoft Tale
🕑 Added 2024-01-26 14:00:14 +0000 UTC
There's a section in my current video about Ubisoft that I don't think I can squeeze in without worsening its pace… however, it doesn't stop fascinating me.
When you've got mega-corporations that are multi-national with thousands of people employed, it's compelling to see a cohesive narrative and bias form within it over time.
Obviously, there's the story about EA's Ultimate Team starting out in life as an offline bonus mode within their UEFA game instead of FIFA, that eventually evolved its mechanics step by step until it step by step walked its way into mainstream action games like Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 4.
When a game reinvents the genre, that development cycle doesn't become a trend in the studio, instead, the once unique mechanics of that reinvention become the trend of that studio… and several others.
Hence this quick but notable story about Tom Clancy, and the death of Ubisoft's PC support during the 2000s.
A Coffin
After the success of Rainbow Six in 1998, Red Storm Entertainment released Ghost Recon for PC… only for its year-late Xbox port, a system the game was never originally designed for with a presumably smaller install-base, outsold the original, which itself was considered a success.
Its Lid
That same year, Ubisoft created its first console-centric and exclusive game in the Tom Clancy series with Splinter Cell, netting 1.1 million pre-orders, let alone sales.
Nail #1
Ghost Recon 2 began its development with a PC version in-mind, but with the PS2 & Gamecube porst already changing up for the primary Xbox Version, it was dropped all-together. So Ghost Recon 2 came out in 2003, debuting exclusively on the same console as Splinter Cell, and again, to 1+ Million copies.
Nail #2
Two years later, Rainbow Six 3, did release separate versions for the PC and Xbox at the same-time, finding more profit and acclaim on the latter, one that lacked many of the former's design pillars such as the Planning Phase.
Rainbow Six 3 for Xbox ended up being the most popular game on Xbox Live, dethroned only by Halo 2.
Nail #3
Finally, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter outsourced the PC Version to have its development team from Ghost Recon 2 focus entirely on the Xbox 360 release, the primary version that once again to higher praise and profits, in the same year that Rainbow Six did release for PC two months later, but as a straight-up console port.
A coffin, its lid, and the nails.
It's kinda funny to think that the game which unearthed this corpse for Ubisoft was a console-led multi-player only Rainbow Six game that was merely meant to recoup the wasted development cost on Patriots…
