EIEF: Guillemot on the Power of Gaming

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot focused on the power of gaming for the non-gamer in his keynote for the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival. Guillemot predicts the video game market will to grow 50% in the next four years. He expects new technologically powerful consoles, accessibility-focused consoles and Web 2.0’s ability to give creative power to individuals to spur this growth.

Guillemot commented of this growth potential: “We have a huge opportunity as an industry [for] people to express who they are, how creative they are and build their community of friends online. Games give you a way to do something that people can recognize.”

Guillemot referred to Ubisoft’s upcoming family oriented titles including the Imagine brand for young girls and the My Life Coach brand. He expects the casual market to draw in new gamers. To handle this influx, Ubisoft has created an internal group targeted family friendly Wii and DS titles, and is hiring about 500 people a year with plans to go to 600 to 900 in the next few years. The company plans to continue to make complex harder games but also will create easy game. It is looking into implementing an in-game monitoring system which would offer help when a player gets stuck.

His conclusion? “Our competition is not just video games, but books, films, the internet, theatre and music. We have to make sure that we do well to keep [the people who are coming to gaming] for the long term. We have to make sure our industry image is improved to allow us to attract new talent.”

via Gamasutra