Ubisoft talks up the value of DS casual gaming
And there's a big, new announcement due next week
During his keynote talk at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed the scale of the company's success on the DS.
"Ten percent of revenues came from DS casual games last year. We sold 3.5 million Petz games alone," he said.
And such casual games will be a major focus for the company going forward. It's created a new division to make casual and family-friendly games, especially those that can be played together.
Indeed, Guillemot explained that on a personal level, Nintendo's Wii Tennis was the first game his wife had played; something that had changed his family's attitude to the industry in which he's worked for the past 20 years.
"We need to attract new audiences, as well as people who used to play games but have given up," he said.
As part of this approach, on DS, Ubisoft will concentrate on its casual brands such as Imagine, My Coach and Petz. Another new casual brand that Guillemot said he expected to be a big hit this Christmas will be announced at the Leipzig Games Convention next week.
However, interestingly Ubisoft has found the process of making casual games to be very different to hardcore games. Not only has the company had to bring in experts from outside the gaming industry, but it also has had to do up to five times more focus testing to ensure its games are accessible enough to an audience that hasn't spend hundreds of hours playing.
