Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot has responded to a shareholder question about the Stop Killing Games campaign – and in a very newsworthy corporate question and answer session, revealed that a new Ghost Recon game’s in the works.
To quickly recap, Stop Killing Games aim to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable after the cessation of official support. They were inspired to take action by Ubisoft themselves ‘sunsetting’ online racer The Crew.
Ubisoft’s response to their campaign comes around the time the group’s petition to the EU to take action against the mass extinction of online games hits 1.4 million signatures. Despite some doubts about potential signature spoofing, the petition’s recently attracted support from EU politicians and industry trade bodies, so it’s no surprise Guillemot’s fielding questions about it from moneyfolk.
“Regarding the petition, we operate in a market,” the CEO began (via Game File), immediately whipping out what I assume’s the corporate version of the phrase ‘we’re living in a society’. He went on to say that players are “forewarned that eventually the game may be discontinued”, and framed the studio putting The Crew 2 on sale for €1/$1 back in 2024 as an attempt to let players of the first game hop across to one that wasn’t about to be deep-sixed.
“You provide a service, but nothing is written in stone and at some point the service may be discontinued,” Guillemot continued, “Nothing is eternal. And we are doing our best to make sure that things go well for all players and buyers, because obviously support for all games cannot last forever. But that’s an issue that we’re working on. That’s something that the industry at large is working on, to minimize impact on players.”
The exec closed out his point by saying that the likes of software and tools made to make live-service games “become obsolete” or no longer available in time, outlining that this is why studios can opt to put out new versions.
It’s worth noting that Stop Killing Games have been clear they’re not asking for all online games to be “eternal”, but rather to “implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary”.
Moving away from Stop Killing Games, in the same shareholder ask-a-thon Guillemot and Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet casually alluded to a new Ghost Recon being in development. The CEO mentioned “capitalising on upcoming launches, such as The Division and Ghost Recon”, while Duguet touched on investment from Tencent being used for “future development of other major brand names”, citing Ghost Recon as an example.
Confirming the execs’ chatter about the ghost reconning their attic, an Ubisoft spokesperson has told Game File that the publishers “look forward to sharing more when the time is right”. Nice. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come with NFT trousers.
