Ubisoft: People Still Don’t Understand the Importance of the Wii U GamePad

“If you arrive with good innovations supported by the console then you’re potentially creating something really new to appeal to players and then you can build a brand upon it, like we did with Rabbids and a bit earlier with Just Dance, and like we did with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. On the other hand, you’re speaking of big investments, everything depends on the console itself. On the Wii U for instance, the level of the Wii U hardware is a little bit higher than Xbox 360 or PS3, but it was more about using the new GamePad and finding new designs for games, asymmetrical etc.

“One thing for sure we knew is that this new controller would be something harder to convey than the Wii, which was about the movements in your game, so we knew we needed to educate people around this GamePad idea. We strongly believe that people have not yet realized the importance of the gameplay that this can provide, but for sure they need the good games to support the system. And they need the installed base to gain more support, which is not the case yet,” he noted. “For our games we really wanted to show the innovation. In ZombiU for instance, the players are really fond of the multiplayer mode because it’s totally new; it’s like one FPS player against an RTS player. On the second screen approach… We pushed the limits of that so it can be a real gameplay challenge to look at two screens.