According to a recent earnings call, Ubisoft would like to add cross play to any and all of their PvP titles. Although the Montreuil-based company has recently suffered some financial setbacks thanks to the poorly-received Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the experience has clearly been something of a learning curve for Ubisoft, which has recently delayed Watch Dogs: Legion and Rainbow Six Quarantine as a result of the previously-mentioned game's poor sales.
Ubisoft announced some "radical" fixes for Ghost Recon Breakpoint after reports surfaced of just how disappointing the game was financially for the company, thanks in part to the game's excessive use of microtransactions. While a similar situation initially occurred with Rainbow Six Siege upon release, a systematic approach of perpetual updates and additional free content led that game to become one of Ubisoft's most consistently played titles, with over 20 million players being logged in August of this year.
Ubisoft is also a publisher of smaller, indie studio-driven titles, such as the cross play-enabled free-to-play game Brawlhalla. As reported by gamesindustry.biz, the CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, would like to see more of the company's games utilize cross play, which is the process of playing games in an online multiplayer fashion between different consoles. Currently, only two Ubisoft titles are eligible for cross play, with the second being Just Dance's World Dance Floor.
"Our goal is to put cross-play on all the PvP games we have, over time," CEO Yves Guillemot said during an earning's call earlier this week. "That's well on the way." As it currently stands, only a few select titles are available to play between all the current console generations, including Fortnite, Minecraft, and Dauntless. If Guillemot truly wants to move all Ubisoft PvP games into the cross play coliseum, such a change could see titles like For Honor, The Division 2, and the aforementioned much-played Rainbow Six Siege becoming playable across all consoles.
With the success of Fortnite and Minecraft's cross play between consoles, it's not surprising other developers would be excited about the prospect. Sectioning players off by console, although profitable for the game's platform developers, creates a rift in a developer's player base which can make creating separate online cloud servers both expensive and difficult to maintain. By grouping everyone playing any one game together, be it on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, or PC, developers could have a much easier time of managing PvP servers in the long run. Until then, players will have to worry about defeating the Behemoth on their own.
Source: gamesindustry.biz