Tom Clancy Games Changed Ubisoft, Says CEO Yves Guillemot

Ubisoft has, over the years, developed a veritable lineup of intellectual properties, which ranges across genres and boasts of some of the biggest heavyweights in the industry, from Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry to Rayman and Prince of Persia. But it’d be fair to say that the publisher hasn’t gotten as much out of any single property as much as it has from the Tom Clancy license, which has spawned multiple franchises, each of them more successful than the last.

From Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six to Splinter Cell and The Division, the license has given birth to some exceedingly successful franchises for Ubosoft. Recently, while speaking with IGN, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot spoke about the same, acknowledging that it was only after their acquisition of Red Storm and the Tom Clancy license that the publisher went from being mid-sized to a major name in the industry.

“The first one that changed the lot of the company was Splinter Cell,” said Guillemot. “We went for the Xbox, and it was a complex bet, and a dangerous bet because they didn’t have many machines [out there]. Launching on that machine and not PlayStation at the time was a bit risky, but we couldn’t go straight on PlayStation. We wanted to use the capacity of the [Xbox]. We did very well on Xbox. We hit probably 50 percent of the install base.”

In the same interview, Guillemot also spoke about Splinter Cell, why the series has been absent for so long, and when we might expect to see more of it. Read more about that through here.