Ubisoft: 1080p Does Not Sell Games

I have made my thoughts on this entire nonsensical 1080p debate (pushed in no small part by a certain console manufacturer, and lapped up by its fanbase) abundantly clear by now- it’s pointless. It doesn’t matter. A great game is a great game, and it doesn’t matter how many lines or pixels it displays on screen. And now it appears at least one major AAA publisher is also echoing that sentiment.

“It’s certainly not something I care about in a game,” Far Cry 4 head honcho Alex Hutchinson told OXM. And this isn’t a case of sour grapes either, or of early damage control: he made this statement after confirming a target resolution and frame rate of 1080p and 30 frames a second for the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game. “It feels weird to me that people are cool about playing a sort of retro pixel game, and yet the resolution somehow matters. It’s like: is it fun, is it interesting, is it new, is it fresh, are there interesting questions?

“With the 4K TVs and things – somebody was telling me that with a 4K TV, to even see it, your living room has to be big enough to sit like 12 feet from the screen. I don’t know the exact numbers, but it starts to get a little crazy. I’m just in it for the experience, I’ll play a SNES game if it’s cool.”

Hutchinson went on to talk about how destructive the emphasis on resolution was for gaming and its evolution:

“I think it’s a bad axis. We should not be in a business that sells itself – we are, a little bit, but that sells itself on the flavour of like, gadgetry and technology. I think that’s a bad sign.

“If our thing is ‘woo, the same exact thing you had before, at twice the resolution, instead of a new thing’… A new spin or an evolution, I think is much more interesting.”

Hutchinson, I agree with you. And just for those remarks, you may have earned yourself one Far Cry 4 sale, from me.