The game maker

YANNIS MALLAT, CEO, UBISOFT MONTREAL

Canada isn’t exactly known as an IT powerhouse, but there is one area in which it excels: videogames. The industry has more than 300 companies and 16,500 employees adding $2.3 billion to Canada’s GDP, according to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada. At the top of the chain is the Canadian arm of France-based Ubisoft, responsible for such top-selling franchises as Assassin’s Creed ( 78 million copies sold) and Just Dance ( 50 million). And at the top of Ubisoft in Canada is Yannis Mallat, who joined the company in 2000 as a third-party producer and was named CEO in 2006, at the age of 32. Mallat leads the two biggest creative teams at Ubisoft, which has 29 studios around the world, and both teams were instrumental in creating Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4, the latest titles for two of its biggest-selling series, which were released within a week of each other in midNovember. “I think we are the only studio to release two big triple A titles on next-gen consoles seven days apart,” Mallat says. “That speaks a lot about the creative powerhouses that we’ve been building here in Canada... and, globally, the faith in Canadian talent.”

It seems unusual to release two big products at once.

It’s a competitive environment, but it’s also an environment that is mainly driven by quality. Ubisoft has quality and innovation within its own DNA so we only focus on the triple A-quality titles and gamers know that and players know that. When you have two top games, people will pick them both no matter when the release is. This is the kind of business we’re in. How do you manage that process?

been building over the years an astonishing bastion of talent. If you think about the Toronto studio, there are already 340 people here who helped tremendously on both titles and, of course, there is the flagship studio, 2,700 people in Montreal, working on them too. It’s a lot of people indeed, but it helps us to strategize the production and those titles have been worked on for quite a while so we are able to operate

a totally outdated view of how things are, at least at Ubisoft. It’s back to this idea of momentum and by momentum I mean expertise, knowledge, tools, process, technologies. When you’re at the crossing point where the talent masters their craft, masters the new tools and masters the techniques, and you have this humane approach of respecting the people, but also respecting what they have been developing, you have this fantastic productivity where in a reasonable amount of time, they come up with awesome games. It is our job and our responsibility to make those videogame worlds appealing, mainstream, comfortable, full of discovery, fulfilling all the needs people may have. Assassin’s Creed is all about history; Far Cry 4 is all about being put into an insane place where lots of things happen, you have to react and you can craft your own story. The open world structure affords mainstream appeal and a nice platform to fulfil every gamer’s needs.

You talk about mainstream appeal, but a lot of people are turned off by the violence in a lot of games.

that point, I’d like to say that should it be Watch Dogs or Assassin’s Creed, you can actually play the whole game without killing anybody if you want. Maybe not enough people know that. That being said, the more we welcome a diverse pool of talent making the game, the more we will enrich the offer and that’s really what we are aiming at.

Unlike with a lot of businesses, your customers are very engaged. If they like or don’t like a game, you’ll hear about it.

are certainly not complacent at all and that’s for a couple of reasons, both external and internal. On the external side, gamers are very vocal and they require the best, so when you’re such a consumer-centric company, it’s easy to sometimes feel hurt by what those guys can say, because