Ubisoft Employs Over 12,000 Devs, Here's Why

Hot on the heels of the Take-Two CEO taking potshots over Ubisoft and how they run their infrastructure, the company responsible for titles such as the Tom Clancy franchise and the Assassin's Creed series is setting the record straight for why they run their business the way they do. With over 14,000 total team members currently attached to the Ubisoft name, and 12,000 of them actively working on projects, Ubisoft definitely takes an interesting approach to game development. Now they're explaining why.

Speaking with GamesBeat during E3, Ubisoft's Laurent Detoc got real about how the company's infrastructure works and why it's working for them despite many in the industry calling them nuts:

"We have about 14,000 total [employees], but maybe 12,000 in active development, which is still the biggest group in the industry," Detoc clarifies. "It shows in our conference, the breadth of content and the variety we offer is second to none in the industry today. That's one of the benefits of having this large pool of talent.

"If you go back a few years, people were looking at us and saying we had way too many people. Financial analysts were telling us to focus, to reduce that number, to be more strategic. We would say, 'No, this is the strategy. Games are going to need more and more people, especially as they go live. The team that works on a game has to stay on that game instead of continuing on to the next game.' If you don't have enough people, you have to make a choice. Those are choices you don't want to have to make, because both outcomes are bad."

And it's not just one team assigned to a project either. A good example of this is Assasssin's Creed Odyssey that has several different Ubisoft studios working on the title at once, with their Quebec studio at the helm:

"Some other companies—I believe Microsoft's studios are each attached to one brand in particular, so they'll work more in isolation with one another. They may use outside teams to help them, which everybody knows how to do by now. We believe in the networking of the studios, in studio collaboration. We can shift people. When we control the associate studios, we can shift 50, 100 people here or there more easily. They're all trained and used to working together. They've moved from one studio to another."

Detoc added, "We just opened up in a few cities this year. Bordeaux is a very nice city in France, and suddenly our studio in Bordeaux is much better able to attract talented people and grow than we thought, because we have other people in studios around the world saying, "Sure, I'd like to move there." When they do, they help attract more people from the outside. They help the studio do stronger outreach, and before you know it, there are hundreds of people in one place when we thought there would be half as many over that time. There's a very nice virtuous cycle to our studio network."

From everything we've seen so far about Assassin's Creed Odyssey, we thank them. And hey, if it works - it works. With titles like Rainbow Six Siege and Beyond Good and Evil 2, Skull & Bones, and even more coming out in the future, the more the merrier!