"Assassin's Creed 4" has just been confirmed by Ubisoft, and one of its newly appointed studio heads talked about what makes Ubisoft the successful company it is.
According to a report from GamesIndustry on Thursday, Pauline Jacquey, who is the new managing director of Ubisoft Reflections, talked about the reasoning behind her remaining with Ubisoft for so long.
"The culture is really good. The DNA of the company is that we're a bit the underdog, ten years ago people were laughing at us in big retail in the US.
"And we're not arrogant, I think we're very humble in the way that we do things, and we like to take risks. The CEO of the company is really really great in pushing us to take risks.
"It's OK to fail and make mistakes, and you can do it again and again. I failed two big games, I probably lost €10 million between these two productions, but it's OK because I did other things that went better. There's a lot of forgiveness, a lot of openness, and I like this," Jacquey said.
Jacquey then discussed how she will be applying the things she has learned from her past to her new experience at Reflections.
"That's the beauty of having seen so many studios, it's as if I had worked with ten different companies. I believe I have a good baggage of best practices that are not just all coming from France and Montreal.
"Some are coming from China, some are coming from India, so I'm currently trained to deploy different practices. It can be related to the culture of the studio, it can be related to methodologies, development processes or creation management.
"And since I was [with Ubisoft] for a very long time, I participated in the creation of what we call the Stage Gate process, that's our internal development process.
"It's very well documented and very interesting, because it allows risk but it's still controlling production. It's something I know by heart because I participated in creating it so it's something I can use now in any production.
"A lot of my job today in Reflections is informing, sharing information, sharing best practices and mentoring the producers and the leads, people I work with, and to give them the best of Ubisoft. But not everything, not everything is good in Ubisoft, I'm just trying to filter and just give what's best," Jacquey said.
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