The ‘games as a service’ initiative might have just killed another story-driven, single-player IP.
It’s not that this is even rare nowadays, when you have titles like Electronic Arts’ Star Wars Battlefront series of games, titles with GaaS roots that ultimately contributed to Amy Hennig’s single-player Star Wars title to be canned. It’s the same exact situation veteran creative director Patrick Plourde finds himself in, as he recently confirmed to Videogameschronicle that a sequel to his critically-acclaimed title Child of Light is very unlikely. This is despite the fact that he teased Child of Light 2 in a Twitter post a year ago.
Sorry for the long silence. But we have this little thing up and running :) #childoflight #switch pic.twitter.com/M6k1xoXX8F
— Patrick Plourde (@patrick_plourde) August 8, 2018
The exclusive interview sheds some light on what Plourde thinks has caused the sequel to be dropped, and the ‘games as a service’ model frequently used by publisher Ubisoft came up.
“I don’t know if there’s a Child of Light 2 that is in production. Ubisoft is big, but I’m not working on it,” Plourde said. “Right now, I don’t think there’s a Child of Light 2 being produced… I’m not holding my breath.”
Plourde thinks Ubisoft's attention is being pulled elsewhere right now. “I don’t think it’s the type of game that Ubisoft wants to make…The company is not an adolescent company, it is a mature company. And the other things, in terms of portfolio, it’s still supported – we ported it on Switch and we’re still selling a bunch of copies, but it’s just that right now it’s all about games as a service," he said. "We can make money out of it, but you can make more money elsewhere. That’s the problem of not being independent while making this.”
Ubisoft, Child of Light’s publisher, has worked very hard for a couple of years now to push its ‘games as a service’ model to its many consumers, with titles such as Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, The Division 2, The Crew 2 and even single-player games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey featuring GaaS elements prominently. You can definitely make the case that it has been beneficial to players, seeing as they can enjoy Ubisoft titles for as long as the games are being updated with both free and paid content. This GaaS trend did, however, shift the publisher’s focus towards these monetization models as they can be very lucrative if done right, and away from creative and talented titles, as they drew less players in due to their niche status.
In any case, I hope that Ubisoft, or any publisher for that matter, realize that keeping your playerbase happy with a diverse portfolio of titles is ultimately better than settling on heavily monetizing a couple of games, which can lead to very embittered gamers. I don’t think anybody wants those in this day and age.
You can find the entirety of Videogamechronicles’ exclusive interview with Patrick Plourde right here.
