“It’s very simple to me: There’s no such thing as not being able to annualize a franchise. If it’s good, people will come.”
Ubisoft’s North American executive director Laurent Detoc in an interview with Gamasutra.
Evidently, Ubisoft doesn’t believe in such a thing as franchise fatigue. Even if the product is consistently good year after year, excitement for a series will wane and you run the risk of over-saturating consumers’ palettes. But despite the brilliant creative forces slaving for their publishing masters in this industry, it’s nigh impossible to keep an annual product consistently good. Your game’s foundation may indeed be Porsche – as Call of Duty’s engineers love to remind us – but after spreading your concept so thin over such a small amount of time, someone’s bound to get lazy, and your triple-A blockbuster will show dark rims beneath its eyes.
I truly wish to see Ubisoft rub out a fantastic wad of Assassin’s Creed every Fall, but sooner or later, they’re going to start shooting blanks.