Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed how impressed they are with the performance of Pokemon Go. What’s more, he has teased their own AR game in the works.
With everyone literally taking the streets and hunting Pokemon, it’s obvious that we are living a thrilling time for Augmented Reality games. This seems not to have escaped the eyes of Ubisoft.
During their financial conference call for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2016-2017, CEO Yves Guillemot has acknowledged this fact. He’s said that folks at Ubisoft are “very impressed” by the achievement of Nintendo and how good the game is performing. No wonder, you may say. Seven days after its official release in the States, Pokemon Go smashed the record created by Candy Crush Saga in number of daily users. In other words, Pokemon Go is officially the biggest mobile game in U.S. history.
This is definitely a very luring prospects for some gaming companies. In this way, Yves Guillemot has teased their own AR game in the works. However, he has also stated that it won’t be the same type of game as Pokemon Go. We can expect rather a game that uses and enhances the augmented reality technology all the same. Also it’s not coming any time soon so hold your breath. There is still room for surprise and, who knows, maybe Ubisoft’s announcement is followed by others.
It’s too early to call, but with Watch Dogs 2 on the way, we’ve got to bet that the game will feature some sort of AR aspect.
A New Beginning for AR Games?
Before Pokemon Go hit our daily lives, there was already an AR game that was lying all sorts of foundations for the genre. We are referring here to Ingress, developed by Nantic, and launched back in 2012. Ingress is not about capturing cheerful creatures but rather, claiming portals at places of cultural significance and linking them to create virtual triangular control fields over geographical areas. The competition is not player-to-player based but between opposing factions. The more control fields your faction controls, the better it ranks.
Pokemon Go has certainly put AR games in the spotlight this year. It’s all about community and interaction with the real world. It spurs players to physically move from one place to the other. In this sense, the possibilities of AR games and how they are played are quite extensive for the gaming industry. It’s a category not exempt of controversies, on the other hand, with detractors criticizing how AR titles “compel” users to look at the world through the “looking glass” of their smartphones. Other critics pinpoint to the future demise of the genre, believing that it will die with the same speed as it rose. In the meantime, Pokemon Go numbers keep on growing worldwide.
What’s your take on this? Do you like AR games? Do you think we’ll be seeing more companies will hop on the bandwagon or that all of this is a fleeting sport?
[Source: DualShockers]
