Ubisoft on Wii U: "the machine can have a great success"
Tablet to harness mobile and social gaming techniques.
Nintendo's new Wii U console "can have great success", giant video game publisher Ubisoft believes.
That's why the company has seven games in development for it.
"We have been extremely happy with the functionality of the console and the use," answered Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO, during the Q&A portion of the annual earnings call.
"What is really interesting is the fact that we have this tablet that allows us to bring totally new gameplay, and also brings the possibility to have a lot more social functionalities, because you can have now a screen to play asynchronously with your friends, to receive challenges and to really have a screen to communicate with your friends. That is going to help tremendously the experience in video games.
"We feel that the more we grow, the more use we will have for social functions in our games. And the new gameplays - a lot have been invented in other platforms, so there are lots of new ideas that will come to console. So that will help to bring new games with good functionalities, and be very good in turn at usage.
"So all this tells us," he went on, "that the machine can have a great success, because it will bring to families a good machine. And this will be for gamers but also for all the social games that are generally sold on the Wii. Going after those two types of populations will give a good chance for that machine to have a great success."
"[With the tablet,] you can have now a screen to play asynchronously with your friends, to receive challenges and to really have a screen to communicate with your friends."
Yves Guillemot, CEO, Ubisoft
Chief financial officer Alan Martinez summarised that Ubisoft will make five casual games for Wii U, and two games for core gamers on Wii U. One of those core games will be Assassin's Creed, he said - presumably AC3. The other core game must be an adaptation of Ghost Recon Online, the free-to-play online PC shooter.
One of the Wii U-exclusive games is Killer Freaks from Outer Space, which Ubisoft announced last summer at E3. What the other exclusive is, we'll have to wait and see.
Ubisoft announced Marvel superhero game Avengers: Battle for Earth for Kinect and Wii U last week.
Your Shape on Wii U was leaked in March, and Rayman Legends was leaked via a Wii U demonstration video in April.
Rabbids Party Land and Raving Rabbids were both names on a retailer-leaked list of Wii U games spotted last week.
It also sounds like Just Dance is a sure thing on Wii U. In reference to the dancing series, Ubisoft's financial presentation noted: "Our goal is to continue to grow the brand with geographical expansion, and new platforms like Wii U."