Ubisoft was the first Western publisher to take notice of China. The company expanded into the country with Ubisoft Shanghai all the way back in 1996. Over twenty years later, Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot was at Chinajoy, showing off games including the mobile, China-focused Heroes of Might & Magic: Era of Chaos, as well as localized titles such as For Honor and Steep.

Gamasutra took the opportunity to talk to Guillemot about Ubisoft’s origins as an agricultural trader, why it would choose to expand to China so early, and how Yves himself supports creativity and risk-taking within the company.

Take us back to Ubisoft’s origins.

Yves Guillemot: At the beginning, my parents had a company that was buying and selling goods to people that worked in the countryside—in agriculture. At one point, the state decided that it was not for small companies to do that, but the state. So my parents had to find a new business. And they had to deal with their sons—because we are five brothers—which was, “Okay, we paid for your studies, but you have to come for one year to the company to help.” 

When my first brother came back he tried a new business which was importing CDs, music CDs in France, and that business took off and he did quite well. Until the point where the big majors said, “It’s our business, we don’t need to let the small guys do that.” So they started to take the CD business away. So then we said, “Okay, this one is not going to be. As we don’t publish music, we have to change.” 

In the meantime, nine months before that, my other brother, number 2, came back from school and he saw when he was traveling in the UK that video games were sold at three times less at retail than in France. So he said maybe we could take those games to France and do a mail-order company. So we created a mail-order company, buying from Centersoft in the UK. That took off brilliantly at the beginning of the Amstrad CPC. After a few months, we had retailers saying, “Can we buy from you? Because you’re killing our business because we are selling at two times the price. We can’t survive. We want to buy from you.” So then he did sell to those retailers, and at one point we said “Okay, it’s good to distribute products, but we should publish and to do that we have to create games.” 

Then it was my turn to come home, and take care of publishing. And that’s how Ubisoft was created. I started to create games with a small team, and we also represented publishers outside of France in France. That’s how we started, with Elite System who was doing Ghost and Goblins, Commando, and all those games. That helped us to finance the creation of internal products. We did Zombi and we did a lot of Amstrad products, then ported to Commodore 64, and we realized that we could sell those products in more and more countries so we entered UK with Elite System, Germany with other partners and we went to the US. So we continued to work on both legs, one which was representing publishers and one which was creating our own games to publish worldwide.

We went until a point where we said, “Okay we work with a lot of developers. We have a few people inside, but lots of developers outside. So let’s instead recruit lots of people inside the company and create the future of games.” That’s how we created a big team for Rayman. We then had some people in Montpellier—Michel Ancel was in Montpellier—and some people in Paris.

Very quickly we saw that France was not big enough to create the games we wanted, so we opened a studio in Romania. And then we said, “Okay, we have to go in Asia and America.” So we opened in China in 1996, then Montreal, Canada. So that gave us a chance to recruit different types of people that had another view of the market and a better understanding of those countries.

Skull & Bones is being developed by Ubisoft Singapore

So it’s the 90s, you’ve made Rayman, and you’ve decided to make a move into China. A huge, very different market. Why would you make that play first, go there rather than any other place?

We really went at the same time to both continents. We went Montreal and China because we said, where do we have to sell products on their own terms? And we said those two territories are the biggest ones and we have to be strong and recruit lots of talent there so that our company becomes a worldwide company. Because a company’s DNA depends very much on the people that are in that company. And it’s so much easier when you have talent that live in the countries to make that company understand what market you are in.

Well, on this trip we’ve visited both Singapore and China, and while Singapore is a majority Chinese country, speaking Mandarin, it feels more international, like it would have been easier to bridge the gap if you went to Singapore first, for example.

You’re right, you’re right. At first in China we experienced difficulties because it was really the beginning of the video game industry here so we had to train everyone. And it was a lot of work. Where in Canada, we could recruit people that were coming from schools. There were lots of schools and we could recruit talents that could quickly create games. Where in China we couldn’t do original games, we had to work on porting some games or just doing parts of games.