After the Renaissance and Vikings, it’s time to discover Baghdad in the ninth century for “Assassin’s Creed” fans, thanks to the new game in the successful series that was released on Thursday and which the French publisher Ubisoft is counting on to relaunch. itself.
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The “Assassin’s Creed” saga, created in 2007, is one of the most popular video game series of the past 15 years, with more than 200 million copies sold worldwide. The last work was “Valhalla” in 2020, whose revenues exceeded the “one billion euros” mark, according to Ubisoft president Yves Guillemot.
Three years later, the impatience of fans around the world was at its peak, until Thursday, and the release of the movie “Mirage”, which was initially scheduled for release at the end of 2022.
Thanks to the plot trick, “Assassin’s Creed” offers players in each version the opportunity to immerse themselves in a new period of history, thanks to a machine capable of making the protagonist travel through the DNA of his ancestors, providing endless possibilities for intrigue. .
To create these universes and give them historical consistency, Ubisoft claims to employ “dozens of historians, sociologists, and other social science researchers who come to the studios’ aid.”
For example, in order to reconstruct medieval Baghdad, “we worked with historians who told us: we cannot contradict your proposals, which allowed us to create with confidence,” explains Jean-Luc Sala, artistic director of AFP. “Assassin’s Creed Mirage”.
The release of this new “movie” is extremely important for Ubisoft, mired in a multifaceted crisis in recent years, especially on a financial level.
Ubisoft announced in May that it had fallen into the red during its 2022-2023 annual financial year, with an annual net loss of €494.2 million.
However, the company has promised a return to profits for the current financial year, with more major games being released on a regular basis, while also counting on the release of a title based on the “Avatar” film universe in December.
“For four to five years, the group has been very disappointed because it postponed a large part of the launch of its games,” Midcap Partners analyst Charles Luis Planade summarizes to AFP.
He believes that these upcoming games will “clearly improve the financial health of the group and (help it) once again become the Ubisoft we knew a few years ago.”
Ubisoft also chose an aggressive commercial approach for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which retails for 50 euros ($72), while a new video game generally costs 70 euros ($100).
