Former Far Cry 4 director says Ubisoft became "very allergic" to new ideas and killed many projects

Alex Hutchinson, who served as creative director on Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3, sat down with PCGamer for an in-depth interview where he shared his thoughts on Ubisoft's internal struggles. According to him, the publisher has grown increasingly averse to creative risk – and that's a big part of why the company is in the state it's in.

Hutchinson described the development approach his teams worked hard to build:

"The style of development we pioneered was being able to manage big teams by letting them be individual groups with ownership of their own thing, to allow us to make bigger games faster."

Then things changed. A five-year investment boom brought private equity into the industry at a scale nobody had seen before, triggering a wave of talent departures – senior staff leaving to start their own studios or join new ones.

Hutchinson himself founded Typhoon Studios in 2017, which released Journey to the Savage Planet. After Google Stadia acquired the studio, it was shut down in February 2020. That kind of creative risk-taking is exactly what Ubisoft, according to the former director, has largely stopped doing.

"They always had a history of sequelizing the franchises, but also having a couple of new things coming along. They became very allergic to the new things, and so they killed a bunch of our ideas, like when I was working on Pioneer."

Pioneer was conceived as a No Man's Sky-style space game, teased in a Watch Dogs 2 side quest, but quietly disappeared into the company's internal development limbo with its fate still unknown.

Pulling back from experimentation has had real consequences. When Ubisoft did take a bigger swing outside its usual franchises – as with Immortals Fenyx Rising – the game struggled to recoup its investment. Fresh ideas either die in development or arrive with budgets so large that failure hits especially hard.

"There's a million tiny things," Hutchinson added. "They're essentially a packaged goods business, and they had trouble figuring out digital as a whole platform."

Against the backdrop of XDefiant, Skull and Bones, and Star Wars: Outlaws all failing to find their audiences, that description lands pretty accurately.

Right now, Ubisoft is leaning heavily on the Assassin's Creed franchise, which has kept the lights on through Valhalla, Mirage, and Shadows.

There hasn't been a new Far Cry since 2021, the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake was cancelled outright, and the director of the upcoming Hexe recently left the company. The picture isn't a pretty one, and the need for change is becoming harder to ignore.