Ubisoft just made a huge business deal with an unexpected partner – Atari!
The two companies shared this press release:
Atari and Ubisoft announced that Atari has acquired all intellectual property rights for five acclaimed Ubisoft titles with a view to making them available on new platforms.
The acquisition includes Cold Fear (2005), I Am Alive (2012), Child of Eden (2011), Grow Home (2015), and Grow Up (2016).
… Atari will re-release these titles under their publishing label and explore opportunities to expand their reach through updated formats, new content, and extended distribution channels.
What Even Are These Games?
Most of our readers will probably remember Grow Home and Grow Up. These are smaller budget games made by Ubisoft Reflections, one of their bigger studios.
For both games, you played a robot named B.U.D., moving around a procedurally generated voxel environment using physics-based gameplay.
These two games were part of a trend of AAA game companies letting their studios experiment with smaller games. EA had Unravel, and most recently, Obsidian had Pentiment.
Cold Fear is a sixth-generation survival horror shooter. It was made by a defunct French game studio named Darkworks. While it wasn’t a notable title, Ubisoft was just sitting on the IP for years.
I Am Alive is also a survival game, this time shifting to action adventure and with an emphasis on climbing. This was a seventh-generation game made by Ubisoft Shanghai.
Finally, Child Of Eden is a musical rail shooter for seventh-generation consoles. It was made by Q Entertainment, the original studio who made Lumines and Meteos.
What Does It All Mean?
The only common denominator for all these games is that they were franchises that Ubisoft was not touching for years. Much like EA and Activision, Ubisoft had a habit of moving on from their smaller or less successful games, without letting them go.
We don’t know if Atari expects to make a fortune with these games. We expect the deal wasn’t that big. Atari is fond of reviving old games, and that may be the angle they’re going for with this deal.
Ubisoft Seems To Be Decluttering
Ubisoft is in the middle of reorganizing the whole company to form a new subsidiary with Tencent. That plan includes moving their most successful franchises to that subsidiary.
So what does that leave the main company of Ubisoft? Well, we can see that they don’t plan to work on these IPs they just sold.
We shouldn’t be surprised if Ubisoft makes similar moves in the future. I could see them looking for takers for the likes of Might and Magic, TrackMania, and Red Steel. I bet they even talked to Nintendo about selling off Just Dance.
