This weekend, Ubisoft’s Six Invitational annual launch is on track for gamers with a $3 million prize pool.
It’s an event that not only celebrates the Rainbow Six Siege match of Ubisoft but is also celebrating how Ubisoft has made use of Electronic Sport (sports) to transform its business into a more modern’ games for operation.’
Here’s a bit of history of the invitation and why game publishers are concerned about sports events.
Under Rainbow Six since 1999, Ubisoft has published games. However, until 2015, the franchise was primarily a storey-based shooter focusing on experience for a single player.
The company launched that year Rainbow Six Siege, the marketing and customer engagement vice president of Ubisoft, Tony Key, believed that is was an effort to revive a series of gaming services that had sunk into a creative pit. At the time, a great many of the gaming industry was more towards an entertainment service model for games, with customers paying for downloads and in-game products.
Six developers Rainbow have agreed to lean into the game’s multiplayer elements to create a new form of service entry for Rainbow Six. In many cases, fresh content was constantly rolling up, in this case new “operators” and new maps. For publishers who want players to stay active and spend money, regular updates of the content are crucial.
As esports are the essence of a game, it was not long before Ubisoft started to throw out smaller events and tournaments for fans of Siege. In 2017 the first Six Invitational with an original $100,000 prize pool was launched. This year’s $3 million Ubisoft prize pool has been crowd-financed with revenues generated by players from an interactive battle pass.
Nevertheless, Ubisoft wasn’t alone to purchasing into the esports industry, particularly as traditional publishers are also able to adapt to modern games with esports that produce much of the content required.
Activision Blizzard, an American developer that, for example, has had a few games on a competitive scene develop, but only in 2017 did the company run an own esports league until the launch of its Overwatch League. Over a decade since the first instalment of the game was released, last month Activision Blizzard launched its competitive Call of Duty League.
Siege has successfully gradually increased its registered player base, with more than 55 million registered players from the 10 million users first published in November 2016.
According to the publisher’s earnings report last May, Ubisoft has created over $1billion in revenue in less than four years. For another ten years, the organisation has dedicated itself to continuing the game.
Senior esports director Che Chou from Ubisoft stressed the fact that esports in Ubisoft serve as a marketing tool for the game.
“It’s understanding you can’t market it the way you have just started for a five-year-old game,” he said.
Ubisoft’s dedication to the conversion of many of its franchises and new titles into service games has been greater since Siege’s publication. The premium gaming service Uplay+ was also launched last June. And it is planned to broaden the scene in sports with a few more titles.
“We want[ and it is] what we begin to do with our various games, like Brawlhalla,” Chou said. “We want an ecosystem. We will lean towards competitive society and continue to invest in those programmes to keep our players alive.’ The Ubisoft stock has risen by 19% to date, despite the fact that the firm has announced a fall in net bookings earlier this month in its profit report. The business nevertheless exceeded its estimate, and its success was in part due to continued interest in the Six Sieges Rainbow and other older titles.