Ubisoft discusses the creation of their Singapore studio
A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Ubisoft's Olivier de Rotalier...
GS: With this venture, Ubisoft chose to build a new studio in a new region from scratch, where there is not really a very large existing talent pool. Within the team culture, you've got established people that you've shipped in, and you've got people you have to train, and you have to integrate these folks. How do you go about bringing people up to speed quickly?
Olivier de Rotalier: I think the first thing when you start a new studio -- what I did here in Singapore -- is you identify the potential of the country itself to beyond the video game company. What we saw in Singapore is that the education was very good, and the country was attractive to people whose first language is English. There were a lot of conditions that made us very optimistic about our ability to leverage this pool of people, of talent. So that was the first thing.
After that, when you start here, there are two things. First, there is how much training you can do, and this is where working as a network with other Ubisoft studios, we could bring people from Montreal, we could bring people from Paris, either for a short or a long stay to transfer their experience, share their expertise with people here, where the level of experience was proven to be lower than some of the Western countries. We could leverage this Ubisoft network and attract people here to provide that training. That was a big thing.
After that, as you can see in how we've handled those four years, the challenge that you take on has to match what your team can deliver. Of course we couldn't start from the beginning in Singapore working on Assassin's Creed III, for example. We had to move the teams, step by step, to take on challenge after challenge, integrating more and more people in the team, and making those people live together, to be able to take on these challenges. In terms of how you define a strategy for a new studio, you have to take into consideration the growth of your team and the growth for things that are more and more ambitious.
GS: With this venture, Ubisoft chose to build a new studio in a new region from scratch, where there is not really a very large existing talent pool. Within the team culture, you've got established people that you've shipped in, and you've got people you have to train, and you have to integrate these folks. How do you go about bringing people up to speed quickly?
Olivier de Rotalier: I think the first thing when you start a new studio -- what I did here in Singapore -- is you identify the potential of the country itself to beyond the video game company. What we saw in Singapore is that the education was very good, and the country was attractive to people whose first language is English. There were a lot of conditions that made us very optimistic about our ability to leverage this pool of people, of talent. So that was the first thing.
After that, when you start here, there are two things. First, there is how much training you can do, and this is where working as a network with other Ubisoft studios, we could bring people from Montreal, we could bring people from Paris, either for a short or a long stay to transfer their experience, share their expertise with people here, where the level of experience was proven to be lower than some of the Western countries. We could leverage this Ubisoft network and attract people here to provide that training. That was a big thing.
After that, as you can see in how we've handled those four years, the challenge that you take on has to match what your team can deliver. Of course we couldn't start from the beginning in Singapore working on Assassin's Creed III, for example. We had to move the teams, step by step, to take on challenge after challenge, integrating more and more people in the team, and making those people live together, to be able to take on these challenges. In terms of how you define a strategy for a new studio, you have to take into consideration the growth of your team and the growth for things that are more and more ambitious.
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