Ubisoft Toronto boss Jade Raymond believes that it is time for video games to grow up by taking more risks to achieve commercial success as a developing medium.
"I really do feel it’s time for our medium to grow up," she told CVG. "I think we don’t need to make the equivalent to a Michael Bay flick in order to sell five million copies. I think things can be exciting, have meaning and hit important topics, and I’m not the only one that thinks that."
"I think every other entertainment medium or art form does manage to have commercial success and have the viewers or audience think or be inspired. Games, I think, have even more potential than that given that on top of the narrative side we do have all of the gameplay mechanics and we create rule sets from scratch which can have any kind of meaning embedded in them."
Rayman hopes to walk the talk with her team's next entry in the Splinter Cell series.
"It’s not easy to do that, because it requires breaking our recipe and trying to find new recipes, but I think it’s an important thing for us to strive for."
"It [Splinter Cell] will have all of the action flick elements for sure, but we’re trying to also explore something a little bit more interesting, which is actually one of the themes that’s at the root of the franchise historically, but that never has been surfaced so much."
By Ben Salter - Tweet @Ben_Salter