Every year for the last 3 years, we’ve brought together some of the best minds in Ubisoft to discuss one thing – PC Games. We refer to this as the PC Summit, and for the first time ever, this annual internal event was held in Malmö – the birthplace of Ubisoft’s PC client Uplay.
In this article, Uplay’s Cain Sinopoulos talks about the summit and Ubisoft’s continuous work to take PC game development to the next level.
This year, the PC summit attracted an assortment of almost 100 attendees within the Ubisoft family, visiting us from all over the world working across almost every live project and department in the company.
We all came together with a common goal: to work towards the betterment of PC game development in Ubisoft so we may strive towards being able to offer what we aim to equate to the epitome of a great PC experience.
The PC Summit was first held in Paris 2016, followed by BlueByte in Dusseldorf in 2017. It has since evolved into an event exploring the different aspects of PC development, the PC market and the ever-changing trends of the platform and industry as a whole. All this, with the aim to share knowledge between different teams and departments within Ubisoft so that together we can stay ahead of the curve.
We in the Uplay team are proud to be able to host this event, mainly because of our love of PC and our firm belief that PC gaming is the future. With PC we have a playground at our fingertips that gives both ourselves and our players the freedom to explore our worlds in ways perhaps not possible on other platforms, along with tools and features that only we can provide for our players.
After all, there is no experience like the PC experience.
This is a love we see shared within Ubisoft, and we are thrilled to gather those within the Ubisoft family of a similar mindset in one place to focus on the future of Ubisoft PC games, and how we all can work to make them better, and to make them something special.
This year the summit focused on 3 main pillars for presentations, panel discussions and workshops:
PC Standards
What does it take to create a successful PC game? At the summit, we dived into this subject together with the steps we’re taking to ensure success across all projects. From streamlined work and initiatives, to project-specific developments, we’re aiming to set the highest standards for what the next big PC hit should look like.
PC Production & Pipelines
Here we wanted to cover topics regarding PC as a production platform and the benefits or shortcomings therein. Subjects like DevOps and GAAS for our games and how the platform challenges or opens up these models.
PC Platform (Uplay)
How do we see Uplay as a platform evolving to suit our production and business needs? How can we use it to leverage the ecosystem between Ubisoft titles? How can Uplay bring more value to our players? Uplay is ever-present when it comes to Ubisoft PC games, so we explore where it’s headed and how we and our players want to see it change.
We believe that these pillars are important, as we not only want to share what has worked so far, but also ensure that we’re digging into practices that we can benefit from tomorrow: practices that will allow all teams within Ubisoft to create better games, run more reliable services, and maximize the freedom the platform has to offer.
With the PC Summit for 2018 now behind us, it is of course important to make sure that we carry on with one of the event’s core values for existing in the first place: to share knowledge and experience.
To do this we do not limit the audience of these talks to those who attend. They are shared en masse with the entire Ubisoft family, so every single person has an opportunity to learn, be inspired and potentially be the driving force behind establishing these valuable practices into their own projects.
The future of PC gaming is a bright one, and we’re going to do our part to ensure it’s as bright as it can be.
