If you’ve played a Ubisoft game in recent years, you might have noticed that they feel similar to one another. That has to do with the Ubisoft Editorial Team, which advises all of the company’s internal studios and helps them define a direction for their games. Following the disappointing sales of recent titles such as Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Ubisoft restructured the Editorial Team. Things changed again following allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct, sexism, & racism levied at multiple senior Ubisoft employees, including editorial leads. Now, just over year after he joined Ubisoft as the new VP of Editorial, Fawzi Mesmar spoke with IGN about how he is working with senior leadership to put together a “creative framework” to help direct individual game teams in their creative visions. Mesmar and the editorial team put the pillars in place and help teams reach them throughout the development process.
Mesmar’s three pillars is for Ubisoft games first to have a complete focus on quality, the second is to make games that are culturally significant. Mesmar describes this as a drive to make games that form the overall pop culture at large. In other words, have games that are made well and are enjoyed by lots of people. The third pillar, as Mesmar describes, is to create third spaces. “If work is your first space and home is your second, then the third space is this…You can just pop in, pop out, and connect with like-minded individuals or groups of people in which you can express yourself and connect with freely. I’d like to think about it as similar to a skate park. You can show up [whenever] at a skate park, even if you don’t want to skate, you just sit there and hang out.”
“We treat these as guidelines,” Mesmar says. “So that these are not things that every single project needs to have or that every single project needs to abide by. They are creative guidelines. Think of them as a framework that you can use to activate your creativity, but not a checkbox that you need to address…and one game can’t be everything. We wouldn’t expect [that from] even the games that want to follow through with the guidelines or take some of those criteria into consideration. Games need to be focused on what they are and who they’re for.”
Another recent hire was Raashi Sikka who joined Ubisoft in February of 2021 as the VP of Global Diversity, Accessibility, and Inclusion, a role new to the company as a whole. Sikka says that D&I efforts existed at the company but weren’t united under the same banner before.
“Things were happening, they were just happening in different places used by different teams using different words and language,” she says. “And what we’ve tried to do really is come together with a common direction, common vocabulary and language and a north star that the entire organization – 20,000 people – can get behind and help us move in that common direction.”
Sikka and Mesmar both want to work with creative teams to make sure that the game content is more diverse and inclusive.
“We provide the team with the player feedback, and then the team are the owners of their creative vision and then they make the decision on how they want to proceed with their game considering the feedback,” Mesmar replies. “It’s difficult for five or six people to agree where they want to go for lunch. Imagine if it’s hundreds of people working for years on a very highly creative and personal endeavor. There will be disagreements in point of view, of course, and I think that’s an inevitable part of the creative process. But this is why assigning ownership, which is creative ownership, is always with the team.”
“When it comes to when we’re doing a review at the later stage of a game, what we tend to give the team back in terms of feedback is high, low, medium risks of what we’re seeing and what we think needs to be changed,” she says. “When something is going to be flagged as high [risk] that we think that this is really not in support of our values, we try and make sure that it goes beyond a conversation and we take action.”
Sikka also wanted to highlight the Content Review group, a diverse set of team members who aren’t working on a project to ensure that the creative teams at Ubisoft are being inclusive and respectful and celebrating the diversity of their game.
“So we set up this group of volunteers, we have about a hundred odd people who are contributing their voices and their perspectives to these various projects, and we kicked it off as a pilot,” Sikka said. “It proved to be really successful. We have a team of about two full-time staff members dedicated to running the process and managing the hundred-odd volunteers and interacting with dev teams across the world.”
She highlights that the Content Review Group was instrumental for Roller Champions and its diverse cast of characters and feedback on the different outfits and hairstyles. She also wants people to look forward to Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a game Mesmar is very excited about.
“For me, when the first Assassin’s Creed had the dude on a horse riding to Damascus and it was one of the first times in gaming where I saw my culture being represented,” he says. “And now with Mirage coming to Baghdad in that historical era, I can’t wait for our players to be able to experience that.”