Shortly after Ubisoft announced their acquisition of all intellectual property rights to Tom Clancy's name, they held up a conference call where they revealed where they are headed with the popular franchise.
According to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, they have wanted to create a Tom Clancy's MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game for quite a while, but were deterred by the massive royalties they'd have to pay. And now that those royalties are finally gone, it is time for the Tom Clancy's MMO to see the light.
"On the MMO, the investment is generally high, so you need to maximize the revenue. And with the royalties we had [been paying], it was another barrier not to create the game, because the return on investment was diminished by that," Guillemot said. "Having no royalties, it's going to help us to have a full return, so we are ready and decide now to go for an MMO on the Clancy name -- which is big, because you have on one side Splinter Cell, Sam Fisher, the Rainbow, the GRAW and all the other new creations that we have. So this will make that product [a] really big product."
Guillemot didn't announce a specific schedule for the MMO but he indicated that it will be released 'not too soon but not too late'. "We have the technology to create MMOs, and we have lots of our games that are on the Clancy franchise that are already multiplayer. So to create an MMO, we need to have larger teams to actually spend the time and to create it. So it's more a question of decisions and teams, and now because we have the knowhow so we can go for it now."
Finally, Guillemot estimated that this game would cost between $40 and $50 million to develop.
