Ubisoft Singapore

How one of Ubisoft’s largest satellites is starting to establish its own identity.

- Chris Thursten

Ubisoft Singapore was founded in 2008 by a small team from the French publisher’s Paris headquarters, the first phase of an ongoing effort to build a game-production network in the most rapidly developing parts of southeast Asia. In the last decade, the studio has grown to over 300 people while retaining its initial leadership – and its alumni have gone on to establish Ubisoft’s presence in the Philippines and Chengdu, China. Ubisoft Singapore appears in the credits for every Assassin’s Creed game after the first, and was instrumental in Ubisoft’s earliest forays into dedicated multiplayer with Ghost Recon Phantoms, a precursor in many ways to the wildly successful Rainbow Six Siege.

Even so, the contribution of any given studio to Ubisoft’s overall effort is often hard to gauge for anybody outside of the publisher’s closed system. Ubisoft establishes more new development houses than its peers relative to the number of existing smaller studios that it buys out, but this means that Ubisoft’s satellites don’t have the histories or reputations that come with the acquisition of a company such as Massive, developer of The Division. Internationally distributed development, now a fact of life for thousands of people working in triple-A game production, has the effect of anonymising the efforts of specific teams, studios, and regions. After almost a decade in operation, however, Ubisoft Singapore is beginning to emerge as a creative force in its own right.

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