Tom Clancy’s Ghost Splinter Rainbow Cell 11 Online: Coming Soon from Ubisoft

By Steven Crews | March 21, 2008 | | Filed under: News

In what is likely to be a growing trend in the years to come, Ubisoft, a company whose prior contributions to MMOs have included Shadowbane, and the canceled MYST Online, announced yesterday that they intend to try their hands at the genre once more.

And, this time, they’ve figured out why their prior titles were not the smash-hits they had hoped for:

They didn’t have Tom Clancy’s name on the box.

Gamasutra has the scoop on how they intend to rectify this situation, quoting Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot:

Guillemot revealed that the company had considered developing an MMO for some time, but had been held back by the royalty fees they will no longer have to pay.

“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,” he said.

Continued Guillemot, “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 [Sixes] the GRAW and all the other new creations that we have. So this will make that product [a] really big product.”

And, of course, this is coming on the heels of the recent announcement of the possibility of the Call of Duty franchise going MMO in some form or another.

Is this the sign that MMOs have truly moved into the “mainstream” gaming realm? Are we going to be seeing Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online Adventures in stores by 2011? And when it arrives, what kind of reception will it receive?

On the one hand, competition and capital investment is good for any industry. It spurs innovation, fresh ideas, and new development in the face of possible stagnation (i.e.; the argument that we’ve all just been replaying DikuMUD for the past ten years, with better graphics each time).

On the other hand, this whole notion of turning preexisting non-MMO properties into online titles in order to increase franchise profits seems to have a very strong gold rush mentality to it.

Those of you who remember your history lessons about the 49′ers during the California gold rush may recall that very few of them ever actually struck gold. Most of them lost everything but the clothes on their backs, caught in the frenzy of chasing riches which weren’t there.

For all of our sake’s, let’s hope that we’re not in for a similar turn of events in the MMO genre.