Ubisoft Massive COO Calls Politics in Games "Bad for Business"

You know, I don’t actually want to talk about politics in games all the time, but it seems Ubisoft just can’t help but bring it up. Granted, they’re about the most “political” triple-A game developer out there, with games like The Division and Far Cry 5 sticking its nose in real-life political turmoil, but they’re the ones who keep making it a talking point by insisting they’re not political, or that they’re political but “neutral”… and now Ubisoft Massive COO Alf Condelius is at it again, telling a panel at the Sweden Games Conference that politics are “bad for business”.

…Which, you know… is fair.

"For example in The Division, it's a dystopian future and there's a lot of interpretations that it's something that we see the current society moving towards, but it's not—it's a fantasy. It's a universe and a world that we created for people to explore how to be a good person in a slowly decaying world. But people like to put politics into that, and we back away from those interpretations as much as we can because we don't want to take a stance in current politics.

It's also bad for business, unfortunately, if you want the honest truth ... But it is interesting and it is a discussion that we have, and it's an ongoing discussion we have with our users, of course, because people want to put an interpretation into the universe that we create and they want to see their own reality in the fantasies that we give them, and the stories that the games are."

So he’s rehashing what the CEO said earlier about the politics being open for interpretation, or “neutral”. Later on, he explains that while they might latch on to certain political messages: like, say, “War is bad” or “don’t let the planet die you idiots”, they’re not expressively political because they don’t point to any one bad guy or any one party to vote for. Which, okay, makes sense.

Not sure I agree with how defensive Ubisoft is about all this, but it’s interesting to hear their thoughts nonetheless.