Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has revealed that the company changed the way they showcase games after the backlash they received from Watch Dogs. Fans were angry with the game due to the differences between the showcase at E3 2012 and the finished product. Guillemot stated that the priority is now to make sure that the game runs on the target hardware before showing it off at events such as E3. “With E3 2015 we said, ‘OK, let’s make sure the games are playable, that they’re running on the target machines,'” he explained.
There were claims in 2014, shortly before Watch Dogs was released, that the graphical quality was scaled back, and trailers from the games development cycle were used to support this claim. Guillemot talked about what Ubisoft were able to learn from their mistakes with Watch Dogs; “When we show something, we ask the team [to] make sure it’s playable [and] make sure gamers can immediately see exactly what it is, That’s what we learned from the Watch Dogs experience–if it can’t be played on the target machine, it can be a risk.”
Although there were very prominent mistakes made with Watch Dogs, Guillemot believes that it was a good start for the franchise. He stated that “It’s a real challenge to create those types of games, When they come out, especially the first iterations, they are not perfect on everything.” Although a sequel has not yet been announced, Guillemot refers to Watch Dogs as a franchise and Ubisoft will be looking to improve on further iterations, “We’re incredibly happy with the sales of the game and the experiences that the people are having. So it’s a franchise. It goes into the franchise barn and now we figure out what to do next. It’s something that we can build on now.”