Ubisoft to Enter the Sports Gaming Market

An anonymous reader writes "eToychest has posted news that Ubisoft will be developing a series of sports games. The company has signed an exclusive license with Vijay Singh to produce a Vijay Singh-titled golf game. Ubisoft also announced that it has acquired the technology, tools and source code shipped in Microsoft Game Studios team sports games, including NHL Rivals, NFL Fever, NBA Inside Drive and MLB Inside Pitch." GamerCentric.com has a quick piece on this as well.

Comments

Sporting debut?

[delete]

Is this a different Ubisoft from the purveyors of "Pro-Tennis Tour" that graced the Spectrum, Amiga, Atari and PC around 1990?

And, more importantly, will they be including a purse in this one?

Employment opportunities?

[MBraynard]

MS games ditched this and it was widely assumed because they wanted to lure EA into XBL. EA had probably watched as MS vigorously promoted it's own sports games over Segas for XBL in the last season or two and did not want to be at a disadvantage.

So what happened to the people working on the sub-par but not 989 bad games for MS? Will this mean that Ubi may re-hire some of them?

And is this even a good investment considering the recent move by some leagues to go exclusively with one developer (specifically EA using this to kill a superior title at 40% of the cost in SegaSports/Visual Concepts's ESPN NFL 2k5)?

Ubisoft must be spreading legs for EA early

[Red Moose]

Man this sucks. Ubisoft had a run of pretty good games like Splinter Cell, FarCry and such when a lot of other houses were producing utter shit.

Google search for EA and Ubisoft

Now, Ubisoft will redirect resources to most likely making shit repetitive sports games only with "euro" commentators for the soccer games, the skiing games and the rugby games.

In the end, all we will have will be a recreation of every sports game on the planet on the same engine with updates every year.

Uh, good for them?

[Wraithfighter]

Ubisoft might, repeat, might be able to get their money's worth in the NBA area, since there has yet to be a clear winner in that category.

And I'm pretty sure that NCAA football hasn't gone exclusive yet, so some money could be made there, but no football and no baseball means they lose out on two of the three biggest sports games.

That, and Vijay doesn't really have the oooh-ahhh name power that Tiger does. Yeah, he's ranked #1 right now, but still no star power.