With their recent acquisition of Massive Entertainment, and the World in Conflict intellectual property, UbiSoft have announced their plans for the development studio. Speaking last week at the BMO Capitol Markets Interactive Entertainment conference, Yves Guillemot, CEO and President of UbiSoft announced that Massive Entertainment will help the company "get closer to the MMO space."

Whilst Massive Entertainment have a considerable talent for developing strategy games, Massive employees are known to be massive fans of World of Warcraft, and other games with heavy online components. In interviews prior the release of World in Conflict, team members have often joked that "half the development team plays WoW, the other half plays Battlefield 2", and that they'd like to branch out.


The full statement from Yves Guillemot regarding the future of Massive Entertainment is as follows.

We just bought it[World in Conflict and Massive Entertainment] from them[Activision Blizzard] since those guys have Blizzard so they didn't need that studio as much as we do, and those guys are extremely strong in RTS, so they are going to help us also get closer to the MMO space.

Our goal there is to go first with light MMOs ... that have been extremely popular in China but are also coming in the U.S. and Europe and are generating lots of good revenue, so our goal is first to start with light MMOs, and then in the future also come with RPG and RTS, also in the MMO space.

The "light MMO" is something Massive employees have hinted at in the past. One could argue that Massgate (the multi player, matchmaking and community tool built into World in Conflict) could easily be expanded into the MMO arena, as it already contains a lot of the necessary features - stat tracking, friends lists, acquaintances, chat rooms, leader boards and player match making.

It will be interesting to see how Massive Entertainment will handle what is relatively new ground for them, with all their previous development experience encapsulated in the RTS genre. Whilst there is no exact word on the nature of the the project, an MMORTS with a persistent online campaign could be something very interesting indeed.