Ubisoft’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, Tony Key, spoke to List Daily today. He said that Ubisoft does not create a game unless it can turn into a franchise.

Tony was asked if he wanted to see Watch_Dogs turned into a franchise. He replied,

“That’s what all our games are about; we won’t even start if we don’t think we can build a franchise out of it. There’s no more fire and forget – it’s too expensive.”

Knowing Ubisoft, there is a 99% chance that they will create a sequel to Watch_Dogs, and a sequel to that sequel. Watch_Dogs will continue to spawn numerous games until both the players, and Ubisoft, get exhausted and decide to move on to another franchise. Take a look at Assassins Creed. The franchise has 10 games (including those released on handhelds), with two more in the horizon. Something similar happened with Prince of Persia; three main games, then two more and, just recently, an iOS game.

“We feel like we’re in a really good place with Watch_Dogs, but until we’re the biggest game of the year we’re not going to be satisfied.” Tony continued “Last year we cleaned up at E3 because we were pretty much the only next-gen game around. Watch_Dogs for us is really a franchise because we’re tapping into something people really care about, never more than when the NSA PRISM scandal broke.”

When asked how Watch_Dogs was developed by keeping real world surveillance scandals in mind, Tony said “Absolutely. At one point in Watch Dogs, Aidan taps into the surveillance system of an apartment building and he’s looking at what everyone is doing.

“We had a screen shot of this guy sitting in his apartment with a department store female mannequin sitting with him and he’s talking to it. When the PRISM story broke on Wednesday, we had that screen shot out on Friday on social media and said ‘You never know who’s watching.’ We were able to react very quickly, and that’s what social media brings.”

I’m really looking forward to Watch_Dogs. It looks like a revolutionary game. However, the fact that Ubisoft may create countless sequels and spin-offs kind of annoys me. What about you?