Ubisoft's Jade Raymond has taken the opportunity during her session at this year's DICE Summit in Las Vegas to take about fans participation in franchises.

Taking inspiration from the intense fanbase and vast library of fan fiction that engenders Raymond spoke on the importance of fans participating in the evolution of their favourite games series.

She began: "Fans are important. I don't know if a lot of the audience are Star Trek fans, but I personally am, and it was brought back from cancellation by the fans, and fans have always had quite a bit of power. I had the pleasure to work with [on The Online] and I was fascinated by how much time he would spend looking at what fans were doing, reading their stories, and from what he learned putting it into the next expansion."

"On we spent a year of pre-production not just thinking about how to make a great game with innovative play while creating a new engine," Raymond added. "I realized how rare it is to create a new franchise from scratch, and while not to get ahead of ourselves if we did get a chance to make more games or a TV show or a I wanted to make sure we had the groundwork there to do that successfully. Often you make one game or film and if it was a success you think, 'Oh God, what do we do for the second one?'. Also, you can rely on the same team working on the same franchise for several years but creative people don't want to be confined to one thing, so we spent a long time working on the franchises meta story and overall arc, thinking about how to create 'sandboxes' in which each future team could experiment and come up with their own stuff within the franchise."

She concluded: "The great benefit of working with fans is that it keeps your game fresh and relevant, and when fans really get into a franchise and feel they own it not only will they create great content they will share it with their friends. Fans and community are becoming our most important marketing platform."

Thanks Edge Online.

By Ewan Aiton