Assassins Creed Franchise

How do Franchises establish and develop continuing sales figures? Write a response to the question using Assassin's Creed III and detailing the following areas: Publishing, Development, Marketing and Distribution

The Assassin's Creed franchise is a franchise based on a game that was initially released 5 years ago, in 2007. The game back then sold over 8 million copies, and since then the series has continued to sell in such high figures. The narrative of the whole series has remained pretty much the same throughout, although this is a very popular structure. We start off with Desmond, who is the ancestor of a series of Assassins. He is the main character, yet we very rarely play as him in the game. The game starts with him entering the animus, a system for where he can relive the memories of his ancestors to collect artifacts from history.

 

 Altaïr From The Original Assassin's Creed

In the publishing of the game Assassin's Creed III has been aimed at the same audiences as before. Males, although this time around they have aimed the game at people older than 18 rather than 15, and some of their fans have grown up with the series, much in the same way that the Harry Potter fans have grown up with their books and developing the characters, while at the same time the books have beocme much more adult. And in the 5 years of Assassin's Creed it has increased in the age. Over the course of the three main Assassin's Creed games (1, 2 and 3) there have been three main characters; Altaïr, Ezio and Connor. Each of these have also developed throughout the series, so much so that Ezio became a very key figure in the series, and was a very popular character amongst the fanbase.

Connor from Assassin's Creed III

Assassin's Creed has used a very similar engine through the series, however improvements have allowed for improvements. The first Assassin's Creed game used the Anvil Engine under the name of Scimitar. This is an engine which is also used by Prince of Persia. Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood and Revelation are all also on the Anvil Engine. However, the brand new AnvilNext engine allows for better weather cycling, and for a crowd of up to 2000 people in any one place at a time whereas it had previously only a few hundred, these developments have been huge in making the franchise better for the gameplayers and the fans. AnvilNext also allows for characters to disappear during the game, as well as Ai and graphical improvements. The game design has also increased in size over each of the Assassin's Creed games, meaning that the players have much more to achieve in each game, meaning they are more likely to keep on playing the game. Gameplay has also improved, as Assassin's Creed I feels much more rigid when compared to Assassin's Creed III which has much smoother movement due to the increases in the quality of the engine, leaving gamers much more reasurred that the character will follow their commands rather than following a different path when free-running. 

 

In the marketing of Assassin's Creed the developers of the game have been releasing data about the game in the build up to Assassin's Creed. These include things such as images, information about the story, gameplay videos and videos about the making of the game. The luxury that companies have nowadays is that they can post videos on YouTube for free, and therefore gain free advertisement of their games. These videos and pieces of information about the game are key for the players of the game, and all fans of the series begin to anticipate the games more and more. These are also very exciting for the new gamers as they allow a sneek peak at a product that they may way to purchase. There are many franchise games which release demos too which also allow for people to sample the game, perhaps for the first time, and this allows them to make a good judgement on trying out the game. In March 2012 Ubisoft also announced that they would be spending over £4 Million to try and increase the sales figures. This is as well as lots of interviews which people from the game to say that this Assassin's Creed is possibly the best ever.

The distribution of the game is the final aspect in the creation of the game. Companies such as Game, Amazon and Play are large distributors of the game, and do schemes in the pre-ordering of the game to allow discounts or bonus features for the people who buy the game. Supermarkets such as Morrisons, Sainsburys and Tesco all get involved in the sales of the game, and contribute towards the expected 8 million sales of the games. Another form of sales on the games are on the Xbox Live Market and the Playstation Network for people who don't want a disc copy of the game, but instead would rather download the game onto their device.