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Watch Dogs: we won't start a game unless we can franchise it, says Ubisoft

Watch Dogs sounds like it will become a long-running series, following comments from Ubisoft's senior vice president of sales and marketing, Tony Key, who has said the company won't start a game unless it can turn it into a franchise.

Speaking with [a]List Daily, Key was asked if he wanted to see Watch Dogs become a franchise, to which 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.

"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. 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 closely Watch Dogs was created with real-world surveillance scandals and strategies like PRISM in mind, Key added, "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."

Meanwhile, Ubisoft has stressed that current-gen builds of Watch Dogs will have no trimmed-down features when compared to next-gen editions. Check out the details here.

Thanks GI.biz.

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Watch Dogs

PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii U, PC

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Dave Cook

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Dave worked on VG247 for an extended period manging much of the site's news output. As well as his experience in games media, he writes for comics, and now specializes in books about gaming history.
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