Introduced to the audience of the GameOn Finance conference in the Toronto Stock Exchange building as “the new kid on the block”, Yannis Mallat may be a new member of the game development community in Ontario as the head of the newly formed Ubisoft Toronto, but he brings with him a long history of success leading Ubisoft Montreal.

“I don’t picture myself as a ‘business’ CEO,” Mallat began his keynote. “I’m not a big fan of figures. They’re not the reason I’m the proud leader of one of the best studios in the world. The reason I am the CEO is to be able to rendezvous on a daily basis with creativity and innovation.”

Though Mallat stressed he had a strong belief that good management of finance is important to a successful company he felt correct management of creativity and innovation was “critical” to success.

Innovation, Mallat argued, was the defining aspect of all of Ubisoft’s successes. Founded in 1986 by five brothers who first discovered video games in the UK, Ubisoft began by distributing Amstrad and Atari games in France. According to Mallat, the company began its history for innovation in the business sphere, first by going public on the French stock market, and then by choosing to open internationally spread studios, in Shanghai and Montreal.

“This was a big deal,” continued Mallat. “Montreal was in no way the hub we know it as now. It was struggling with unemployment for young professionals — over twenty per cent were not able to find jobs. As part of our mandate with the Quebec government we were expected to hire locally, so had to rely on hires that were passionate about games but not experienced.”

As a result, the growth of the Montreal studio was slow, and largely a learning process. Though early titles (such as Rayman spin-off Tonic Trouble) were poorly received, the studio benefited for not having too much expected for it at an early stage, and this patience, Mallat explained, was paid off with their first big successes — Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

“Traditionally in game development we use a stage-based production pipeline. Nothing innovative. You get a concept, you do some pre-production, and so on. However, we discovered that what had created our big successes were the ‘breakthroughs’ — new technology and gameplay ideas — that we had formed outside of the pipeline.”

Laying the success of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell down to the development of a lighting engine and the use of it to create “light and shadow-based gameplay”, Mallat recognized that these “breakthroughs” were developed unconsciously and “not planned.”

As a result, he chose to change Ubisoft’s production pipeline to rely on an initial gateway stage—“the breakthrough gate.”

“How do we define a breakthrough? We narrowed it down as a unique innovation that leads to a new way to play. It can’t leave the player indifferent,” Mallat stressed. “This gate wasn’t added by our creative talents. It was a business decision, as we realize that a breakthrough is the single factor that defines success. The ‘breakthrough gate’ is an entirely formalized stage, and the most important part of the process.”

As a result, Mallat confided that the mandate of project can be changed by the business team based on the creative team’s breakthroughs — and that multiple prototypes representing the importance of the breakthrough must be created before a project can be considered to even move into the conceptualisation stage.

At this point, Mallat chose to go in depth on the “breakthrough” that was leading Ubisoft Montreal’s current project: convergence.

“Convergence is a breakthrough. We have created a digital production facility to realise our capacity for digital production. We discovered while creating titles like Assassin’s Creed that thanks to our technical pipelines we are creating assets for games which are high-quality enough to be used in 3D or live action movies.”

This technical breakthrough is the leading innovation behind the development of the Assassin’s Creed: Lineage series of live action films, which shares assets with and is closely tied to Assassin’s Creed II; and their decision to create a game based on James Cameron’s Avatar (a film which similarly relies on technological breakthroughs).

The aim? To spin the convergence of game and film technologies into a convergence of the game and film mediums.

“It’s a breakthrough in terms of not only technology but the potential of the content, and it will have a significant impact. It may not sound like a breakthrough right now, but the true convergence will be what happens in people’s minds when they see what we’ve been doing.”