Case Study: Ubisoft's Escape Rooms

[Music] my name is uh cyril baron i've been in the industry for about 20 years i had the first part of my life in publishing marketing working for atari infogram and then i switched to production and joined actually ubisoft dusseldorf in 2012 so about seven years ago ubisoft dissolved is actually part of ubisoft bluebyte we are one of the oldest studio in germany uh we're doing a bit older type of product that ubisoft is doing so big kodev on the big brand of ubisoft we have some pc brand maybe you know anno you know settlers and we love innovation and actually so ubisoft escape game is one of our innovation projects it's coming out of ubisoft dusseldorf basically our mandate is to create virtual reality escape games in the best gaming world of ubisoft and we have actually released two experiences already the first one is called

escape delos pyramid it's actually based in the world of assassin's creed origin and we released that in july 18 and we just released couple of months ago a second experience called beyond medusa's gate which is also an escape game set this time in the world of assassin's creed odyssey so back in ancient greece what's special about our games at least for ubisoft is we are doing them exclusively for location-based entertainment businesses so our clients are actually physical escape rooms they are vr arcades or they are whatever outlets specialize in entertainment so we have some familiar center we've got some laser tag etc something also which is a bit special in our project is we are actually controlling the distribution what i mean by that is we do not have distributors we actually want to have a one-on-one relation with every single partner and we are currently building this

network because in lbe it's very important to have very good partners and having this line of communication is super important for us so you know a bit what we are doing and what i would like to start with is to tell you about about our our journey into vr actually we operate a bit like a small startup within ubisoft so you see all the teams there are the 21 guys at the at the bottom of the screen we are very small we need to be very fast uh we want to change the world a bit like a startup it actually started back in 2017 i think uh submitted a concept to our editorial team in paris about doing escape room in vr and they actually liked it and they told us you know what maybe it's a good idea we're going to give you a small prototype budget build a team and try to prove to us that it could be interesting so we had three months to create this first prototype and then we presented it to serge sergezweit who is our chief creative officer in ubisoft and he said you know

what i like it guys so please go and start doing the first game which we started back in october 2017. so at the time we were 10 devs and we actually released or escaped the lost pyramid our first game at the end of june in 2018 and by the time of release we were actually a 1600 team so still very fast and uh actually our first client started operating our game on the 1st of july 2018. immediately the team started to work on the second game and at the same time we were trying to find new partners to uh to distribute and operate our games this year in february we actually reached 100 partners worldwide in may as i've told you we released our second game true line we reached 200 partners we think we are the market leader there's no official data but our reach is quite important and currently also team is currently working on our third room which is not going to

be based this time on assassin's creed and that we are going to release uh actually next spring and if we find one or two missing people we running the team we should be 23 by the time of release so as you can see or at least for ubisoft we are very small team and we have a very small development schedule basically what it means that from the get-go especially when uber 10 we had to make lots of production choices to make sure we could deliver on time and quality and so basically what we decided is that our experience are going to be room scale only and from the get-go we say it's going to be exclusively for location base vr it was great because for us it means we could have the same minimum specs for every single partner so we did not have to spend as much time to do optimization if you want to cover lots of different pieces and at the time so it was two years ago we said that we will support rift

and actually htc vive and that's today still the two devices that we are supporting because our partners who have started we want to make sure that they can continue to export our games years after years also what we decided from the get-go is that it's going to be multiplayer only and actually it's going to be r2 or 4 players why two or four players because we said if we want to do four we are going to do two times two so we are going to do twice the experiment we are going to mirror it because in terms of uh uh design it would be easier and we would be able to actually do that in time we also said that it's going to be a one-time experience there was lots of discussion about can you make it replayable but it's difficult to do an escape room in a replayable way because it's all about discovering it would require too much time for not enough as in value and we said no we are not going to do that it's going to be a one-time experience only and if we are very fast in developing one game

it's better to try to do more than one than trying to do actually replayability and for our first and second game we also said okay we're not going to have npcs in the game because we had we have no animator it's more difficult and we won't be able to do it on time so see from the very beginning very strong choices at the same time we have some very agile production method so basically the first thing and one of the most important was having the right people and basically all the people i've got in the team are people who have a very less do it mindset you know we just do the prototype we put it in the game it needs to work so basically we had a very we have a very flat hierarchy in the team overall it's all about weekly sprints we need to be always playable and we started with a very light project management kanban system which has evolved a bit now that we are more but it's still the same philosophy also one thing that we decided very

early on and i think it was a very good decision is actually if it's a one-time experience that is going to be played outside we're going to do one time play test so we're lucky because we're in a big studio so we are about more than 200 you know dusseldorf so we organized a big contest within the company where a group of four could actually apply and since before alpha actually people were coming playing the game so basically we were able to measure and iterate and actually see what was happening and that's when when we started vr we understood actually what matters is not what you see or what you see as a dev on screen it's about what you feel and making sure that we had all these play tests from very early on actually give us lots of knowledge and confidence about the quality of the experience when it was released outside so let's talk about how do we create business-to-business experiences for mainstream consumers because one thing is clear is that our audience is actually very mainstream

if you know escape room escape room for everybody it's for all ages all people you go there as a family you go there with your grandmother you go there as a company it can be a corporate event so you can go with your boss with your colleague so basically it's also for people who have no vr experience most of the time sometimes they don't have video game experience so thinking about accessibility from the very beginning was one of our core principles so and you can also see that we've also been testing at blue bytes with people in wheelchair because accessibility we understand it's key and at the same time that we have this in terms of audience we know that if you do location-based entertainment you have some constraints from the business side one of them is on the business side customers are going to book a 60-minute session especially in vr arcade which means that you actually have only 60 minutes to learn the game and finish it so you really

need to think from the beginning about onboarding the players how do you finish and how you're going to give tools to your partners the operator to manage all the different players so this is what we had in mind when we started and we say okay so what are we going to do how are we going to do it one of the first thing we were wondering is why do you go out of home because it's not going to be played in uh at your place you're going to have to go out and basically if you go out of home it's because you want to meet friends most likely you're going to meet colleagues maybe you go out with your family so that's right from the very beginning we say it has to be multiplayer and here you can see one of the setup is all two or four players so that's a four player setup so the game was going to be multiplayer and i think if you listen to your arcade and location a tateman doing vr they tell you that 90 of the game which are played are actually multiplayer games so i think it it it was a very important decision and

what we wanted to do is to make sure there was a very strong collaboration in the game so if you go as a group you want to make sure that all together you're going to be working well and so basically what i'm going to show you is uh some video of a group of four players actually in the game they are talking to uh actually one another and they understand that they have to do it together otherwise they are not going to make it so please pay attention more to what they say than what you see can you stay on the bridge too so see because when i stood it down maybe you need to stay tuned oh yeah okay [Applause] guys right you've heard the guy said oh we have to work together guys right and it's correct it's one of the really core principle of our experience and one of the rules we have is you cannot solve the game on your own if you don't escape room physical escape

room sometimes you are in a group where somebody is very fast in picking up everything you find the locks it does everything for you so you're watching but you say oh okay so you feel a bit outside and what you wanted to do is at the end of every single experience anybody from the team should be able to say guys without me you would not have done it and it's important because when you go as a group and you have the satisfaction it means that when you come back home or when you go back to work on monday you're going to say that you've done something for your team and you're going to talk about it so that was one of the core rules that we've got also what we wanted to do if you go out of home is we wanted you to do something that that you cannot do actually in your living room so of course it's larger than your living room so in our game if you have four players you need four room scale so you're not going to be able to do that at home or at least not a lot of home are going to be able to do that but what was important for us is to be larger than life and i think that what vr offers you

it offers you to transport people to different places so again pay attention to what people are saying yeah i was wondering if it'll come alive now is that a class so imagine you know you go back to work on monday what you can say oh together we were with my three friends we were on a boat in this massive underground cave and we are the giant statues of atlas above us that's the type of emotion that you want to give actually to a player so we want them to experience something larger than life we want them to do something that you actually cannot do in real life maybe because it's too difficult maybe because it's just impossible or too dangerous

and again that's what people are doing so you're not going to see what they've done but basically they have to climb something which is quite steep and they're actually commenting on it i did my it in real life i wish that climbing was at easy in real life and yes it's amazing i think when people actually do that and they've got this feeling of doing something incredible it brings actually uh satisfaction to to the experience that you are doing so this was one of our principle of everything we do we want to be larger than life we want to be [Music] to enable you to do something you cannot do in real life and at the same time because of our audience we need to make it accessible to actually everyone so how do we do that what were our design guidelines first we are non-violent what does that mean that even though we are set

in the world of assassin's creed you're not playing as an assassin you're not going to assassinate anybody and i think it's valuable because we have lots of feedback from partners we are architing you know it's good to have a game where you can put anybody you're not going to kill anybody which is positive and we think it was important especially for our target audience second what we've done and it's probably one of the best decisions we made even though it was not a decision we we've done from the get-go is we are giving you a full body avatar so one of the first things you do when you arrive in the game you're going to be in a lobby altogether you have your avatar and you see yourself there is a mirror so if you wave at the mirror you're going to see your webbing and actually this is the moment where people who have not done vr are sold on vr because at that moment they understand oh but that's not just a video game that's not a gaming console that's incredible that actually me and we can see each other people can talk you've got some accessories they've got

ads so they can take them out and they say how do i put it on and you tell them well how do you do in real life oh and you put it on and say wow it's incredible it's working and i was saying it was not an obvious decision because when we started we had no animator so basically you're not tracking the fit so yeah if you look at the animation it's not perfect at all far from that but it doesn't matter actually the benefit of having a full body is so much better than actually it's really selling vr to actually customers so i really recommend people who are not sure about having a real body avatar it's really worth it because it's really making people enjoy the experience a lot then if you want to be mentoring you need to be as natural as possible so of course as you can you've seen people are talking well you're not in the tutorial to talk when we do bow shooting we put a bow in the world we put an arrow and i think anybody understand that if you grab the bow grab an arrow put it in and shoot it's

working you don't need a tutorial it's it's it's magical climbing is a bit more difficult but people get it so uh and because we had room scale you actually don't need to learn really locomotion so it was quite natural and actually we have just two tutorials in the game one is for grabbing so we are telling you to press the trigger to actually grab an object and the second one i'm going to talk to you about so at the same time even though we had uh room scale natural walking what we decided also is to give you in each game a kind of moving platform for you so we could actually transport you in a much bigger world to make sure that you would see more of the universe and now i'm going to show you so you've seen that medusa which has all the extract you've seen you are actually on a boat so you've got your boat with your mate and it's going through the cave and actually in pyramid this is what we have

so in pyramid actually you had this small platform and actually the platform where all the players are coming together and it transports you from the very bottom of the pyramid to the very top if you manage to find the exit and so you've seen everything is super natural and then what did we decide to do ha teleport we're going to say but that's crazy it's not natural it's difficult it's true and that was probably the most difficult decision we made we're still arguing about it saying it's it's not perfect actually we decided to keep it mainly for convenience for the partners because if you have a partner who has a smaller size maybe two by two not three by three well it's more difficult we wanted to be able to

accommodate so we said okay we're still going to a low teleport in the game because it's going to be easier for actually operators to do it but we've done something a bit different i mean if you are of your expert when you have a game with grabbing and teleporting you will have your two button controls so basically you're going to grab with your trigger and use your adjusting to teleport what we've done is we actually implemented by default one button control system which means that actually on the trigger you have both the grabbing and the teleporting the way it works is if you have an object that you can grab and you put your ankles to it it's going to be highlighted to press the trigger you grab it and if you want to teleport you need to point at the floor maintain the trigger in and you have a alpha second delay you see a line going on and then you've got this blue circle and when you release it you teleport if you are a vr expert guy when you try your game you say your game is not working i think there's a real problem with teleporting because

i'm trying to do it it takes some time and it's true but actually if you are a very mainstream person who has never played well just 60 minutes to learn was never done video game you can learn how to use one button in 60 minutes you can't learn to and actually it really makes sure that for us we've seen that everybody has been able to play the game even though they had no vr or no game experience and what we do is for more experienced vr players in our tools for the for the partners they can actually activate a by default two button if you want to but it's not what we advise as a as a main uh as a main control and again we we've been very happy with the choice we made on this level finally what we've put in the game is um because it's working really well with assassin's creed in general is this eagle vision and basically it's kind of replaced the game master so basically when you are in the world and you're a bit lost and it can happen in vr especially when

you've never done it if you raise both you and above your head with your controllers we are going to highlight in the world what's important for you to touch or interact with if you want to solve your quest and that's actually quite helpful because if you don't know you do that and you kind of find your way through so this is all the idea we had when we started pyramid we released it of course we had lots of feedback and we realized that everything was not perfect there are lots of things that we could improve and actually we changed a couple of uh things when we've been doing our our second game the first thing we've done is we've staged the multiplayer differently in pyramid basically you start 4 in the lobby where you have character then we separate you to make sure that you feel the tension and little by little we put you back together as a group because you have this notion of coming back together which is very satisfying but by doing so actually on some of the

paths you were two and you did not have the choice of what you could do and it was bad because for example we have some climbing to do and we know how uh intensive can be climbing some people could not do it but they had no choice and that was really bad so actually what we've done in medusa is we have actually changed this so to make sure that the beginning of every single stage you start at four players you see what's happening and you can actually decide where you want to go so if you don't want to climb you don't have to do it then we can still split you because it's really satisfying to make some small group working together really well but you have the choice at the very beginning also one rule that we applied is we keep the line of sight so here on this screenshot it's from the view of one player just on your right there is somebody climbing and maybe you don't see really well but on the other side you have two other players again one another so basically

even on this big level the four players are always inside and why is it important because we realized from our first game is that when you're lost in vr you feel really lost you don't know what to do if you have to wait it's a really a bad experience but as long as you can see the other players you can actually talk to one another they can actually help you and basically you never have the feeling that suddenly you've been on your own or you're not part of the group or it's different and by making sure that at any single point you can always see the people you always feel as a group which is at the earth of what we want to do one of the things also we've done is so this is a help system you remember that we had we actually made it optional so it's actually actionable from what we call the spectator basically all the videos you've seen on the screenshot it's the views that the partner has using our spectator mode which is a tool it's

not made to be great looking it's just made for the partner to see and to follow the way it wants to all the different players and he's able to act on the game and he can activate or deactivate this help system if somebody wants a other game or a simple one what we also change is the time of the experience so pyramid the average completion time is 44 minutes worldwide and it was too short because when it's 44 minutes i'll show you after the distribution of playtime varies a lot depending on the groups and too many people were able to finish it less than 30 minutes which which is too short so basically for medusas the average play time completion time is 54 minutes and we think it's right now the optimal time in terms of satisfaction for the different partners finally in pyramid you know if you do if you've done some

escape games at the end as a team you escape people tell you okay come together the team we're going to take a nice photo and it's a cool souvni and you can post it it's really cool so that's what we are doing in pyramid but in medusa actually we do it in game so basically uh yeah i know it's having a an electronic photo in ancient greece it's it's a bit daring but actually people love it and it's a great memories and then the partners can actually give that to their customers they can share it and it was something positive so this is what the part about more about the choice we made in terms of design and what i want to talk to you now a bit more is about what the client what our partner said because we have these direct relations so we talk a lot with them because we're actually learning a lot from the market and actually what does it really for the market in general so we have a lot of data we track how players are playing and it give us some

interesting statistics so for example in terms of number of players and i think we were surprised by this because if you look overall at our games you actually have more two player sessions than four-player session in escape room so in traditional escape room location there's more for players but in general for an open vr arcade there's more two players and i think what we realize is vr escape room is a fantastic experience for couples lots of people have the adventure together as a couple and i really we're always saying now to our partners you know think in your marketing to target couple to do something together because that's really something which is very strong which you can actually do together one of the things what i was mentioning before about average completion time is you can see the kind of distribution and the difference between actually pyramid and melusa and having this 54 minutes is really

more optimal because you have very few people who are able to finish before the 30 minutes where it feels a bit too much and to actually help partners to manage this we have a kind of leaderboard which is not to encourage actually teams to be fast because we want people to take helmeted but it's to be able to see somebody who's been very fast look you're among the best guy so you're a great team don't be upset i mean you've done so well i mean we could not expect you to actually do so well in terms of competition rate so there's more people who are finishing the game in escape rooms location but there's a but we should not think that these people are actually more efficient in doing it it's just that a traditional escape room have a different approach to booking so basically often they don't have just a 60 minute time slot some want to have 75 or 90 minutes because their approach is to see i want everybody to finish

i want to talk to them before so they take more time and that's actually why there is actually a bigger time because in general there is a very similar success factor between one or the other and then what we do because we have this direct relation with our different partners we are doing lots of survey with them so this one is a bit old because it was done before the release of medusa but it's still valid in terms of information that had been shared with us so as you can see it's in the survey there's the speed between escape room and vr arcade we have just all been answering about uh our question so one of the first questions where jam is is the revenue in line with your expectation so we were happy to see that 60 percent say yes but actually you do realize that for 30 35 percent they say it was below expectation uh what they got as a as a result and so we were asking them so why do you think it is below expectation

what what can we do about it so one of the comments we've got usually is the fact that uh because we are two or four players if you are especially if you're an escape room usually you bring groups of five six people together which you actually cannot do right now and it makes sense because if you put six people into the four you're going to have a kind of better business so we know it's not something we can do but a lot of the comments are not so much related about this are more related about it's still very new so we still need to communicate we thought that just because it's vr because you have a big brand is going to pick up just like this it's not the case and actually you people sometimes underestimate the effort you need to do to market actually beyond the experience outside of vr and basically what uh we can really see that there is not a general app an acceptance of vr and there are very lots of differences per

venues and for type of consumers and basically you'd still need to convince mainstream but it's quite interesting because some of our partners are doing pretty well meaning that some vr arcade are really uh because it's a bit different than their traditional model which is a paper minute this is a paper session you book one hour so it's something different for them but some are really trying to emphasize the fact it's different from the typical of your arcade where you can get access to a big catalogue of games you come from a session and the one who actually market this as an escape room what they're telling us it's super interesting for them because they are bringing in people who would never come actually to a vr arcade because they are not interested or they do not know about it because they don't have this type of acceptance but they are interested by escape room and if you like escape room you like a challenge so if it's in vr it's okay you can pick it up but what they are saying is by doing so actually these guys have discovered that vr is cool

and some of them actually are coming back to the location so there is an interest by entering by kind of a different side to the market so what we also asked them is do you think you're going to increase the space dedicated to vr escape room in your venue and as you can see lots of people were actually in favor of doing it and actually almost half of these people were people who mentioned before that the revenue was below their expectations so we were a bit well we are happy because we think it's better but we wanted to understand why is that and i think one of the reasons we've got is when we ask them is um feedback that you got from customers on the experiment is it in line with your expectation is it below or above and actually i think that's one of the reason is actually even though they played the game before they know how they are the feedback they got is actually excellent and it really

shows you that when vr is excellent people are expecting uh are doing better so they see that there is something there which is going to grow and get better over time so actually when you ask them when we have them albright do you see the future for vr escape rooms so it's on a scale from one to seven you can see everybody's about four and actually almost 60 percent were saying that there is a real opportunity and actually something that i can say we've seen on the market and it's quite new um because when we started two years ago we never we had never heard about this but now we have many actually people saying i'm going to do an escape route business but it's going to be solely with vr experience because we think it's a future we think it's working and actually now we have about 240 partners uh eight of them are doing exclusively escape room in vr and i think it's a trend which is going to actually continue

finally i wanted to go maybe a bit beyond the data not that i have certainty about how to market and address the consumers because it's still difficult we still need to learn about it but there's a couple of points which i think are interesting and if you have some idea i'm also interested to discuss after that after the talk with you to see what we can do one of the first thing we are always telling especially escape room is you need to explain people that vr is not a gaming console i mean you're not going to pay 30 dollars to go and play on playstation outside your home and that's still what lots of people believe they don't understand that what we're doing are not video games they are experiences and it's fundamentally different and when you are able to go beyond that when people understand that this is the case they have a very different relation to what vr is and i think that one of the challenge we've got is how do we communicate that

i don't have the solution the one thing i know is we should not market it as a video game so for example i'm a bit hardcore on this topic but there's not one trailer of our games available outside so what you've seen today are the only moving images that have been produced so you have an idea but because they don't properly relate what you do and what you see it's always below so i know that everybody wants to communicate and they say we need a trailer we need something but i mean our game is never going to look as good as the last assassin's creed because it's the way it is we are not a 2d game so i don't have the solution uh but i think uh we should not do that we really need to market marketing as an experience because that makes a difference and the one thing i've seen which is really really working actually is you need to let people try and that's one of the things that some of our escape rooms are doing when they

finish the traditional one they go back in the lobby where you have this character they just put the headset it can be 10 seconds but in 10 seconds the guy understands it's something different and something similar i remember which i thought was very clever uh survivors in their arcade actually in the torrents what they add they had a very nice arcade and is giving on a big mall there on the street you have a very big transparent uh front window and what we are putting just in front is rich's plank and basically you could see from the outside people and basically tell you what is this that's very different it's again going into the direction of this is an experience and it's not just a video game and that's what is making uh i think location business ultimately are actually successful so that pretty much is everything i've got to share with you today i think if you have questions uh maybe we have a bit of time happy to answer them or i can answer some

afterwards or you can send me an email and uh if you want to do vr actually we have lots of opportunities in ubisoft it's really cool and if a french guy is telling you that it's cool to live in germany it's probably true thank you very much