Blizzard is famous for sticking to a "when it's done" philosophy when announcing new games in development and won't hesitate to delay a release to ensure a high level of quality. It's been ten years and counting since StarCraft graced our computers, and gamers still have a long wait before seeing StarCraft II. Don't hang on to any hopes of Diablo III coming our way soon, even though it's been eight years since Diablo II came out. Coincidentally, Ubisoft recently announced that it would opt to space out future Assassin's Creed releases instead of putting out a new game every year. The declining sales of the Prince of Persia sequels were proof that gamers can grow wary of game franchises. Technical issues are often blamed for Spore's numerous delays. It's a slow progression, but development companies are coming to the realization that slow and steady wins the race, while dashing out to milk a franchise for all its worth doesn't always work. Can games afford to stay in development indefinitely? How long does it take before interest starts to fall? Does it always have to be a choice between quality and timeliness? Sound-off after the jump....

Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia) is letting its gourmet franchises cook in the oven of public anticipation before releasing new titles, according to Forbes. The business publication said the publisher is "patient enough to allow its brands to grow slowly so gamers don't tire of them."Forbes posited that Ubisoft is doing this because it has learned from past mistakes. When Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time became a best-selling hit, the company rolled out two sequels (Warrior Within, The Two Thrones) in rapid succession to capitalize on the brand. Neither follow-up achieved the smash success of the first game.Ubisoft then decided to give customers a breather, and has waited three years to release the next Prince of Persia game. It plans to use the same strategy with Assassin's Creed, which was the industry's all-time best selling game from a totally new IP. The president of Ubisoft North America said:"When we bring it back, there will be more anticipation for it."[Via Joystiq]...

Mega64 is a street theater group that re-enacts video games in public places, making them "embarrassingly real." Those re-enactments are recorded on video and displayed on the internet. Previously, the troupe has acted out Hitman, Resident Evil 4, and Ico, among others. One of their videos even guest starred Shigeru Miyamoto! Their latest is based on Assassin's Creed, and it's one of their best yet. We've it embedded here for your viewing pleasure.This one is particularly brilliant. In the game, Altair performs all these actions in order to keep a low profile. In fact, that's the whole shtick of the game -- blending in. Apparently, though, the activities don't work so well in the real world! If we'd seen this man at our local market, we'd have immediately yelled "Assassin!" in a bad Arabic accent!...

Ubisoft has had a terrific last few years with a number of best selling games to its credit. Now the company has revealed exactly how many games its various franchises have sold over the years. According to a Gamesindustry.biz article the top seller is their Rayman series which have sold a whopping 22 million copies. The next three spots are all games based on the Tom Clancy brand (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, and Ghost Recon) which together have sold a total of 55 million copies. No wonder Ubisoft wanted to buy the full rights to the Tom Clancy name.The rest of the list shows some interesting figures such as Assassin's Creed selling six million total copies despite only being released for less than a year and the Brothers in Arms franchise selling 5 million copies over the years. Oddly enough, Ubisoft added the Driver franchise to the list with 14 million copies. However the vast majority of those games were sold by its previous owner Infogrames/Atari (Ubisoft bought the franchise and its developer, Reflections Interactive, in 2006)....

The NPD Group has release its latest list of the top 10 best selling PC games in the US, this time for the week ending May 17. As expected there's not a lot of change in the list; a few older games have reappeared at the tail end of the list such as Assassin's Creed and even Crysis but mostly there's nothing major that has newly popped up. We expect that will change very soon; next week's list should include Age of Conan and the week after that could see the PC port of Mass Effect pop up. In the meantime let's look at what we have available at the moment: 1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff - Electronic Arts 2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts 3. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest - Blizzard 4. The Sims 2: FreeTime - Electronic Arts 5. World Of Warcraft - Blizzard 6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Activision 7. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade - Blizzard 8. Sins Of A Solar Empire - Ironclad/Stardock 9. Crysis - Electronic Arts 10. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition - Ubisoft [Via Game Daily]...

Ubisoft's decision to remove the DirectX10.1 effects from the PC port of Assassin's Creed has generated a ton of controversy and now the patch has finally gone live. The 1.02 patch is now available to download from us and deals with a number of issues that have cropped up since the release of the game about a month ago. Ubisoft states the patch has "fixed broken post-effects on DirectX 10.1 enabled cards" but that's only kind of true; as we have reported the publisher has removed the DirectX10.1 support entirely.The full details on the 1.02 patch are after the jumpDownload the new Assassin's Creed patch right now...

Electronic Arts continues to dominate the latest list of the top 10 best selling PC games which is issued, as always, by the NPD Group. The publisher has four games in this week's list which covers the week that ended May 3. Three out of the four are Sims 2 titles (the main game and two expansion pack) with the fourth, sneaking in at number 10, is Crysis, as the sci-fi shooter from developer Crytek shows up once again on the list after being absent for many weeks.Blizzard's World of Warcraft also continues to be popular with three entries this week. Activision's Call of Duty 4 remains in the top 5 with a placement at number four this week. Sins of a Solar Empire seems to be finally loosing a little bit of its steam; it has dropped out of the top 5 and is now at number 8 after three months on the list. Ubisoft's PC port of Assassin's Creed is at number nine, despite some issues regarding its DirectX10.1 support. 1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff - Electronic Arts 2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts 3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Activision 4. World of Warcraft: Battle Chest - Blizzard 5. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack - Electronic Arts 6. World of Warcraft - Blizzard 7. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack - Blizzard 8. Sins of a Solar Empire - Ironclad Games/Stardock 9. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition - Ubisoft 10. Crysis - Crytek/Electronic Arts[Via IGN]...

A few weeks ago Ubisoft announced that it would release a patch for their PC ports of their highly successful stealth action game Assassin's Creed. However, instead of fixing bugs or adding new features, the patch is to remove the support for DirectX10.1 graphics. According to the initial announcement about the patch the DirectX10.1 support in the game added "a render pass during post-effect which is costly."While the patch has yet to be released as of this writing, some are accusing Ubisoft of playing hardware politics with this proposed DirectX10.1 removal from the game. Why? Because at the moment the only graphics cards in stores that support DirectX10.1 are cards from AMD's ATI unit (specifically the Radeon HD 3000 hardware). Performance issues with Assassin's Creed were reported on NVIDIA graphics cards. The problem is that Assassin's Creed is part of NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" marketing program where the company makes deals with game publishers to add their logo and ad support for a number of PC games.So did NVIDIA ask Ubisoft to remove the DirectX10.1 feature from Assassin's Creed? Officially the answer is, "No." TG Daily contacted both Ubisoft and NVIDIA reps and both denied any sort of external influence, saying that the decision was made by the game's development team. The author feels that the game simply was not finished in terms of proper code and that the programming team put in the DirectX10.1 support without making sure the game would work on normal DirectX10 hardware. It just goes to prove that developing PC games without taking the tons of different hardware combinations can still be tricky....

So little has changed in recent months -- The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft still completely dominate PC game sales. Sure, now and then something usurps them for a short time, but they always come back. The top 10 PC games in the NPD sales report released this past week:1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff Expansion Pack2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe3. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack4. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest5. World Of Warcraft6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare7. Sins Of A Solar Empire8. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack9. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition10. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2That makes four years that The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft have been fairly consistently pwning the industry. The only other PC exclusive on the list is Ironclad/Stardock's runaway 4X RTS hit Sins of a Solar Empire. The others -- Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 -- are multi-platform titles. WoW's position is no surprise, given the NPD's research with regards to online game revenues. The Sims 2's domination of the charts, however, speaks to a vast, silent market of gamers to whom hardcore games like Rainbow Six don't appeal....

The next Price of Persia game will be using Anvil, the same graphics engine that powered Assassin's Creed. Don't jump for joy quiet yet, because it's not going to look anything like AC. Instead, this particular Prince from Persia will be cell-shaded.Personally, many of us here at the Big D like the cell-shaded look. It was used to incredible effect in Ubisoft's 2003 FPS, XIII. The upcoming superhero MMO from Cryptic Studios, Champions Online, will be using it -- and it looks fantastic. Seed, the MMO that was DOA, used it too, but the majority of people never got to see how incredibly cool cell-shaded graphics can be. We weren't sure whether this very unique look is what the Prince needed until we saw screen shots on the French game site, Progamers (which were taken from the gaming magazine, Joypad). We're convinced.[Via Team XBox]...

Regardless of how you feel about the game, Assassin's Creed was a mega hit at retail so it will most undoubtedly get a sequel in the future. One thing we hope developers take note when creating the PC version of the sequel are the amount of steps it takes to exit out of the game! This video, hilariously, shows us there are way too many steps to take when trying to get back to your Windows OS of choice.We suppose the creator didn't just think of throwing their PC out the nearest window. That guarantees you'll crash out of the game.[via THEBBPS]...

The quarterly time period where publicly traded game publishers reveal their latest financial numbers has begun yet again. Ubisoft reported that revenues for their last quarter (which ended March 21) came in at 217 million euros ($340.5 million), a 10 percent increase from the same period a year before. The sales success of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Assassin's Creed for the Xbox 360 and PS3 were the main reasons for the rise. The PC versions of both games were released to stores this month and Assassin's Creed has already topped the PC sales charts in the US.For once, the publisher didn't announce any delays in upcoming game titles, something that the company had a habit of doing in the last few financial press releases. That hopefully means that previously delayed titles like Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Splinter Cell Conviction and especially Far Cry 2 will be released sometime this year....

He is standing on top of the world, or at least at the top of the charts. Yes, the PC port of Ubisoft's hit stealth action console game Assassin's Creed found itself at number one on the NPD Group's latest weekly top 10 list, this time for the week ending April 12. Despite some technical issues with the PC port (including word that Ubisoft will soon remove support for its DirectX10.1 graphics modes) it's a good sign that the game can still bring in a PC audience even six months after the release of the console versions.The rest of the top 10 is mostly repeats from previous weeks with Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath dropping from number one to number eight on the sales list. There are some other shifts among the top 10 but the only other new game besides Assassin's Creed is the stand alone version of Valve's acclaimed (and super-short) puzzle shooter Portal. It managed to squeeze in the list at number 10. 1. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition - Ubisoft 2. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest - Blizzard 3. Sins Of A Solar Empire - Ironclad Games/Stardock 4. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Activision 5. The Sims 2 FreeTime - Electronic Arts 6. World Of Warcraft - Blizzard 7. The Sims 2 Deluxe - Electronic Arts 8. Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath - Electronic Arts 9. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade - Blizzard 10. Portal - Valve/EA[Via Voodoo Extreme]...

When a patch is released for a PC game it''s usually to add features or to fix bugs. However, an upcoming patch for the recently released PC port of Ubisoft's open world stealth action game Assassin's Creed will do something a little bit different; it will actually remove a major component of the game.Specifically, the patch will remove support for the game's DirectX10.1 graphics mode. According to a post on the game's official web site, players have seen performance gains under DirectX10.1. While that might normally be a great thing, those performance gains were apparently because Ubisoft programmers removed " . . . a render pass during post-effect which is costly." The patch will also fix a number of other bugs in the game that have been found by players and submitted to Ubisoft. Despite the unusual patch news, reviews for the PC port of Assassin's Creed have mostly been positive. There is no word on when the patch might be released....