PLAYERSTATE
Dream state
Dean Anderson is predicting a streamlined future for user-generated content in games
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s E3 pitch for HitRecord was easy to get swept up by. His company would help community creators funnel music, animation and art assets into Beyond Good & Evil 2. Through the Space Monkey Program, as it was known, fans would get the chance to be part of the sequel to a cult classic, and Ubisoft would gain the extra material it sorely needed to fill the multiple planets promised for the game.
The negative response from professionals, however, hit like a series of Inception bwarps. Since only those whose work influenced the final game would be compensated, creators would be working on spec. Some called the system exploitative, a sentiment echoed when Ubisoft worked with HitRecord again for Watch Dogs: Legion. While the publisher’s PR fought the flames, however, another part of the company had enough distance to think philosophically about its situation – and even learn some lessons. In 2019, Ubisoft’s Entrepreneurs Lab in Paris worked for six months with a startup, Playerstate, aiming to fix the problem HitRecord had exposed.