🎙️ How Ubisoft turns Video Games into Transmedia Franchises

Hello everyone!

In Episode 17 of The Speakeasy, we’re joined by Hélène Juguet, Managing Director of Ubisoft Film & Television in Paris, to explore all things franchise. Hélène walks Joe and Gabriella through her philosophy that timing can't be controlled, unpacks how Ubisoft matches IP to medium, and reveals why turning fans into co-creators is the key to keeping a franchise alive across decades and life stages.

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Most assumptions about adapting video games start from the wrong place: that a game needs a strong linear story to translate well to screen. Hélène pushes back on that. What makes a game IP adaptable is its systems. A game builds a world first: rules, mechanics, characters, an internal logic that holds together on its own.

From that system, dozens of different stories can be told, which is exactly why something like League of Legends, with no obvious "movie plot" at its core, has spawned music videos, animated content and entire character mythologies. It's also why a single Assassin's Creed game can become a teen drama, a documentary, or a Netflix prestige series without contradicting itself. Books adapt one story. Games adapt a world — and a world can hold infinite stories.

The instinct with any successful franchise is to scale it globally as fast as possible. Ubisoft's approach with Assassin's Creed Dynasty, an entirely new lore built for the Chinese market starting with digital comics, does the opposite. Rather than exporting the same Assassin's Creed to a new audience, they built a version rooted specifically in Chinese history and storytelling, treated as a local IP in its own right.

The logic here is simple but counterintuitive: fatigue isn't really about how much content exists in a franchise, it's about how much of the same content exists in the same market. There's no "Assassin's Creed fatigue" in India or China, because the franchise hasn't over-saturated those audiences yet. Local-first expansion goes beyond distribution; it creates a fresh runway for a decades-old IP without diluting what already works elsewhere.

Every franchise starts as a hit, but not every hit becomes a franchise, and the difference, according to Hélène, comes down to whether the IP was built as an ecosystem or as a single story. A franchise needs its own internal DNA: a core mechanic or tension that can be projected into hundreds of different narratives without breaking.

For Assassin's Creed, that's "hide in plain sight." For Splinter Cell, it's stealth in a military setting.

Once that core system exists, new stories, genres, and formats can be built on top of it indefinitely, because the world itself, from its smallest sidequests to its main characters, is doing the structural work.

The franchises that last decades have to do more than just hope they retain fans. To proactively keep them engaged, they have to let fans become part of the thing itself. Hélène points to the flood of letters Ubisoft receives from Assassin's Creed fans who describe the franchise as something that shaped who they are, not just something they played.

That level of emotional investment is what keeps people coming back even when their life circumstances change: a parent who no longer has time for a 60-hour game might still read ten pages of a franchise novel before bed, or come back years later to introduce it to their own kids.

Co-creation is a retention strategy and a freshness strategy. Once a piece of someone's creativity, time, identity, or emotion is genuinely baked into a franchise, walking away from it stops being a real option.

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