The developer of The Division has admitted that it purposefully avoids commenting on modern day politics to avoid alienating customers.
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Ubisofts Tom Clancy franchise has been going for decades now, but despite being named after a right-wing writer famous for his politically-charged novels the games go out of their way to avoid discussing any specific politics – and thats not by accident.
We cannot be openly political in our games, said Ubisoft Massive COO Alf Condelius at the Sweden Game Conference this week. So for example in The Division, its a dystopian future and theres a lot of interpretations that its something that we see the current society moving towards, but its not – its a fantasy.
Its a universe and a world that we created for people to explore how to be a good person in a slowly decaying world. But people like to put politics into that, and we back away from those interpretations as much as we can because we dont want to take a stance in current politics, he said in comments recorded by GamesIndustry.biz.
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Its also bad for business, unfortunately, if you want the honest truth…. but it is interesting and it is a discussion that we have, and its an ongoing discussion we have with our users, of course, because people want to put an interpretation into the universe that we create and they want to see their own reality in the fantasies that we give them, and the stories that the games are.
It has to be subtle for a lot of people to be attracted to it, it has to be undefined for many people to put their own definition to it, he added. It has to be vague in some aspects while its in a very well defined world, for people to be able to interact with it for a very long time.
In other words they want to be able to sell games to right-wing fans who approve of the dystopian implications of many of the plotlines and also those who would be against them in real life but still want to play the games.
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Perhaps the most controversial Ubisoft game of recent years though is Far Cry 5, which in the pre-release hype implied that it was a direct commentary on modern American politics but in the end studiously avoided any such subjects.
Theres also the infamous case of Rainbow 6: Patriots, which was to feature homegrown American terrorists railing against Wall Street corruption but which was quietly cancelled as Ubisoft seemed to get cold feet about the idea.
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