Vivendi Universal Games announced a deal with the late Robert
Ludlum’s estate to exclusively develop and publish games based on his
literary works and associated movies. Most of Ludlum’s work is
focused on international espionage, much like Tom Clancy’s novels.
Thus, it seems VU Games is attempting to challenge Ubisoft’s high
selling Tom Clancy games. According to the CEO of VU Games, Bruce Hack,
“VU Games intends to aggressively establish Ludlum as a top-tier
games brand with high-quality franchises poised to go head-to-head with
other major spy-action games in the industry.†Since this deal was
recently announced, no information is available yet on specific games,
other than they will be released on multiple platforms. Financial
information regarding the deal was not announced.
VU Games has created some amazing games, including Half-Life and
CounterStrike. If VU Games can create products at the same quality,
Ubisoft will face stiff competition. Ubisoft, with its Tom Clancy line
of games is well established in the genre of international spy games,
and they have an enormous library of literary fiction to use for games
along with the name, Tom Clancy. VU Games, on the other hand, doesn’t
benefit from using Robert Ludlum’s name. While many gamers know of
The Bourne Identity, they don’t know who wrote it. So, for VU Games
to really create a challenge for Ubisoft, they will need to brand all
games based on Ludlum’s work with his name, to create something like
the Tom Clancy series.
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