Ubisoft Scalar aims to make games more like the web
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Thursday 14th April 2022
Ubisoft
Everyone loves a good analogy. It's a great way to get your point across, especially if you're trying to explain something that doesn't exist or cannot be shown in a way that everyone understands.
Ubisoft Stockholm's managing director Patrick Bach is certainly a fan of an analogy as he frequently compares Scalar, the publisher's new cloud-native development technology, to the world wide web.
"Games aren't using cloud like many other services are," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "If you look at how you use the web today, that's way more advanced and more mature than what games are doing. Technology used to be the thing that made games cool, we were at the forefront, but we've been lagging behind because we've been stuck in our old ways and no one has done a big shift in the way you think about how you make games."
His comments come as he explains the origins of the project. A group of Stockholm staff began by questioning why video games are developed in a certain way, and what the medium could be like in ten years' time. They then looked at what is currently lacking before games reach thatpoint, and cloud functionality was a significant factor.
Patrick Bach, Ubisoft Stockholm
Bach emphasises that this is not about Netflix-style streaming, but more about moving compute, memory and all the other fundamentals that allow a game to even operate into the cloud. The team hopes Scalar will become a new foundational technology built around what the team believes video games should be.
"We're talking about certain types of games that don't exist today because the technology limits you," Bach continues. "Scalar allows you to have greater scalability, meaning you can grow your game
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