Ubisoft, Capcom Clarify Assassin's Creed, Lost Planet Exclusivity

Major publishers Ubisoft and Capcom have clarified the status of forthcoming next generation products Assassin's Creed and Lost Planet respectively, in light of intense speculation on whether they would be exclusive to specific hardware formats. Although long considered an open secret, Ubisoft has debuted a press release indicating that Assassin’s Creed will appear on the Xbox 360 console as well as the PlayStation 3, apparently at the same time in early 2007. A PC version was also confirmed, following previews in newsstand magazines. The game has a complex history, first being demonstrated in the form of a short trailer as Project Assassin on the Xbox 360, during the X05 press event last year. The game was next seen, in playable form, at E3 2006 where it was demonstrated only as a PlayStation 3 – with Ubisoft staff at the time indicating there were currently no plans for an Xbox 360 version. Amidst rumors that the PlayStation 3 E3 demo was actually running on an Xbox 360 development kit, various consumer media sources have claimed numerous times that the game is a multiformat release. The reason for Ubisoft’s reticence in confirming or denying the rumors has never been clear. Despite analyst predictions that exclusive titles from third party developers would decrease in the future in an industry-wide attempt to recover increasing production costs, developer Capcom has also recently confirmed that its current Xbox 360 exclusives, zombie slayer Dead Rising and sub-arctic first person shooter Lost Planet, will remain as such. Rumors had suggested that both games would be ported to the PlayStation 3, but speaking to consumer website GameSpot, Lost Planet producer Jun Takeuchi indicated suggested that, “For games such as Lost Planet and Dead Rising, the Xbox 360 was the target platform. Since they have been created specifically to take advantage of the system's capabilities, we have no plans at this time to port or develop these titles for any other console.”