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Ubisoft has announced during its E3 press conference that it will be teaming up with community-based production company HitRecord to produce content, including environmental art and music, for Beyond Good and Evil 2.
This needs some explanation. HitRecord is an online community that produces content, collaboratively.
At a pre-conference briefing, actor and HitRecord founder Joseph Gordon Levitt took to the stage to talk about how this works: someone from Sweden could contribute a bass line and the community could decide they like this and want to build a track for Beyond Good and Evil’s space pirate radio using it, so it becomes a foundation and people could start submitting their own music around it, wherever they are in the world.
Gordon Levitt was excited about working with Ubisoft on Beyond Good and Evil 2 – the first video game that HitRecord has worked in collaboration with.
“I think video games are the future,” Gordon Levitt said. “In a lot of ways more so than movies.”
This program goes live today, and creatives can start contributing immediately. This decentralised content creation is unusual, but the team behind Beyond Good and Evil 2 hopes that it will bring down a “wall” between players and developers.
Whether or not this will take off should become immediately apparent, but the partnership is an exciting development in the video game space.
HitRecord has usually paid it’s contributors, although the HitRecord site is currently down after the attention sent its way, so we can’t clarify the exact rates at this stage. However, following Ubisoft’s conference, Gordon-Levitt tweeted: "It’s hugely important to me that HitRecord pays artists fairly. Since 2010 we’ve paid community almost $3 million."
