Ubisoft announced the fifth season of its Entrepreneurs Lab, an incubator program in Paris and Singapore. The call for projects related to blockchain and social entertainment is now open until March 1.
Ubisoft is a big French video game company with about 16,000 employees, but it has been more open to experimenting with technology and startups than many big entertainment companies throughout its history.
Led by the Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab Team, this entrepreneur program began in 2017 to support startups creating innovative products and services. Of course, it has a secondary goal of bringing Ubisoft teams closer to transformative trends for the entertainment industry.
The program aspires to further explore two trends:
- Social Entertainment: Social bonding is at the heart of entertainment. Many gaming experiences already offer innovative features for players to engage, be creative and learn together. This season, Ubisoft’s goal is to go a step further, looking for new ways to create socially inclusive, empowering, positive and accessible experiences. It may seem vague, but Ubisoft isn’t drawing a bunch of boundaries around this topic.
- Blockchain: Building on what it’s learned over four seasons, Ubisoft reiterates its longtime commitment to exploring blockchain applications for gaming. It intends to learn and experiment with how the technology could empower players, creating new ways to enhance their experience with new forms of interactions and features.
Catherine Seys, program director at Ubisoft Entrepreneurs Lab, said in a statement that social entertainment is a new area that the company wants to explore across a range of fields such as music, video, live shows, and more. And she said that blockchain has yet to unveil all it has to offer as a technology.