Ubisoft has a party game for Wii U, but you can’t play it

By Will Fulton February 12, 2015

unreleasedubisoftwiiupartygame know your friends — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Ubisoft has reportedly been sitting on a completed Wii U party game for the last year, with no plans to release it. Called Know Your Friends, the project was uncovered by the digital sleuths at Unseen 64 on the site’s Patreon supporters-only podcast (via Nintendo World Report). The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal over the course of 2013 and completed in early 2014.

A party/quiz game with local and online multiplayer, Know Your Friends was designed as a Wii U exclusive to utilize the GamePad in creative ways. For instance, one question apparently had each player arrange the others in order of how likely they are to invite them over for dinner. Gameplay comprises a combination of general knowledge trivia and Newlywed Game-like exercises such as this for measuring how well friends actually know one another. The GamePad camera allows every player to be present in the game as a papercraft person with their own head mapped on.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told Polygon during E3 2014 that the company has been sitting on a number of Wii U projects until sales of the console improve in order to justify the marketing expense. Ubisoft’s last release for Wii U was a port of Watch Dogs in November 2014. When asked whether he anticipated that eventuality actually coming to pass, Guillemot alluded to a game that is likely Know Your Friends:

“I hope so,” he said. “We have a game that has been done for six months. It’s on the shelf, waiting for more families to have the console.”

Ubisoft’s troubled relationship with Nintendo’s latest console stretches back to 2013 when, alongside Electronic Arts, the company expressed a lack of confidence in the platform’s ability to reach mass market audiences sufficiently to justify the marketing overhead that goes into AAA releases.

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Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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