Ubi Soft Entertainment's online division has launched ubi.com, a new gaming portal that allows gamers to play games and participate in online communities. ubi.com is now available in North America and France and will eventually spread to other countries. The company also has plans to extend ubi.com to console gamers later in the year. Since online communities are an important part of the gaming culture, ubi.com has licensed state-of-the-art forum technology to make it easy for players to post their comments and ideas online and hopes to give fans the ultimate community experience. As an example, the Website for Tom Clancy's GHOST RECON, one of the most highly-anticipated games of the holiday season, was designed with the user interface style of the game itself. Visitors to the site will find constant updates of new screen shots and movies, exclusive developer chats and active fan-driven forums. ubi.com is also using a new proprietary matchmaking application that is fully integrated directly into all supported Ubi Soft multiplayer games. By activating the ubi.com matchmaking service, players can easily launch online games, find friends and opponents, chat and swap files. Tom Clancy's GHOST RECON is just one of the exclusively-available multiplayer games on ubi.com. ubi.com will also be throwing their hat into the subscription-based multiplayer online ring with SHADOWBANE, a subscription-based roleplaying/strategy title expected to release in the first half of 2002. ubi.com will begin a closed beta test of SHADOWBANE in early November with hundreds of users and gradually increase that number to thousands as game development progresses.
