Ubisoft and Biborg Bring the Roman Empire to the Anno Franchise

The Strategic Case for Taking Anno Into Ancient Rome

Ubisoft Mainz made a deliberate genre-expanding decision in setting Anno 117 within the Roman Empire. The Anno franchise has historically operated within the city-building and strategy category, a segment that competes directly with titles such as Cities: Skylines, developed by Colossal Order, and Tropico, published by Kalypso Media — both of which court overlapping audiences drawn to economic simulation and urban planning mechanics. By transporting the series to antiquity for the first time, Ubisoft differentiates Anno 117: Pax Romana within that competitive field while tapping into the enduring cultural fascination with Roman civilisation.

The strategic brief given to Biborg was explicitly twofold: serve the existing Anno community, which had waited six years for a new instalment, while simultaneously broadening the franchise's reach. Those two objectives pull in different directions. Longtime players expect depth — intricate economic systems, detailed construction mechanics, and long-horizon strategic thinking. Newcomers require legibility and emotional engagement before they commit to that complexity. Biborg's creative solution addressed both demands within a single cinematic film, using the visual language of Roman epic cinema — a genre with proven mass-cultural resonance — to signal the game's setting and scale without alienating either audience.

The global games market provides useful context for the ambition behind this launch. According to Newzoo, the PC segment reached 43.6 billion US dollars in 2025 with twelve percent year-over-year growth, the strongest performance across platform categories. Anno 117: Pax Romana, as a PC-primary city-building and strategy title, launches into a segment demonstrably in expansion. In France and across multinational Europe, where Biborg concentrated the campaign's production and initial distribution, PC gaming maintains a culturally established position within the broader games market, according to Newzoo's European market reporting.

One Actor, Five Roles: Biborg and Guillaume Cottet's Cinematic Approach to Anno 117

The Anno 117: Pax Romana launch trailer is built around a single, formally inventive conceit. Directors Guillaume Cottet and Julien Lejour — working with Biborg Creative Lead Thomas Purbeck and Lead Video Director Matthieu Chiama — constructed the film around one actor portraying five distinct roles: four Governors and one player. Each Governor embodies a different approach to the game, one oriented toward visual grandeur, one toward economic mastery, one toward military dominance, and one toward the pleasure of play itself. The debate staged between these figures within a monumental Roman chamber is, in structural terms, an externalisation of the internal negotiation every strategy player conducts when deciding how to build their empire.

Guillaume Cottet, who co-directed the campaign alongside Julien Lejour, brings significant cinematic credentials to the project. Cottet's prior directorial credits include the Montero music video, a production noted for its ambitious visual construction. That background is legible in the Anno 117 trailer, which draws explicitly on the visual codes of Roman epic filmmaking — monumental architecture, dramatic light, and a performative register borrowed from classical theatre. Mathematic, the production company and visual-effects studio attached to the film, translated those references into a contemporary cinematic aesthetic that connects the game's Ancient Rome setting to a recognisable tradition of historical spectacle.

Thomas Purbeck, Creative Lead at Biborg, articulated the film's underlying logic directly: "By diving into a debate between four competing Governor visions within the same player, I think we created something fun and true to the many ways you can build your empire in Anno 117". Production Director Chloé Marchand and Strategic Planning lead Lory Martignoles also contributed to the campaign's development at Biborg. The trailer posted on November 10, 2025, drew strongly positive responses on Reddit, with users specifically praising the quality of the visuals, the central performance, and the overall production standard, according to reddit.com community discussions at the time of release.

Anno 117 Launch Results Show Franchise-Best Commercial Performance

Anno 117: Pax Romana delivered measurable commercial results following its November 2025 launch. Ubisoft reported a solid launch for the title, with net bookings exceeding those of Anno 1800 over a comparable post-release period, according to Ubisoft's own financial reporting. That benchmark matters given that Anno 1800 itself was widely regarded as the franchise's strongest commercial entry prior to this release.

The game reached 1.17 million players since its November 2025 launch, described as the fastest-selling title in Anno franchise history, according to steamdata.ai. On Steam, the game recorded a peak of approximately 50,480 concurrent players, according to steamdata.ai — a meaningful indicator of day-one and launch-week engagement for a PC-primary city-building and strategy title competing in a category where concurrent player counts signal sustained community interest.

Critical reception reinforced the commercial picture. Anno 117: Pax Romana achieved a Metacritic score of 84, according to Metacritic as reported by En Wikipedia, placing it comfortably within the tier of well-regarded strategy releases. No formal industry awards for the Biborg launch campaign have been confirmed across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, or the Webby Awards as of available sources.

Clapboard rates the Anno 117: Pax Romana launch campaign 78 out of 100, reflecting the film's formal ambition, the structural intelligence of its one-actor-five-roles concept, and the demonstrable commercial outcomes it supported. The campaign's primary strength lies in resolving a genuinely difficult creative brief — serving two distinct audiences simultaneously — through a single, coherent cinematic idea.