For a nation of 60 million people, Italy's games industry has never quite fulfilled its obvious potential. On our visit to Milan Games Week in late 2017, the vast crowds -- 150,000 attendees in that year alone -- spoke to a country with a deep passion for video games, but one with a relatively small number of development studios. If you focus on companies with the capacity to make larger games, the proportion is smaller still. For many years, studios like Milestone Interactive and Kunos Simulazioni were responsible for the most ambitious productions in the Italian industry, but that is starting to change. With Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle in 2017, Ubisoft Milan bucked the trend, emerging as that rare thing: an Italian studio with AAA ambitions and no interest in racing.