Ubisoft has completely revamped its subscription service. And in the middle of the announcement, certain controversial comments don’t get through, dividing players. For what ?
Yesterday we learned about a small change in Ubisoft’s subscription offering. To sum up,
Ubisoft has revised its subscription offering and introduced Ubisoft+ Premium, an expanded and more complete version that replaces the old Ubisoft+ Multi Access and PC Access plans. This premium service, available on Xbox, PC and Amazon Luna, gives subscribers direct access to new releases from Ubisoft, including early releases of some highly anticipated games. For a monthly subscription of $17.99, players enjoy a wide selection of classic games, special editions, additional content and monthly rewards. In the midst of all this, we needed to promote the subscription system, and that’s where it got stuck…
Ubisoft is controversial, why?
In fact, it is a small sentence to promote the new streaming service that the publisher Ubisoft caused controversy and caused a certain incomprehension among many players. The quote comes from Philippe Tremblay, subscription director at Ubisoft. See instead:
Gamers are used to owning their games. It is this change that needs to happen among consumers.
The phrase then came under scrutiny and began circulating on social media. With the snowball effect we know. A tweet on the topic even received more than 48,000 likes and was viewed a whopping 4.87 million times. Many players expressed their anger and threatened to stop purch asing games. Some even went so far as to encourage piracy of upcoming Ubisoft titles. The tweet that got the most reaction was undoubtedly this:
This tweeter blurts out the words that it is “anti-consumer propaganda and a way to milk gamers from generation to generation.” Reading the comments, it’s hard not to notice that a lot of people seem to agree. Even well-known personalities such as Joueur du Grenier have now commented on the quote:
A confusing statement or a genuine wish from Ubisoft?
But when you look closer and put the quote into the overall context, it turns out that things are a little different. Here is the full explanation:
One of the things we found is that gamers are used to owning their games, similar to DVDs. It is this consumer mentality shift that needs to happen. You’ve gotten used to not having your own CD or DVD collection. It’s a transformation that happened a little slower [dans les jeux]. As players become more familiar with this aspect, your progress will not be lost. If you continue your game later, your progress file will still be there. It hasn’t been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your commitment to the game. So it’s about coming to terms with the fact that you don’t own your game.
By analyzing the text as a whole, we understand that taking the sentence out of context is a little biased. In any case, what is certain is that Philippe Tremblay’s comments are very confusing. The man speaks clearly about game ownership by making the connection to the physical form on CD/DVD. But the linking is done very quickly. So is this a miscommunication or a genuine desire to harm the consumer? We’ll let you judge Ubisoft’s comments. What is certain is that the controversy does not appear to be abating.