With the advance release of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Ubisoft decided this week to rebrand its Ubisoft+ subscription services and introduce a PC version of the “Classics” tier at a cheaper price. And a big part of that, says the publisher’s subscription director Philippe Tremblay, is making players feel like they don’t own their games.
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It’s hard to keep up with how many times Ubisoft has renamed its online portals for its games, with Uplay, Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club and now Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics all names that have appeared in recent times Year used were decade or so. Given that Ubisoft only released five non-mobile games last year, it also seems a little confusing why there would be demand for any of these games.
However, there seems to be demand, says Tremblay an interview with GI.biz. He claims that the company’s subscription service had its biggest month ever in October 2023 and that the service had “millions” of subscribers and “over half a billion hours of play.” Of course, a lot of this could be due to Ubisoft refusing at various moments to publish games on Steam, forcing PC gamers to use its services, and probably opting for a monthly subscription instead of the full price of the game they want decided to buy. Still, people clearly choose to use it.
But it remains curious why enough people would want to subscribe to a single publisher’s edition – and at $17.99 a month, that’s not exactly cheap. This isn’t a dissent about Ubisoft’s games – although you might want to apply your own – but something that would be just as true if it were Activision Blizzard or EA.
You can subscribe to Game Pass or PlayStation Plus and get a wide selection of hundreds of games from dozens of publishers, or you can pay significantly more to get just a single publisher’s games, and a publisher with a brand of gaming style all their own. TV networks and film companies have tried this, and those numbers are shrinking quickly, with many already compromising by giving their shows back to the bigger streamers.
What’s even more frightening about all of this, however, is that Tremblay goes on to say that Ubisoft wants to see a “consumer shift” similar to that in the CD and DVD market, where people have moved on to Spotify and Netflix instead of buying physical media that they can can store on their own shelves. Given that most people, despite being part of the problem (hello), also think about it as a problem
One of the things we’ve seen is that gamers are used to having and owning their games, a bit like DVDs. This is the consumer shift that needs to happen. They have become comfortable no longer owning their CD or DVD collection. This is a transformation that happens a little more slowly [in games]. As players become more comfortable in this regard, your progress will not be lost. If you continue your game at another time, your progress file will still be there. That wasn’t deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your commitment to the game. So it’s about feeling comfortable not owning your game.
Tremblay continues: GI.biz“But if people adopt this model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you will be able to access them when you feel like it.” But… we know that’s not true! We know how often services are discontinued and how many games are no longer available.
One of my absolute favorite games was released by Ubisoft in 2003 and is called In memory (Missing: Since January in the US), and this is certainly not part of its Classics range, I’m sure, because the company lost all rights to it a long time ago. Luckily I own a physical copy of it. But a number of other Ubisoft games from the early 2000s that I post on the Classics site have failed to produce results. There’s no reason to believe that this won’t apply to Ubisoft’s current games in 20 years.
There are still plans for Ubisoft to add streaming access to Activision Blizzard’s games to Ubisoft+, as bizarre as that may seem given the publisher’s recent acquisition by Microsoft. It’ll also seem pretty redundant considering all the games will be available via the far more ubiquitous Game Pass, where they won’t fall behind the technical hurdle of streaming. And in fact Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Is already playable via the Epic Games Store if you pre-ordered it there.
If you, for whatever reason, just worship Ubisoft’s edition, then yes – for $17.99 per month you can play Skull bones, Avatar, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Anno 1800And The Crew: Motorfest right now, which is much cheaper than buying them all individually. But you won’t own any of them, and you’ll have to pay that $18 a month forever if you want to keep them until you can’t anymore.
