An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off.
Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off::An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off.
Maybe I am just an old nostalgic fart but I have games that I own that are over 30 years old that I still have access to and regularly play and that's how I like it.
I personally don't at all see any benefit to the consumer that subscription based gaming provides. Arguably you can access more games for less money, but if video streaming is anything to go by (increased prices, less content across more and more services, ads creeping back in etc), that value proposition won't last long.
i'm so excited for the fucking subscription fad to die. people have gotta get sick of it at some point right? what could be enticing enough to replace it for both corps and users?
Why can’t they release the server code or whatever so the community can keep playing the games. I’ve got a bunch of games that I can no longer play because there’s no servers. There was a community attempt at putting something together, they were working from scratch, but it seems to have failed.
The devs won’t support it, but they won’t let anyone play with the abandonware either. Took their ball and went home.
I am quite comfortable with not owning any ubisoft games. It's a kind of comfort that comes easily when one doesn't pay ubisoft any money for anything.
I'd rather remain comfortable not buying games from Ubisoft and EA.
I refuse to waste a single dollar on every game from both companies, since we were all bent over and continue to get bent over because they just don't care about anything but making more money.
A good example from Ubisoft is the handling of the Driver series. They kept on releasing the games in the series in a near unplayable state before when most people had dial up.
A good example with EA was the failed DRM with Spore. They only let you install the game 3 times, which glitched out to the point where people had to turn to piracy (warez and crackz) to play a game they paid for.
We vote with every dollar spent, which gives me hope when people rally around good companies that do the right thing.
I like how in this article the greedy cunt is talking about consumers just getting used to the idea of not owning the game being okay because they'll keep their progress and can come back to their game any time. Like we haven't seen media disappear off streaming services all the time. Like nobody has ever fallen on hard times and had to cut ongoing costs. Fuck off.
Game Pass is going gangbusters. A monthly fee to play shitloads of games, including first party titles at launch, with a discount on purchasing those games if I decide I want them? Awesome.
I think the problem is you, Ubisoft. No one trusts you. And you keep releasing the same game.
I don't know what planet he's on but we already don't really own our games. Hell if Steam goes down I'm going to lose access to pretty much everything.
The problem is more that I don't trust Ubisoft to not change the terms of the agreement halfway through. I can totally see them pulling a rockstar and getting rid of an old version of the game if they decide they want to do an HD release.
Thank whatever is sacred to you that these mindless drones picked video games. Have no doubt that it this same person hadn't flunked out of medical school, they'd be running a chain of hospitals somewhere saying, "patients need to just get used to bleeding more and for longer to support our profit model".
I really don't need a subscription service to give me access to even more games that I'll just launch and play for about 20 minutes before I go back to playing battlefield 4
As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
Yeah, you know I don't lose my game either saved on my CPU or Xbox with a copy of the game I don't have to pay for more than once for a predetermined value.
Snarky comments and people joking about Ubisoft's practices but in reality many if not most will simply accept that, spread their butt-cheeks and prepare for all the shoddy practices to be rammed up their ass. Once they get one foot in the door it's just incremental steps from there, be it visual downgrades, selling experience boosters for games they made slower on purpose, day one DLCs, pre-orders, special editions, accounts for "offline" game, etc. Anything goes if they can squeeze another dollar from their customers. There's a message stronger than words when Ubisoft is constantly voted most hated company and yet remains one of the biggest.
Not sure what to tell you masochistic fans but Eves said spread the cheeks some more, there's nothing else for you to do obviously. Bend over.
Much like music, movies and TV, you just need to make sure your content is both available for purchase for people who don't want a subscription andconsistently available on a subscription service for those that do.
It's when you start fucking around and taking them off again because somebody else is offering you more for exclusivity that we get pissed off and just pirate things. You can't expect Assassin's Creed Black Flag to still be making you a noticeable amount of money, but a subscriber can rightfully expect it to be on your service.
I'm of the opinion that if a game is on a subscription service, be it PSN or Game Pass, then it should stay there except in very extreme circumstances. A game can take weeks to play through, and it's only going to take one large game going AWOL at 90% completion for me to sour on the whole idea.
Subscriptions are taking off, just not Ubisoft subscriptions because most of their games are derivative shit.
And personally I don't have an objection with the concept of subscription as an option. It's no worse than streaming music or videos, or renting a DVD / VHS back when. But whatever the service is will have to have a LOT of content, not just back catalogue but new stuff too with fair & reasonable terms for people to want to subscribe. If Ubisoft wants to ever see its stuff streamed it will have to be as part of some other, better service than the one they offer that's for sure.
It's hard to not be cynical about this pattern. To me, it's starting to look like a lot of companies are setting up long-term plans to weather a recession, and patiently wait for baselines to shift in order to normalize stuff like this.
Another way to frame it is, given enough time, a business will ultimately engage in rent seeking behavior if they see no alternative to adding value. Which kind of makes sense, as Ubisoft now builds absolutely monster sized games (e.g. Assassin's Creed 22 - Find all the Things Edition), with all the DLC, online content, and cosmetic bolt-ons imaginable; they've saturated that market. There's literally nowhere else for them to go, unless they take on much bigger risks like building a whole new franchise or two.
This is one positive about the Switch, cartridges are still a thing and I hope this trend continues with future Nintendo releases. Other than that fuck this, if that's their stance I will be comfortable to sail the high seas.
That's okay, you just need to get comfortable with me pirating your games... Then again that's Ubisoft, I don't think I even want to pirate their stuff.
What's funny to me is the streaming model for media already has shown this won't work out well for gaming companies. When a new game drops people will sign up for a month, binge it, then cancel their subscription. They could try and trickle out DLC to get people to stay subscribed, but unless the DLC is significant people will probably just wait a while until a bunch of DLC is available then binge it again.
Personally I can only focus on one or maybe two major games at a time so I'd be happy to only pay a small monthly fee to one major game company at a time over paying for several $80 AAA titles a month.
I’m not necessarily against one subscription service having a ton of games from a lot of developers. The problem is that a ubisoft service isn’t gonna have games from everyone and that playing a full game takes me 2-3 months with the time I have. Just buying the game is probably cheaper for me and gives me more guarantees.
I dont want to pay a subscription for a bunch of games I'm not interested in. I want to buy and own the specific games I want to play. Fuck off ubisoft
We need time get comfortable trusting games companies that have the track record they do not to fuck customers that have trusted they'll continue to provide access to their games rather than arbitrarily removing them, adding game-ruining monetisation, fucking with subscription prices gating access to their libraries and generally acting like shady arseholes?
The last game I bought was Outer Wilds in 2022, on sale, for like ten bucks. Maybe I bought Firewatch in 2023 as a rebound, but I don't remember. After that, I decided to finally play through the MCC for most of 2023, which I'd bought years earlier for like 50 bucks, maybe. And how much would I have to have paid to keep acces to these games for so long with a subscription model? Well, just to keep acces with Ubusoft would have cost me nearly 300 dollars since late 2022, for less than 80 dollars worth of games. Of course they want us to have subscriptions.
Fuck subscriptions. I pay you $5 for groovy Zilean as a magnificent hippy grandpa and you change him into a cranked out meth head because the Chinese government told you to. Fuck you for your control over what you took my money for!
And of course they won't compete over which service provides the better app\features\catalogue but will try the same exclusivity game the video streaming platforms started... No thanks!
You can't say that and keep it off the only subscription model that is making any waves. Honestly, if you want subscription options to take off, you need to ride the gamepass wave until it subsides and then build up from their when people are lost with all their games gone or on a subscription that is way too expensive.
Oh yeah, so what's next on the plan? Making gamers comfy with not owning their games. Good luck to that. Who hired this moron? Ubisoft is looking doomed. Microsoft's next purchase. Haha! What a dumb thing to say.