It seems Ubisoft game lovers may not have the choice to buy them anymore. During an investor call, Ubisoft’s CFO, Frederick Duguet, remarked that subscription services will only be successful if gamers come to terms with the fact that they “don’t own the game.”.
One of the biggest publishers touting such a subscription-based business model, Ubisoft is making more than 100 games available on its Ubisoft Plus service for $14.99 per month. It is now available on PC, Stadia, and Amazon Luna, though Ubisoft plans to extend availability with more platforms and territories.
The official word on the subscription model
But why would Ubisoft want you to go from buying games to subscribing? According to Duguet, it’s because subscriptions are “a way to increase the lifetime value of our players as well as to reduce the exposure to the volatility of new releases.” The reason is much simpler: subscriptions have the effect of stabilizing the streams of income for the publisher besides offering more effective methods of engaging the players and creating value.
This clearly means, as Duguet puts it, that the gamers benefit more from subscriptions because access opens to a wider array of games and genres-most probably trying new titles they would not have tried. “This is,” he said,”a way of offering more choice and more quality to our players, giving them the opportunity to enjoy our games in a more frictionless way.”
Players’ reactions
Not everyone, however, shares the same vision of a subscription-based future as Ubisoft does. Some gamers are wary of losing ownership and control of their games, especially the requirement to play them from online servers and DRM. Others would rather pay for a single game and own it forever than pay a subscription each month for the chance to lose it all should they quit or when the service gets taken down.
Besides that, bearing in mind Ubisoft’s tradition to develop low-quality and repetitive games that have recently relied on the same open-world concept way too often, some players consider the company incapable of providing qualitative and diverse games. Since Ubisoft Plus does not include any DLCs or microtransactions and is directly competing against subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, EA Play, or PlayStation Now, other players have lots of doubts about the value of the service either.
So, what are your thoughts? would you be adopting Ubisoft’s subscription plan or would you still rather buy your games outright? Tell us in the comments section below.
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