Ubisoft has completely transformed its subscription service. And in the middle of the announcement, certain controversial remarks do not get through and divide the players. For what ?
Yesterday we learned of a small upheaval in Ubisoft’s subscription offer service. To sum up,
Ubisoft has revisited its subscription offer by introducing Ubisoft+ Premium, an enriched and more complete version which 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 range of classic games, special editions, additional content and monthly rewards. In the middle of all this, we had to promote the subscription system, and that’s where it got stuck…
Ubisoft is controversial, why?
It is in fact a small sentence to promote the new streaming service that the publisher Ubisoft has created controversy, causing a certain incomprehension on the part of many players. The quote comes from Philippe Tremblay, director of subscriptions at Ubisoft. See instead:
Gamers are used to owning their games. It is this change that must take place among consumers.
Following this, the phrase came under scrutiny and began circulating on social media. With the snowball effect that we know. A tweet on the subject even garnered more than 48,000 likes and was viewed no less than 4.87 million times. Many gamers began expressing their anger and threatening to stop purchasing games, with some even going so far as to promote piracy of upcoming Ubisoft titles. The tweet that sparked the most reactions was undoubtedly this one:
For this tweeter, the words are blurted, it is “anti-consumer propaganda and a way of milking players generation after generation”. Reading the comments, it’s hard not to notice that many people seem to agree. In the meantime, even well-known figures like Joueur du Grenier have commented on the quote:
A confusing statement or a real desire from Ubisoft?
Yet upon closer inspection and putting the quote into the overall context, things are a little different. Here is the statement in full:
One of the things we’ve found is that gamers are accustomed to owning their games, much like DVDs. It is this change in mentality among the consumer that must occur. They have become accustomed to not having their CD or DVD collection. It’s a transformation that was a little slower to come about [dans les jeux]. As players become more familiar with this aspect… you don’t lose your progress. If you resume your game later, your progress file is still there. It has not been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game, or your commitment to the game. So it’s about getting comfortable with not owning your game.
By analyzing the text as a whole, we understand that taking the sentence out of context is a little biased. What is certain, in all cases, is that Philippe Tremblay’s remarks are very confusing. The man speaks clearly about the possession of games by making the connection with physical form on CD/DVD. But the shortcut can be done very quickly. So, is this a communication error or a real desire to harm the consumer? We’ll let you judge Ubisoft’s comments. What is certain is that the controversy does not seem to be going down.