Does Uplay ring a bell? Surely it does: it is the service that Ubisoft used for a while as the name of its online service. But then came Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club… And, among all these failed initiatives, now comes with two more, Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics. The idea? It’s not necessarily bad. The execution? Frankly terrible.
Ubí, Ubá, I love you more each day
Since Game Pass and PlayStation + Extra (or Premium) have offered many of their games in the catalog for a monthly fee, many others have wanted to do the same. The issue is that Ubisoft, initially, does not release enough games to justify such a high monthly price like 17.99 euros per month (7.99 euros for the classics catalog, which will include ‘Farcry 6’, ‘Watch Dogs: Legion’).
The good part is that all the releases will be available, like ‘Prince of Persia: The lost crown’ from day one, and it will also have extra benefits and the occasional monthly gift. If you are a big fan of ‘Assassin’s Creed’ or any of the developer’s sagas, it might be useful for you, but don’t rush to open your wallet with resignation: the good news is that if you already have PlayStation +, it is included in the catalog.
The downside is the aftertaste of the fact that Ubisoft is spending all its efforts on selling us something that most of us have seen as the lesser evil: not owning our games and therefore losing access to them the day they disappear from the service. Despite the company’s claim that “Consumers are comfortable not owning their collection of CDs or DVDs“, the truth is that it is more a matter of prices than preferences.
We have all experienced wanting to watch a movie and discovering that no streaming service includes it in their catalog. Now the same nightmare can happen with video games. Is there really an audience willing to risk that, after paying a monthly fee, their favorite titles disappear from the famous cloud? We’ll have to see. For now, Ubisoft is trying it, and they say it’s going much better than we all thought. We’ll have to see.
