Players will need to feel a fair bit more “comfortable” with the idea of subscription models and, to a greater extent, not actually owning anything they buy. This week, Ubisoft rejiggered its entire subscription model, but to sell players and the industry on its new move, one company exec misconstrued why gamers and developers might not be so keen to pony up monthly for their games.
Ubisoft’s head of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, offered a fair few innocuous comments in an interview with GI.biz but then said something that could be particularly upsetting for players who’ve long been taken for a ride by a largely anti-consumer games industry. Tremblay said players are used to owning the games they play, but they have got “comfortable” not owning their music or movie collection. His main point: why shouldn’t players get “comfortable” with not owning the product they pay for and instead accept the streaming model as a whole?
Instead of offering two pricing tiers for Ubisoft+’s previous Multi-Access and PC Access, now both are under the $US18-per-month Ubisoft+ Premium umbrella. This gives players access to past games, some early-release titles, and other monthly rewards. There’s an additional $US8-per-month Ubisoft+ Classics on PC, which is supposed to give enthusiasts access to a few of the company’s older titles. All those titles are also available on PlayStation+, but the Ubisoft exec seems to think gamers are concerned about losing their progress or that their games could get pulled.
“As people embrace that model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you’ll be able to access them when you feel like it,” he said. “
Despite Tremblay’s claims to the contrary, these services and the games on them are indeed ephemeral, and access to Ubisoft’s titles exists at the whim of the provider. If you stop paying for PlayStation+ after Sony hiked the price last year, suddenly, all those games you were playing before are barred to you. That’s the nature of the beast. If Sony unexpectedly bans you from their online services, that’s it. You no longer have access to everything you paid for.
The Ubisoft director’s comments drew plenty of derision from players and developers alike. Sven Vincke, the founder of Larian Studios, wrote on Twitter (nope, still not calling it X) that if subscriptions become the dominant model, only “a select group” would get to decide if games like Larian’s own Baldur’s Gate III could make it to the market in the first place.
“We are already all dependent on a select group of digital distribution platforms, and discoverability is brutal. Should those platforms all switch to subscription, it’ll become savage,” he said. Vincke had previously stressed that he didn’t want to put his game on Game Pass or other subscription platforms.
But the loss of physical media has already massively impacted the very nature of ownership. Most of the world’s most popular online game shops offer players a “license” to play that game, meaning you don’t actually have a right to the title. Most digital stores’ terms of service state they could pull your media at any time, should they want to. This happened before on the PlayStation Store when Sony removed access to movies that some users bought through that service back in 2022. This past December, Sony suddenly told users it would remove Discovery content users had previously purchased due to licensing issues.
Is Ubisoft likely to lose access to any of its own titles? Unlikely, but that’s not the point. The more players who are tied to a subscription service, the more major publishers stop trying to offer different ways to purchase games. Tremblay said that a tenth of their new Ubisoft+ subscribers never previously played a Ubisoft game, which itself seems a bit of a stretch, but that does seem to be the company’s main hope with this kind of service for how it will grow. The company hopes to push their games on PC more than just the two mainline Xbox and PlayStation consoles.”
Xbox is easily the biggest player in this arena. Thanks to its $US68 billion megamerger with Activision Blizzard, the company is set up to absolutely dominate the subscription market now that it can shove the likes of Call of Duty onto its Game Pass model. Last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the company’s VP of investor relations, Brett Iversen, that after its latest monopolization effort, “we have the ability to really do what we’ve always set out to do, which is build great games and deliver them to folks across all platforms,” mentioning not just Xbox but PCs, mobile, and other consoles as well.
The other side of the coin is that with these subscription services, players are exposed to far more games than they’re used to, including indie titles. But some of Vincke’s and some gamers’ fear remains that, with time, these models could become so monopolistic they’ll actively block newer, stranger titles from ever getting off the ground.
And you don’t have to look far for examples. Digital streaming has already broken many of its initial promises, offering customers an easier, cheaper, ad-free alternative to the days of cable boxes and movie rentals. The price of streaming has risen dramatically across the board, especially for folks who have multiple accounts to watch everything they want, and practically every streaming service save for Apple TV+ is pushing an ad-based streaming tier. The same kind of ‘enshittification’ could easily happen to game streaming, and it will come at a much faster clip than what happened with movies and TV.