Ubisoft, Ownership, and the Anti-Consumer Nature of Streaming

There’s nothing inherently wrong with digital distribution of videogames and the streaming of videogames to your consoles. The problem is how those tactics tend to be utilized by the companies deploying them. Console manufacturers like Nintendo and Sony can make entire eras of videogames disappear by shutting down a digital shop (or, in the case of Sony so far, simply making said shops nearly impossible to access or purchase from in order to render the same result), and any publisher can pull a game from a storefront forever, even in some cases making the copies you did download and even pay for impossible to use in the process. Planned obsolescence and constant costly upgrades for hardware were bad enough, but now we’re also in a world where we don’t necessarily always have access to the games we’ve paid for, even if the hardware they were designed for still works.

Things are going to get worse on this front before they get better. It’s not just the console manufacturers getting in on the subscription model for games—a model that’s attempted to remove ownership even more from the equation, and left the curation of what’s available at a given time even more in the hands of publishers, ruining the promise of digital distribution in the process. Now, we have to deal with megapublishers like Ubisoft also deciding to join in the proceedings. And then have their Director of Subscription, speaking on Ubisoft’s revamped subscription service, give quotes like this one out in the open instead of just behind closed doors:

One factor that could enable more growth is the death of ownership. [Philippe] Tremblay said players need to get more comfortable with the idea of not purchasing titles and relying on streaming platforms, suggesting that’s what users of other services like Spotify and Netflix have done.

“One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s been a bit slower to happen [in games],” he said

We’ve seen this before, even if we haven’t seen it in games. The promise of streaming, of cord cutting to avoid the ever-growing cable fees, ruined by every rightsholder on the planet deciding they needed their own streaming app with their own subscription fees. If you want to actually be able to access older movies and television shows while keeping up with new ones, you need Netflix, and Hulu, and Peacock, and Apple TV, and Paramount, and oh if you’ve got kids (or love the 20000 Leagues Under the Sea movie as much as my editor Garrett Martin does) you need Disney+. Want to watch sports? Well, now you need a whole bunch of different apps for that, too, and probably have to pay for one of the cable replacement platforms to make sure you fill in the cracks. Might as well just get a Prime Video subscription while you’re at it, too, since they’re getting more and more invested in sports in their quest to be The Streaming App worth staying subscribed to. Remember, though, if something on Prime is also on Showtime or Crunchyroll, you’ll need a separate subscription for those services, too. 

It is depressing to consider that this is nowhere near an exhaustive list of streaming apps you can pay for, and if you disagree that this is infuriating I hope that, at the least, it’s because you’ve simply never experienced things any other way and don’t know any better.

The prices for all of these services keep going up and up, too, so not only are there more and more of them, but they each cost you more over time. There’s no going back to cable, either, as subscriptions for those services continue to dwindle, with attention so heavily on streaming services at this point that there are even movies with real Hollywood stars and well-known directors at the helm that either skip theaters entirely or receive merely a limited release. Best Buy will no longer bother to carry physical copies of movies and television soon—not just the end of DVDs, but the end of blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD discs and so on, too, in physical stores as well as online—due to how heavily invested every company and now consumer is in streaming. Hell, even before Best Buy decided to pull the plug on this, you already needed to hope you lived near a smaller specialty shop if you actually wanted to be able to find something in stock. Other larger stores will surely follow in Best Buy’s footsteps here, too, making it even more difficult to access anything besides the digital media locked behind a series of services.

We’re already dealing with the issue of the digital videogames that you buy not actually, legally, being owned by you: you’ve merely purchased a license, as was the case with digital purchases of music when that service first arose, so whenever the actual owner of the product decides it’s gone, it’s gone. Companies like Nintendo continue to tell you that, for the foreseeable future, you still are able to download purchased software on the shuttered Wii, Wii U, and 3DS shops, but the “foreseeable future” part of things tells you that, someday, they aren’t going to allow it any longer. And Ubisoft can say of their various subscriptions that focus on new releases and classic ones that, “These games will still exist, the service will continue, and you’ll be able to access them when you feel like. That’s reassuring.” But unless the terms of service actually say that “yes, you will have access to these games forever, they’re never going to be unavailable and this service is as eternal as our promise that you can sue us if things prove otherwise,” then no, it is not reassuring. 

It is simply $17.99 per month just to play some Ubisoft games for as long as they allow you to, and whatever games they happen to have at the time. That’s $1 more per month than the Ultimate version of Microsoft’s Game Pass, which includes not just a significant slate of Microsoft-published and -owned titles, new and old, but also all of the titles on EA’s subscription service, and those Microsoft has paid publishers to put on Game Pass in order to make it more attractive. Game Pass is far from perfect for a number of reasons—it’s already seen some functionality scaled back and prices increased, as is the way of these services that make themselves feel indispensable right up to the point of no longer feeling like you can cancel them—and yet it far outstrips what a single publisher, even one as significant as Ubisoft, can manage for a similar price. 

Paying $17 per month for Game Pass on its own isn’t so bad, even if you’re a multiplatform “hardcore” player who’s paired it with $18 for Playstation Plus or $4 per month for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. Add in another $18 per month for Ubisoft, which will surely not want to take part in Game Pass or Playstation Plus as often going forward in order to make their own service more appealing. And then, say, Take-Two decides to do similar, and Square Enix, and whoever else Microsoft hasn’t already acquired yet, until suddenly the only way we are able to access any of Konami’s back catalog or their newest release is to pay them $20 per month. 

It’s going to be messy. It’s going to be expensive. Tremblay believes that a “consumer shift” is necessary like has already happened for streaming movies and television, in order to allow companies like Ubisoft to thrive with their new model where the actual consumer has less choice and less ownership than they currently do. That’s not the correct view, though, merely the corporate one. We should be holding fast, we should be pushing to maintain as much ownership as possible over what we play—we’ve seen what is happening in other media industries, and we’ve seen what little choice and ownership we do have even now before being hit fully by a subscription for every publisher. There are other reasons to not give up the idea of ownership or retail, however, as Larian CEO Swin Vincke explained in a series of tweets earlier in January:

Whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king. But it’s going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not. Direct from developer to players is the way.

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Getting a board to ok a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster. Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximize profit.

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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.

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In such a world by definition the preference of the subscription service will determine what games get made. 

Trust me – you really don’t want that.

As the CEO of Finji, Bekah Saltsman, already explained to Games Industry this time last year, there are developers who already feel chained to the subscription model because it’s the direction things are headed in. “Because of the constriction and consolidation of the industry over the past two years and how a lot of companies are just owned by the subscription services, my concern is that because the libraries are so big and the companies are so prolific with huge user bases, that they won’t need us,” Saltsman told Brendan Sinclair. The higher the percentage of the industry focuses on streaming and subscription-based services, the worse this is going to be. Shops like GOG and platforms like Steam will become more important for allowing you to tie everything into an account that can work on other hardware and bringing your games—that you purchased—with it, but those are far from all-encompassing. A shift to more streaming will further stratify the games landscape, if anything, and make AAA releases that much more formulaic and lacking in ambition in favor of something safer, trusted, proven. And every publisher can say this will all be to the good, and that it will be consumer-friendly, but again: check your monthly bank statements, actually count up how much you spend on streaming apps for movies and television, and think back on if it’s actually cheaper for you, and as robust, as what you had before. Think on if there was maybe another way this could have all gone down, that didn’t leave you with just the one road to take.

Changes need to come to the gaming landscape, which is seeing both its greatest successes and the signs of an imminent implosion due to unsustainable practices. There’s no question about that. Finding additional ways to squeeze the consumer base for cash, though, is not the kind of change that’s necessary. It might be what the suits in the boardrooms want, but when has that ever benefited anyone besides them? We should want more than what Ubisoft promises, and we should want more than we have. Anything less is settling, and there’s been enough of that in the media landscape already.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.