Ubisoft's Tactics Are Making uPlay Less Attractive Than Ever

It was similar in heroes, whichever the latest one is. You pick up epic items in the campaign and you can't use them unless you do some Uplay registering, which I tried to do a dozen times but somehow that connection could never be established.

Do we want Ubi to stop making games? Or are we just insisting that they sell all their software through Valve?

I'm confused as to what the end goal of this backlash is.

"That might sound compelling to Ubisoft, but it's not compelling to me, the player."

THERE ! After the whole Xbox One affair, you'd think people would learn. I'm not saying UPlay can't potentially be beneficial to the player. But you're not explaining why or how ! Oh, you want me to deal with all your bullcrap and then I'll get so ZombiU wallpaper ? Greaaaaat...

And here we have yet another case of executives telling consumers what they want. This has historically burned companies badly. Sony, with the PS3. Microsoft with the Xbox One. Both tried to tell players how they should be enjoying console games. Both got slammed by awful sales until they turned it all around. Sure, fanboys may seem to be viciously loyal to a brand, but they are a minority. The majority is fickle and quick to jump ship if they see a better one sail by.

In the rush to market an AC game annually, they didn't really take any time to run some focus testing on these things.

Do players use companion apps?

Do players like companion apps?

And of course, do players want to use said apps while playing the main game?

Because I think the answer to the first two may actually be yes for many people, if the apps serve a purpose beyond marketing. World of Warcraft has had a companion app for a long time, and being able to talk to guild chat, or check your game auctions from your phone is a useful feature. Some games let you play phone games for currency that transfers over to the full game. Ok, sometimes it's kinda cool to play a Bejeweled reskin at the bus stop and get a little bit of progress.

But when you have to pull out your phone while playing a console game, it's gone a bit far, so the third question is generally a pretty firm no.

The lesson for Ubi, is that interconnectivity shouldn't be done because its there - it should be done because it is something consumers actually want. The other lesson to be learned, is that you can't just slam out an AC a year with one giant team. Splitting them into three, and working a three year cycle will simply produce better content, as Activision has learned with CoD.

Ubisoft have long tried to strongarm players into doing what they want them to do; remember the Online Services Platform which forced you to play singleplayer games online? When AC 2 launched you had to be connected constantly. At least they were dissuaded from doing that, but Uplay is a less than preferable alternative.

Why do Ubisoft keep doing it? People keep buying their games! It's as simple as that. If Ubisoft feels they can get away with it, they'll do it, no hesitation.

Makes me want to be a $200 customer!

After I couldn't play Anno because of a Uplay glitch... I started avoiding games that have Uplay. Over the past few years I could have purchased several Ubisoft games that I wanted to play but didn't! Only Assassin's am I willing to put up with Uplay for and after Unity maybe not even Assassin's anymore. I'm not sure what Uplay does for Ubisoft besides annoy customers until they are no longer customers.

@joshwent: Yeah it is gross. I have no issues with getting people to do "stuff" for free digital goodies, but making someone watch a trailer at least two times seems a bit unreasonable. I know that as a fan I was trying to actively avoid trailers and other media before DA: I was released, so I probably take this more seriously than a casual fan would. Still, I felt like they were painting me into a corner, and it was annoying, especially when I remember that they used to do this stuff with things like flash games etc. that would be more interactive and fun as a player and less spoilery.

@toug: All I can say is, yuuuuup. :D

@drabnon: I did it for my husband, who is the Assassn's Creed super fan. I gladly help him out with stuff like that, and he does the same for me with the games that I end up becoming obsessed with. But it certainly was annoying to realize just what hoops we would have to jump through to get a few cosmetic options unlocked. I realize that we're part of the "problem" as it is. At the same time, I don't mind supporting a publisher in ways outside of just purchasing the base game if I really love the product they're putting out.

It's a difficult nut to crack. I think that the publisher's are exploiting me as a completionist personality type with this kind of stuff. In older games I would just play the game to unlock stuff and then resort to an online guide if I couldn't figure out how to do something that was really bothering me. Or before that, in the days when I didn't have internet access, I would just keep playing and hope that banging my head against it would eventually yield positive results.

Now, if you want everything, you have to get certain editions of the game through different retailers, each with different pre-order DLC. You can either buy them all (crazy) or you can try to find them in other ways, forums, trading, ebay, etc. You can try to wait for the stuff to eventually be released in a Game of the Year edition, but for a big fan that can be a hard wait and I suppose there is no guarantee that everything will make it in. Then there's all this stuff, usually just cosmetic, that you can get through ARGs, flash games, phone apps, and buying other products such as shaving cream, chips or soda, or things like hard cover strategy guides for the game or other game products that are sold around the time of release. Again, those people who want it all (like me unfortunately) can be drawn to doing this stuff or buying these things. Luckily, there are very few games that make me want to do this. Still, it's amazing to see how this has kind of blossomed in the past few years. I suppose I should use a more sinister verb than blossom, but there you go. :)

Thanks for writing about this. I think uPlay is totally worthless. One of my biggest pet peeves over the past few years is the fact that EVERY publisher feels the need to have some stupid storefront client in order to play their games. uPlay is even worse by the fact that it's store just links to ubisoft games in STEAM and STEAM is what actually executes the games. uPlay doesn't even act as a stand alone client; it requires STEAM to even function correctly, so what exactly is the point?

Origin, Blizzard, any free to play MMORPG publishers. It's gotten old.. I have about 6-7 of these bullshit storefront clients currently.

I still want them to make good games, Rayman, Child of Light and the Splintercell games are still great games with some good people behind them. It's the billion dollar games they can't get right for some reason.

@ravelle: Off topic: I'm still playing Rayman Legends a few hours a week. I just can't get those last two Teensies!! (They're two of the 40 second, Dark Rayman Invaded ones in case you were curious.)

On topic: I agree with you somewhat but Far Cry gives me so much more pleasure than uPlay gives me displeasure that I have no issue having to go through their crappy software to get to the goodness - especially considering I have yet to experience any issues with uPlay myself.

It's not about the middling scores, middling score are fine (everyone is entitled to make a bad game). It's more an issue of piss poor trends, which is something that the site has actually named and shamed for a few years now. It just seems that things are getting progressively and aggressively more awful regardless of general community feedback. Part of the problem is the people who a deep enough into games don't have a majority voice when it comes to "voting with your wallet", subsequently we don't always necessarily have the power to effect meaningful changes in publisher policies. I would argue that the responsibility falls on the gaming press to be the collective advocates for the players when it comes to trying to affect change.

Putting junk like free to play elements, pay to win in lieu of good old fashioned cheat codes, moronic social hooks and pointless and annoying app/ marketing fueled website integration inside full priced retail products is asinine. Hell I believe someone in here has already pointed out that EA has a marketing campaign going on right now where they make you side through a pile of trailers and click on various sections of the video in order to unlock loot, how is that even remotely OK?

@korwin: Well the case in point is that EA has "won" the worst company in America award and they're still doing these marketing campaigns regardless. It hasn't done much good in shaming them into doing something else.

The problem is that "award" is almost meaningless in context, again because someone like EA has no real business beating out companies like Comcast or Koch Industries which means the whole thing comes across as hyperbolic. Something more industry focused given from people who's opinions should carry legitimate weight would probably more effective.

That Unity map is a hot mess. Old Assassin's Creed maps were far more focused and elegant. These days it feels like far too many people are getting involved and the result is painfully obvious. I fear for the future where we'll have icons within icons so more icons can be added to the map.

No one likes uPlay. Not even the people who work on uPlay.

I am so glad I read about this before I bought the game. I don't use iOS or Android, so I don't want to fucking have that shit waved in my face in a game I pay $60 for. This type of coercive "cross-marketing" (or whatever the fuck they call it) in full-priced games is an utterly offensive and obnoxious trend that needs to stop. It gets worse every year. The people in the marketing departments at the big game publishers who force this type of cross-marketing crap onto and now into our games need to be called on the carpet for it. Review scores need to go down because of it. In Unity it sounds like Ubisoft has taken things to a new intrusive low by dangling inaccessible content in players' faces inside the game itself. Stop roping off game content unless we jump through the various cross-marketing hoops like good little consumers. It was already bad enough when it wasn't dangled in your face while you are playing the game. All of the following bullshit needs to die:

• Pre-order exclusive content
• Retailer-specific content
• Join-our-shitty-community-on-the-web exclusive content
• Install-our-shitty-publisher-specific PC app/storefront exclusive content
• Download-our-shitty-phone-app exclusive content
• Let-our-CEO-fuck-you-in-the-ass exclusive content

In case you can't tell, this shit makes me fucking mad. Fuck you Ubisoft. Maybe if the game programmers didn't have to spend time implementing all this extra bullshit for your marketing idiots, the game itself wouldn't be so full of bugs.

P.S. Patrick, please do not encourage them by implying that they need to start roping off more valuable pieces of content if they want you to jump through their cross-marketing hoops. I don't think that's what you meant to imply, but the marketing jackasses at the big publishers are so stupid to begin with, I wouldn't put it past them to interpret it that way.

Something that rarely comes up in these articles is the issue of piracy/the "freeness" of PC when it comes to starting new storefronts as well.

No offense to Patrick, but unless you were a PC gamer back in 2000-2005ish, it's impossible to really understand the motivations behind the Dark Days of PC gaming. When piracy rates were between 75%-80%, huge PC franchises got sequels specifically made for the consoles, and we never got ports of huge multiplatform games.

People like to casually think it was because of money or boredom, but the thing is, piracy has always been caused by ease of access. Back in the day, if I wanted to buy a game, I had to drive 15-30 minutes to the local electronics store. Since PC games weren't stocked in favor of console games, it'd be a coin flip whether or not they had what I wanted, even if it was a fairly big name title. So I'd of course have to keep checking every store in the immediate area until I either found what I wanted, or gave up, depending on what happened first.

This eventually pushed me into downloading the games I wanted, because it was easier then checking for physical copies. I had the money to buy them with, and would have gladly put forward $50-$60 to buy them, but that opportunity never presented itself, because there just wasn't enough PC gamers where I lived to justify the shelfspace. It created this really terrible self fulfilling prophecy, where buying PC games was so hard nobody did it, but since nobody bought PC games they stopped getting made/sent out to shelves.

Steam changed all of that. People like to say they got where they are because they "forced" people to use the service, or the deals, or any of that other stuff, but it's always been secondary to the biggest thing it offered, which was ease of access. Suddenly in my own home I could buy a game off Steam, go to work, and have it ready to play when I came home. I didn't have to pray Best Buy was carrying Company of Heroes anymore, I could just click a few buttons and there it was. And that's the crazy thing about Steam, it turned all these pirates back into paying customers, because it provided a service/ease of access that was better then free.

And it's the thing EA and Ubisoft don't seem to understand, and seem to be learning the hard way. Steam is now the baseline, and unless they can figure out a way to offer a better service, they won't draw people away from their collections. I own over 2000 games on Steam, starting over on Origin or Uplay would require some serious work on their part.

Taking things away from their products, or taking their products away from Steam isn't really a solution. Oh it makes sense business wise, exclusives force people to use your service, but this isn't the consoles. PC gamers can't be forced into doing things, because they always have outside means on how to access this content if they don't want to jump through these hoops. According to friends I have within EA, the PC sales of their games have dropped steadily over the last few years since Origin ( as everyone just went right back to downloading their games. ), and people are already working on cracking the social features of Unity.

Obviously GB doesn't endorse piracy, and neither do I ( I went and bought everything I ever downloaded off of Steam, and have a library of 2000 games now. ), but it's really hard to see this end positively for EA/Ubisoft. They are attempting to use business tricks that require rigidity and control on an enthusiast market that thrives on looseness and freedoms. To even build a PC you need a level of knowledge and enthusiasm that directly counters the market-speak/exclusivity ideals these companies are pushing, ( who else willingly spends $800-$1000 on a machine that'll require $200 worth of upgrades every 3-4 years) so when stuff like this happens, it just baffles me that someone actually was willing to push it, or is proud enough to keep pushing it in the case of EA.

@korwin: You know, I don't really equate going to a link in youtube or giving a like in facebook to this. To me, this is worst, because it is inside the game. It is a constant icon on your map, a constant chest out of reach, a constant reminder that you should subscribe to our service and complete our promotional material to get this loot... inside the game setting. In a way, it is even worst than the NPC in Dragon Age 1 selling you DLC, because at least the whole process was game related. This is simply advertisement for other services and products Ubisoft wants you to try inside the game, and content gated to them. Not that I wanted them to sweet-talk me into the deal, but this is so transparent from Ubisoft is almost insulting.

One of the main selling points of Steam is its ubiquity and transparency. I know it didn't start that way, but this case is not only pervasive to the games, but doesn't work half of the times...

Most annoying of all, is AC Initiates isn't fully functional yet! The companion is an extra hoop, but I don't think it's that offensive when its working properly. Mass effect had the whole galactic readiness app (admittedly not required). This is just something to do on the bus.

I love my DRM within DRM and launchers that launch other launchers that launch game launchers that launch the game.

I guess I can be glad GoG exists.

Over the years, Ubisoft has become more of a soulless husk of a company who seem to be much more interested in money rather than the craft. This is one example where they are trying to farm users to their irrelevant online portals and the other news I read today is that they want to start targetting young children with merchandise. Not teenagers, like 5-6 yr old because they want to tap into that lucrative Minecraft market... Here little timmy, have a cute figurine of an assassin who kills people violently for a living...

Concentrate on the games, pour love into them and success will come. Coming up with marketing strategies won't work on gamers, they can see right through the BS.

Maybe they need to climb a tower and to uncover how gamers are feeling about their company right now?

@tehpickle: Good points. I can agree.

Don't forget that the app you need to unlock chests requires a lot of playing of that app to eventually unlock them (and the worst kind of bullshit app store game mechanics, at that). Oh, and that app is $2.00.

Makes it all the weirder that Ubisoft was also the first big publisher to release somewhat recent titles on GOG, such as the first Assassin's Creed or Prince of Persia 2008.

I'm one of those few Luddites who doesn't own a smart phone so anytime something requires a companion app or smart phone with no way around it, I get extremely annoyed and try to find ways around it. It's really frustrating because there's no little PC download or something. I'd probably download all of the companion apps to games if they had PC releases, just because I like not getting locked out of things. I have no need for a smart phone and phone companies charge ridiculous rates for them so I'm not going to bother with them for a while.

One thing I do like about uPlay is the achievement system. Doing specific things unlocks achievement points and you "spend" them on unlockables for in game use. It's what I felt the XBL achievements should have been. It's nice to have an in game reward for doing stuff. Yes it could and probably should be actually in game but it is still a nice feature and is what makes me keep uPlay games connected.

This, pretty much.

It seems so odd though, as it seems they weren't nearly as invasive with farcry 4. Just a few meh guns that get replaced early on in the game anyway... Wonder why they went this super-obnoxious route with AC:U...?

The uPlay crap is part of why I returned Far Cry 4 after blazing through it once. I can tolerate paid DLC and season passes in an era where games are much bigger and more costly to develop. Forcing me to install a bunch of separate programs on other machines just to access content in the game is one step too annoying for me to bother. I play video games to relax. I don't want to deal with another login and email list to unsubcribe from just to use a gun I like in the game.