Ubisoft announces UPlay+ Subscription Service for PC

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Ubisoft confirms full launch day line-up for its Uplay+ PC subscription service
And there's a month-long free trial.

Back in July, amid the hubbub of E3, Ubisoft announced that it was preparing to launch its own PC games subscription offering, Uplay+. At the time, a library of more than 100 titles was promised for launch, and the publisher has now confirmed the full list of games that will be available when the service arrives on 3rd September.

A Uplay+ subscription costs €14.99/$14.99 USD a month (an official UK price is yet to be confirmed) and provides access to Ubisoft's full PC games library, which, as you'd expect, includes all of its blockbuster franchises - so that's the likes of Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, and Far Cry unsurprisingly accounted for - plus all of the publisher's upcoming titles, including Gods & Monsters and Watch Dogs Legion.

https://store.ubi.com/us/uplayplus/games/?lang=en_US

 
Yeah, this one will be purely a rental service for me. Pay for a month maybe once or twice a year. Not enough in there for me to want to maintain a year around subscription.

Still, that'll be cheaper than buying their games. I'll get those on Steam during a sale if I like them on the subscription.

Then again, considering how long it's taking me to get around to even starting up a AAA game on XGP-PC, I probably won't have the time for it. :p

Regards,
SB
 
I may take up on that month-long free trial to play Far Cry 5.
And then forget about it.
 
Welcome to Ubisoft pumping out constant titles of the same IPs every year over the course of the year to keep people subscribed... oh, nevermind.
 
I’m a bit astonished that they think this will fly. (Or do they really? Is this more of a test balloon?)
A large part of the PC market is the "Fortnite” crowd - plays predominantly a single inexpensive game on inexpensive computers.
Another large part is people who got into PC gaming in their youth, and still do it a bit when they can squeeze it in as working adults.
Neither of these categories will even consider paying $900 over the next five years to play Ubisofts catalog of titles alone.
Using it for a month every or every other year to check out new titles makes some sense (hmm, didn’t we use to have demos for this?), but can’t drive revenue.
And Ubisoft is only a tiny fraction of the overall PC market. EA, Blizzard/Activision, Take2, THQ, Zenimax, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, the list is looong + indies. Given that there is so many publishers and indies in PC gaming, how many subscriptions do you need?
If you are mostly playing FIFA, then you’d buy that and own it. No subscription fees.
If you are interested in a genre (or even worse, more than one), you would need many subscriptions, so over 5 years you are looking at $900xALargeInteger.
Ehhhh....no.
I honestly can’t see the market here.
 
Yeah, at the announced subscription price, that's like buying 3 full launch priced games per year.

I can't even think of 3 UBIsoft games that I would want to buy each year...at full price. Much less at least 4 or more to make it worthwhile.

Definitely just a "rental" service for me and not a subscription service.

Regards,
SB
 
The point of a subscription is to lock people in to your 'brand'. Many people will continue to pay even when they aren't really using it. Some will cycle through and actually save money, but some will try it out and stick with it either because they found value or because they just don't care about the cost. The risk here is pretty low with a potential big upside.
 
My first reaction was also at the current price it will be DOA, and not the @AlBran goodness game either. I didn't want to start off all negative and wanted to see others reaction to the pricing first before I shared.

I think they need to drop the price to $5 monthly or $30 yearly similar to the EA Vault on consoles, but not include DLC for current games. That way they may get more people onto the base game and then finding ones they like and perhaps biting on buying DLC with a 20% discount.

We can only wait and see from Ubi quarterly numbers how the market reacts.
 
We can only wait and see from Ubi quarterly numbers how the market reacts.
The market will react with a huge amount of subscriptions at the start since there will be a large amount of PC gamer wanting to play all their latest titles for a month for $15. It's 6-12 months from now where the real uptake (or lack thereof) will start to show but I'm sure the real numbers will be hidden from investor reports, rolled up into general PC sales.
 
I wonder how long it will be before a game is released that is only available via a subscription service ?

Over Negative 20 years. It already happened in March 1999 with Everquest. Other MMORPGs followed suit too.
 
Over Negative 20 years. It already happened in March 1999 with Everquest. Other MMORPGs followed suit too.

Even earlier than that, Ultima Online predated EQ by a bit.

And then you had the games that could only be played if you subscribed to AOL or other online services. AOL had a lock on some really good D&D games IIRC.

Heck even in the 80's there were some games that could only be played if you were a member of an online BBS either multi-line or single line. The single line ones didn't usually require a membership fee, but the multi-line BBS systems had exclusive access to multiplayer games and they pretty much all required a membership fee. :)

Regards,
SB
 
Over Negative 20 years. It already happened in March 1999 with Everquest. Other MMORPGs followed suit too.
This has a bit of the same feel, doesn’t it?
Seeing that subscription services can be a continous stream (or torrent) of revenue, and wanting to hook people into your feed, and in turn affix a straw into their accounts that sucks and sucks and sucks.
But just as WoW spawned a decade of copycats that basically all failed, I hope that publisher driven subscription businesses (because I doubt Ubi will be alone) all fail too. If I want a streaming service at all, and I’m deeply suspicius of them, I want a streaming service that supplies material from all publishers.
Just as having a music streaming service that only offered material from a single record company would be an instaflop, so should this be. It’s the wrong idea.
I’ll concede that it is difficult to appreciate a deal that is clearly aimed at someone else.
This is obviously something the publishers would LOVE to sell. But I just can’t see who would look at this and say "sweet deal, sign me up!". If it was $60 annualy I could see it. Barely, because even if I was hooked on their Assasins Creed games, why would this be preferable to owning the games?
The reason I pay for Spotify is that I and my kids can listen to all that music, together or individually, on five or six different devices in the household, or anything else where I can download a client. This doesn’t offer anywhere near those practical advantages. None.
I don’t get it.
Either I’m completely out of touch with reality, or the Ubisoft money guys are.
I’ve been slapped around by reality before, so I’m not placing any bets though.
 
I want a streaming service that supplies material from all publishers.

Pretty much if it doesn't offer something similar to Netflix/Spotify (doesn't have to have ALL the games, but it must offer a large breadth of games from multiple publishers/developers), it's doomed to failure unless the price is extremely cheap.

But this being early days all the big publishers want to experiment and see if they can pull it off.

If Xbox Game Pass for PC didn't exist, this might have a chance. If it only cost 4.99 USD, it might have a chance. But 14.99 USD a month for only UBIsoft titles? That's a hard sell.

Regards,
SB
 
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