Ubisoft revealed a lot of games during their press conference early this week, including Watch Dogs 3, which makes the lofty promise of letting you basically take over any NPCs as you go, about a thousand shooting games, and a new Just Dance for the Wii. You read that correctly.
What seemed the most interesting to me, however, is the subscription service called UPlay Plus they announced they will launch.
For $15 a month, you can have access to all of Ubisoft's games, from current shared-world shooters like The Division 2 to big, open-world RPGs like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Not only that, but the subscription will give you access to their library of past games.
Sounds like a great deal at first, but not only should it not seem all that appealing, but it's a sign of trouble ahead for the industry if this trend continues.
Microsoft already is changing the way the industry works with their Game Pass service, the "Netflix for video games." Their infrastructure is sound, and the value is unbeatable: tons of $60 games available Day 1 without paying extra for it when you subscribe to Game Pass. But not every game. Not Playstation exclusives. Sony will continue to push PlayStation Now, their own streaming service. And now third-party developers want to start their own services? Square Enix already went on record during E3 to say they're considering starting their own service, as well. EA already has something like this that undoubtedly will grow. MMOs like World of Warcraft have been doing this for years. This is the future, and it is very bleak to me.
All of this comes on the heels of Google's announcement of Stadia in recent weeks. Google's streaming-only service will connect to all of their devices and basically allow players to migrate their account to play anywhere on any device. XBox's cloud service that Microsoft is working on will be compatible with Stadia and allow gamers to stream their XBox games anywhere, as well.
It's a brave, new world for gamers. It's also going to be an expensive world. On one hand, gamers might not be buying a whole lot of $60 games anymore. With these services, they won't need to, but what's scary is whether we'll have the choice. Gamers who play online-heavy games will be paying monthly fees to a lot of people now. If you want to play The Division 2 for a year when UPlay launches with Stadia, you'll be paying $15 per month for UPlay, plus $10 for Stadia Pro, their gaming subscription service. In one year, you'll basically spend $300 just to play The Division 2, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and maybe a couple old Rayman games. And what about DLC? Are those still going to require extra purchases, as well?
Microsoft charges gamers $50 a year for XBox Live and $10 per month for Game Pass. It'll be interesting to see if Ubisoft makes their subscription service available on XBox or Playstation (or if Microsoft and Sony would even allow that). Doing so would force gamers to pay even more, right? Does Ubisoft even have the infrastructure to run their own streaming service?
It's also a brave new world for developers. If everything moves to streaming services, how are other developers going to get paid for making their games? Do Microsoft and Sony plan on giving big enough cuts to the developers who make their games available on their services? Do the developers even have a choice in the matter if they want their games to appear on those systems? When I look at Netflix, there's a simple reason there are either a ton of Netflix-made shows or mostly crummy "third-party" shows (that aren't syndicates of previously established shows): there isn't the same profitability for major companies to put their shows on Netflix, so all we're left with are "B-tier" shows that can be big hits or big misses. Making a video game is a whole other ball game. Business analysts conservatively figure that a "triple-A" video game tends to cost between $30 and $40 million. The more expensive games can run up to $100 million and beyond. How are these developers going to get enough of the pie to cover that cost if they don't keep selling a few million $60 copies of the games? There have been some mid-tier developers who have had to close their doors in recent years as it is. How are those companies going to survive? Not every developer has the means or library to create their own subscription service. There definitely will be some companies that get left behind.
The biggest underlying issue with all of this is the quality of the gaming experience. Streaming TV shows is one thing, but streaming video games will be different. Internet connection speeds aren't consistently great throughout the nation as it it, let alone enough for stream full 3-D, 4K, online-centric games. The cost to pay an Internet Service Provider for a good-enough Internet speed is going to increase.
All of this tells paints a very bleak future of gaming to me. Gamers will have to spend a fortune to play all of the hottest games, or there will be more and more of a splintering. The saving grace for a lot of that is crossplay, which the big guns are warming up to, thankfully. I think they need to do that because there will be such a divide of certain games' player base.
I've lost more and more interest in shooters over the years, anyway, so a gaming world dominated primarily by shared-world shooters and Grand Theft Auto doesn't really appeal to me. Hopefully there will be more options other than Nintendo to keep me interested in gaming. I'm sure there will be. I just don't know what yet.
But who knows. The other line of thinking to all this is that a game service this cheap would allow me access to more games I normally wouldn't spend $60 to play. Paying for a service would encourage me to make use of that subscription and play more. It's not like most gamers aren't already going to buy the best Internet service they can get. A lot of gamers buy way more $60 titles per year than I do (not counting Nintendo titles, anyway), so they would save far more money in the long run, making it all worth it. I just hope this streaming future doesn't limit the type of games that get made with regularity. I don't want every game to be massive, 100-hour, repetitive, open-world RPGs with DLC added to them for years, nor do I want the same old shooting games expanded to gigantic, 100-hour grinds just to get good enough gear to be competitive. Thankfully, I'm betting that won't happen.