I remember when Uplay+ was first announced… I threw it some serious sideeye. Why would anyone pay for a subscription service to play games that regularly go on seriously deep discount sales? Now I stand on the precipice of partaking of it myself and have a slightly different perspective. At that point there really wasn’t much that I wanted to play from UbiSoft that I did not already own, or could not purchase easily. Now we are in a time of gold and ultimate edition games that double the price of entry if you so choose to partake, and also on the cusp of a banner sequence of game releases from the studio.
Over the coming months I want to play the following:
Watch Dogs Legion – Available Today – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Asssassin’s Creed Valhalla – November 10th – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Immortals Fenyx Rising – December 3rd – $100 for the Gold Edition
Farcry 6 – February 18th – $120 for the ultimate edition
My natural instinct tends to be to go for that ultimate edition so that I don’t have buyers remorse later when there is some shiny doodad or thingamabob that I don’t have access to. I know it is a bad habit and a first world problem but it is a thing for me at least. Were I to stack up all of those games in the highest version I would be dropping $460 over the course of the next several months… or to put that into perspective almost the cost of a RTX 3070 graphics card.
This morning I stared down the barrel of the Uplay page trying to decide what I wanted to do. I want to play Watch Dog Legions, but did I want to go ahead and just purchase it outright or pay $15 to start a Uplay+ subscription. Even if I went for the Vanilla versions of all four games I listed that adds up to $240 and an entire year of Uplay+ is $180. Yes I realize in the second scenario I don’t own any of the games but my current running theory is that I subscribe for a few months, get my enjoyment out of the titles and then if for some reason I actually care enough about one of the games to own it… I pick it up later when Ubisoft has their deep discount sales like they often do aligned with Steam sales.
What I have realized is that I don’t return to single player games that often. Sure I have played copious amounts of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… but I think they might be the exception rather than the rule. I played Assassin’s Creed Origins hard and heavy for a good while and then walked away from it seemingly never to return. While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Witcher 3, that game was intensive enough that I can’t see myself actually returning to it again. The modern open world game requires so much of you, that once the story is played out… I think it just becomes a challenge to really revisit it. Sure I loved my revisit of Horizon Zero Dawn recently, but that was a case of me experiencing the game through fresh eyes of playing with my chosen platform of Keyboard and Mouse.
I’ve been on the digital download bandwagon for a decade now, and I am starting to wonder if games are shifting around for me much like Movies and Music did. I no longer care about owning any music. What I care about is having access to music when I choose play it and as a result I pay for a streaming subscription. Similarly I don’t care about owning movies, because it is so rare that I will ever sit down and re-watch one. What I care instead is having access to them on the rare occasion that I want to… and for that I also have streaming services. Maybe I have evolved to a point of caring deeply about a small number of games, but wanting access to others just for the purpose of playing them and then dropping them by the wayside.
There we have it… Uplay+ got me and I am now downloading Watch Dog Legions off the subscription plan. I need to set myself a reminder to cancel the service in March, because I can’t really see this being something I want to keep going permanently. It isn’t so much that I cannot afford to buy these games piecemeal over the next several months… but more a case that I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to shell out that much money in one lump sum. We will see how well this goes and what hidden pitfalls there might be, and I will of course report back how it is going. Anyone else suddenly find the subscription option for UbiSoft significantly more tantalizing with the sequence of releases on the horizon? Maybe I will actually sit down and play through some of the Anno games that I have never touched now that I have access to them all.
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