Philippe Tremblay, Director of Subscription Services at Ubisoft, was interviewed by Gamesindustry.biz and talked about the news of Ubisoft+. There, he also commented on the players' relationship with season tickets and their habit of not having them own the games. In short, he believes that gamers will get used to it just like music, TV series and films have.
“One of the things we've seen is that gamers are used to, kind of like DVDs, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They've gotten used to not owning their CD collection or DVD. It's a transformation that's been a little slower to happen [nei giochi]. When players feel comfortable with this… they don't lose their progress. If you resume the game at another time, the progress file is still there. It has not been cancelled. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your commitment to the game. It is therefore about feel comfortable not owning the game.”
“I still have two boxes of DVDs. I completely understand the point of view of the gamers. But when people embrace this model, they will see that these games will still be available, the service will continue and you can access it whenever you want. This is reassuring.”
“The streaming it's also something that works very well with subscription. You pay when you need it, instead of always paying.”
The problem of subscriptions and streaming
Tremblay, as is obvious given his position, is however a bit generic from one point of view. It is not true that the contents of a service are safe forever, but only as long as the company deems it advantageous to keep the service active.
A product purchased in physical format remains in our possession and if it is not damaged (along with the hardware necessary to reproduce it) it can be used forever, a service or an entire platform can instead be closed and access to the products may be interrupted.
In extreme cases, certain products disappear from the world completely: for example, with the closure of the Xbox 360 store, 47 games will be lost forever, since they do not exist in physical format.
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