Perhaps one of the more sinister quotes to come out of Davos, Switzerland, in the last few years than this: “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”
The quote comes, unsurprising, from a 2016 video produced by the globalist World Economic Forum, and is meant to
Hearing this kind of messaging from the WEF is nothing new. That sentiment making its way into the world of video games, however, is.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz released on Monday, a Ubisoft executive came out with what sounded an awful lot like his own spin on the infamous WEF quote.
“Gamers are used to owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen,” Phillippe Tremblay, the director of subscriptions at Ubisoft, told the outlet.
The comment came midway through the interview, which focused on Ubisoft’s new video game subscription service for PC players, Ubisoft+ Premium.
The gaming company hopes to follow in the footsteps of the movie industry by slowly moving to a subscription model.
“We looked at the consumer behaviour and how people were interacting with our offer and we saw an opportunity for us to evolve,” Tremblay said.
“One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s been a bit slower to happen [in games].”
Do you agree with this executive?
“As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don’t lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That’s not been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.”
What that means for gamers then is that instead of owning physical or digital copies of their games, they would pay to play a handful of games on a month-by-month basis.
It may seem like a winning strategy for the moment, but there are a few potential problems on the horizon for Ubisoft as they navigate this new venture.
One, if they’re truly following in the footsteps of movie and TV streamers, they should take a good hard look at the current state of the streaming wars.
As The Washington Post put it quite aptly in a July headline — “In the streaming wars, it feels like everybody’s losing.”,
“…as a growing number of streaming services fight to capture a finite number of subscribers, the industry has become dominated by uncertainty, shrinking opportunity and content overload,” the outlet reported.
Things looked great for many of these streamers near the beginning, just as things look great for Ubisoft right now. As the rest of the video game market catches up, however, they may face a similar situation with numerous streamers all chasing a limited amount of customer dollars.
The second problem Ubisoft’s subscription service will face, if it continues to evolve, is traditionally-minded customers.
Some gamers will always want physical copies. If they’re told they can’t have one, they may take their business elsewhere.
