Love it or hate it, the future of the industry is going to have a lot of subscription services. How many will ultimately survive is anyone’s guess, but one taking a crack at it is Ubisoft with their Uplay Plus. With all these services also comes the companies trying to justify why you should pay for theirs, and Ubisoft Executive Director of EMEA Alain Corre has an interesting pitch to players: a new level of interconnection.
Speaking with GamesIndustry, Corre said that he sees Uplay Plus as a way for players to be more directly connected to developers. While it’s not clearly exactly what he means specifically, it does seem to imply that he thinks this will give players a more direct feedback loop between themselves and developers.
“The reason behind our subscription service… it gives more possibilities for our fans to play our games and we can talk to them,” said Corre. “We can keep them in our worlds, we can discuss with them and—thanks to what they say and the way they behave—we can feed that back into our games development. When we are in control of that within our ecosystem, we feel it’s beneficial for our fans. That’s ultimately what we want to do; we want to have more contact with them, more interaction, listening more to what they want and improve based on what they say.”
It’s often something that goes unspoken, but most of these services from major companies is a way to keep people as integrated into their ecosystem as much as possible, but it’s a first for that being acknowledged openly as a way for people to create a feedback loop into the product. It’ll be interesting to see what Ubisoft plans in that regard when the service releases on PC on September 3rd. You can check out the full list of games it will launch with here.
