Gaming
Ubisoft Blatantly Charges More For Digital Games Than Physical Games
Ubisoft is one of those companies that inexplicably charges more for the digital copies of their games long after the physical price has dropped. While the physical and digital copies are usually the same on release, games sold at retail will often see their prices drop significantly over the next few months while the digital copies will remain at their original $50-$60 price. A couple of Ubisoft execs have explained the logic behind that system, and it’s basically “screw you, we want your money.”
A perfect example of this price difference is Assassin’s Creed Unity. While it’s still at full price on the Playstation Store at $60 in America (and a whopping $99 in Australia), I was easily able to find the PS4 game on Amazon for a mere $20. During a Q&A at a post-earnings conference for investors, Ubisoft was asked about this price discrepancy.
“Digital is more reactive than what we put in stores, but at the same time, it doesn’t react as fast on consoles than it does on PC,” CEO Yves Guillemot said. “What we can say is that when games are older than one year, digital is a lot more dynamic on console because there are less units in stores. It’s a new business, a new trend, and we think all this will get more in line with time, but for sure, at the moment you see all sorts of prices depending on who is doing a promotion for that specific week.”
Once you cut through the business-speech, Guillemot is basically saying that, unlike retail stores, a digital store doesn’t need to move units to clear shelf space. Which means they can charge whatever outrageous prices they like. And when he’s speaking about it as a trend, he’s basically saying that Ubisoft is waiting for physical retail to die so people have no choice but to pay Ubisoft’s asking price.
CFO Alain Martinez also chimed in. “On digital we will not sell for a lower price compared to physical. After a few weeks or few months things can change, and as Yves has been saying, sometimes you might have a promotion on Amazon [but] not on GameStop, but we can also react on the digital side.
“We are actually more aggressive on the PC side where digital is very, very strong. We tend to be more conservative on the digital side for more console and more flexible on PC.”
While that might all sound bad (and it does), Ubisoft is hardly the only company to do this. Nintendo may be the worst. They charge ridiculously high prices for their digital games on the eShop not just because they want the immediate profit, but also because they want to avoid lowering the value of their games in the eyes of consumers.
The lesson here is to never buy directly from a publisher’s store. Go through a third party retailer to avoid being ripped off.
Thanks, Gamestop.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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