Ubisoft's Flawed Online Ecosystem Is Punishing Gamers
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Ubisoft's done a bad thing, but it's not too late to set things right.
In the biggest ‘Games publishers making gamers feel powerless’ news of recent times, Ubisoft announced that it would be decommissioning the online components of 15 of its older (and not-so-older) games from September 1. These include several of the older Assassin’s Creeds, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.
More alarmingly, the VR game Space Junkies, released in 2019, is going offline too, despite being very much a multiplayer-focused game. As of this moment, the game is still available to buy on Steam (it’s currently on sale, but that ends 7 July when it goes back up to $20), and there’s no notification on the Steam page that as of 1 September the game will be effectively defunct. Granted, the game rarely has more than three concurrent players a day on Steam, but those are still people who bought a game to own in the last few years, and the primary function of that game is being actively removed from it by its publisher.
In some cases, the games on the chopping block still have small but active communities. The city-builder Anno 2070 clocks up an average of around 100 players a day on Steam (which doesn’t take into account those playing it directly through Ubisoft’s platform).
One of Anno 2070’s star features is a unique online-only feature called the ‘Ark’, which lets you store materials and upgrades then use them in a subsequent playthrough. In defence of its developer Ubisoft Blue Byte (the German developer behind the Anno series, acquired by Ubisoft in 2001), they quickly responded to Ubisoft’s announcement by saying they’re going to “dedicate some of our development resources to work on upgrading Anno 2070’s aged online services infrastructure to a new system, so that these features can continue to be used past the mentioned date.”
While that’s commendable and good news for the Anno 2070 community, the unique situations of several of the other games whose online services are being pulled raise a lot more concerning questions.
Servers and online services do, of course, cost money to maintain, and you can understand why a game that’s been persistently attracting no more than a few players a day over the past seven, eight years may become unviable to maintain. But in this case, it’s not just multiplayer servers that are being shut down.
Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed 3, both have been superseded by their ‘Remastered’ versions, which came out in March 2019 and December 2021, respectively. Far Cry 3 will lose its multiplayer functionality, but in the case of Assassin’s Creed 3, it looks like players will no longer have access to the rather substantial ‘Tyranny of King Washington’ three-part DLC, which is single-player content.
Now, a logical solution here would be to do what many publishers have done before, and offer owners of both those games free or heavily discounted upgrades to their remastered editions. 2K Games and Bethesda did this with Red Faction: Guerrilla, Bioshock and Skyrim a few years back, offering time-limited free upgrades to owners of the older PC versions, and it’s worth adding that the original versions of all those games – with all their DLC – remained available to buy on Steam. Here, Ubisoft will be locking players out of single-player content that they’ve already paid for, and is so far offering nothing in the way of an olive branch for those players. On a similar note, people who bought Space Junkies – which is only three years old – should be refunded, as their access to that game is about to be revoked. It’s one thing for a game to be effectively defunct due to the lack of players online, but it’s another for a publisher to step in and say that you no longer have a right to play this game.
Games like Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Far Cry 3, and Driver San Francisco will no longer support their (in some cases excellent) multiplayer and online co-op modes. In these cases, Ubisoft could easily look to the enduring popularity of the older Battlefield games. Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 continue to be enjoyed by hundreds of players today thanks to community-run private servers, while many older co-op games can still be played via LAN or online LAN services like Hamachi.
The fact that the 2005 game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory can still be played via LAN (and therefore virtual LAN) while 2013’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist will have its multiplayer component rendered completely null and void suggests that Ubisoft have over the years become woefully short-sighted in how they accommodate players who want to access multiplayer features.
Ubisoft’s obsession with keeping every aspect of their games rigidly tied to their online ecosystem has been catching up with them (or, more accurately, players) for a while. The cracks have been appearing for some time. Last year, for instance, Splinter Cell: Conviction’s online functionality was deactivated. The game ostensibly featured a LAN mode, but it turned out that this too was tied into Ubisoft’s servers (yep, to play locally you still had to connect online), which meant that you couldn’t even play locally with friends any more. An entire (and quite brilliant) chunk of the game, just gone.
We can’t expect official servers to stay active forever, sitting empty for years before we decide to pop back in for a few hours for a little nostalgic session, but the tools and features should be put in players’ hands so that if they wish to continue using parts of a game that they rightfully own, however sporadically, they can.
Ubisoft should facilitate the creation of private servers, untether the games from their stodgy online infrastructure, enable LAN and Virtual LAN modes, and set these games free so that they can live (or die) in the hands of the people who ostensibly own them.
