Ubisoft has announced that its games content subscription service, Ubisoft+, will shortly be available on PlayStation. Ubisoft+ Classics, a new, cheaper tier of the service which offers a curated selection of 27 well-known catalogue titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Watch Dogs and The Division, will arrive first, and will be bundled with the new PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium tiers. Ubisoft+ and Ubisoft+ Classics will also be available as separate, standalone services for $14.99 and $8.99 respectively on PlayStation. The new version of PlayStation Plus will launch in June in North America and Europe. 

Ubisoft+ is currently available on PC, Google Stadia, and Amazon Luna and starts at $14.99 per month. In January, Ubisoft announced its intention to bring its subscription service to Xbox platforms, but this has yet to take place.

Ubisoft has said the size of the Classics roster will increase to 50 titles by the end of 2022. It is likely that more games will be added in tandem with Sony’s PS Plus monthly refresh, where new PS4 and PS5 games will be added to the service.

Ubisoft’s subscription strategy begins to resemble EA’s multi-channel approach

This format of the Ubisoft+ Classics and PS Plus offering is reminiscent of EA Play being included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC subscriptions at no additional cost, although the Ubisoft+ Classics catalogue is much smaller. EA has been capitalising on Microsoft’s cloud technology, which enables broader distribution to more diverse audiences, and Ubisoft is adopting a similar strategy through listing its service on Amazon Luna, Google Stadia, and now PS Plus Premium. Piggybacking off these cloud gaming services is crucial for growing player numbers when publishers lack a proprietary cloud capability – particularly for companies with a minimal mobile presence who hope to drive growth in mobile-first markets.

As with EA, Ampere anticipates the harmonisation of Ubisoft’s fractured content subscription services in the future, culminating in a multi-platform, cloud-supported subscription offer. Only around one fifth of Ubisoft+ PC titles are available via Google Stadia or Amazon Luna, as they are specifically optimised for streaming. 

Channel subscriptions increasingly common in the games space 

With the addition of Ubisoft+, there will be three content subscription services available on PlayStation – six if considering all three of the new PS Plus tiers and the two Ubisoft+ tiers separately. The number of services is growing, but publishers are increasingly seeking to stack or integrate their services within others. This combats the issue of discovery and assists with user acquisition, while maintaining some level of autonomy, providing clear brand visibility and preservation of the publisher-player relationship. Direct-to-consumer services such as EA Play and Ubisoft+ can benefit substantially from broader platforms such as console, which amass wide audiences under one roof.

Few publishers have a content catalogue large and established enough to be able to offer their own direct-to-consumer service, and so the potential of publisher-specific subscription channels seems limited. However, in the vein of Amazon Luna, we may begin to see channels which just cater to specific demographics: children, families, or retro gamers, for example, and at a lower cost.  The rise of channel-type subscription offerings is mutually beneficial for tech companies and games publishers: With the exception of Microsoft, tech giants like Amazon and Google lack the first-party content to truly realise their cloud capabilities, and the publishers themselves lack the distribution technology.

However, inflation and a rising cost of living means entertainment spending will suffer. Gaming services are threatened not just by competing games offerings, but by online video and music services. The proliferation of games content subscription services means choices must be made and as services both stack and divide, some companies will inevitably lose out.

Full Ubisoft+ offering unlikely to come to Xbox Game Pass

It is feasible that the Ubisoft+ Classics service will be integrated into Game Pass, as with the higher PS Plus tiers, and this would represent a similar approach to that taken by EA. The full Ubisoft+ offering is more akin to EA Play Pro in terms of it providing access to new titles on launch day–it is sold at the same price point–and would be too much to give away at no additional cost.