14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft is, without a doubt, one of the biggest publishers in the world right now, but despite that privileged position, the company is now failing at the very thing it's selling, namely games.
The company's latest title, Watch Dogs, has been released and it's registering a true success among the critics, but it's being torn apart by users on the PC platform. It turns out that Ubisoft has underestimated the number of PC players yet again and managed to make a lot of them angry.
If Watch Dogs is not crashing or running miserably on high-end computers, players will find it difficult to start the uPlay client. This brings us to another sore spot for Ubisoft: its own digital distribution platform.
This is a common practice nowadays. Some of the big publishers, like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, didn’t want to pay Valve any money for selling their games through Steam, so the companies started their own services. Which is fine, or it would be if those platforms were even working the way they should half the time.
So, after Ubisoft released Watch Dogs, legitimate players who bought the game could not even start the client because it would not connect to the servers, which were down for one obvious reason. Too many people bought the title and too many of them were trying to connect at the same time. The problem got so bad that not even Ubi.com was loading anymore.
Like any big company that respects its clients, it posted on Twitter, saying that the networking problems had been fixed, and that if you still have issues with the game you should take it up with the support department. Funny as this may sound, the support department is under the ubi.com domain and it wasn't working because the networking problems had not been fixed.
Basically, people didn't even get a chance to complain or praise the gameplay because they could not even start the game. This problem is being generated, in the case of Ubisoft, by forcing players to start a client before starting the game.
Two kinds of people didn't have this issue. Gamers from a decade ago who didn't use Uplay and gamers who pirated the game yesterday. The pirated version doesn't load Uplay and the players don't have any issues. It's understandable that you won't have any multiplayer and that some of the other perks like achievements and other stuff won't be available, but that would be a choice for the gamer to make.
Uplay has an Offline mode that allows the software to load without a connection to the Ubisoft servers, but you can't get that far because the client is crashing before reaching that particular window with those options. It's crashing because it is trying to connect to the Ubisoft servers and it fails.
If that wasn't enough, Ubisoft used a number of NVIDIA technologies inside the title, but the developers restricted the access of AMD engineers to the code of the game, which means that people with that kind of hardware, about 30% of the market, will have really poor performance. This is about money and it's likely that NVIDIA paid a handsome sum for this privilege.
The bottom line is that Ubisoft has a hit game on the market, which was played by reviewers all over the world before the launch, and consequently before the servers were hit, that can't really be played by a large portion of the PC gaming community.
Ubisoft is failing at gaming, but we must take consolation in the fact that the company probably needs a major screw up in order to understand that something is wrong with its business model.