14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Ubisoft working on the Uplay service for the PC announces that it is launching a new version of it, labeled 4.3, which is designed to significantly improve the experience that players are having with it.
The official announcement on the company’s forums states that the following changes have been made:
Improvements
- You can now adjust the bandwidth usage limit of uPlay. How to? Hit the "Gear" on the top right corner, click "Settings" then "Download". Move the cursor from left to right to choose your download speed. Per default, there are no limits to your bandwidth usage. - A new automatic crash dump reporter has been added. - The "Remember me" functionality is now available for gamers using Twitch to stream their favorite games via the Uplay overlay. - Application patching and download speeds have been upgraded.
Fixes
- Small UI improvements & Minor bug fixes applied.
The team at Ubisoft says that it has plans to deliver more upgrades to the Uplay service in the coming months, mostly based on the information offered by the community that uses it.
It’s unclear whether there are also plans to add more functionality or if the focus remains on small improvements and on bug fixes.
When the Uplay service was introduced, many analysts believed that Ubisoft was aiming to create a vast and complex infrastructure that could rival that of Steam from Valve, in an attempt to offer strong competition and grab an important chunk of the digital distribution market on the PC.
But growth has proved elusive and in the last couple of years, the French game publisher seems to have given up on its attempts to bring third-party titles to Uplay and is focusing on offering as much functionality as possible for its own games.
The upcoming South Park: The Stick of Truth, which was developed by Obsidian and was initially created with now defunct publisher THQ, does not include Uplay functionality.
A number of player groups have asked Ubisoft to shut down its service altogether and adopt the widely used Steamworks service suit from Valve, which has a bigger array of features.
Digital distribution is dominated by Steam at the moment, which is popular among PC users because of the deep discounts that it tends to deliver at certain points in the year and for the new concepts, like in-home streaming and tags, that are being added each month.
Download the new version from Softpedia.