Published in Gaming

Game distribution wars have begun

by on14 November 2014

Ubisoft flips Valve’s Steam, makes up

Assassin’s Creed Unity is definitely in hot water. It has a number of glitches and PC enthusiasts are not happy about the frame rate they are getting.

We found out more disturbing news when it comes to digital distribution. Over the years we learned to love Steam. You would buy a game, punch in the code in Steam and redeem the game. We are pointing this out as most PCs nowadays don’t have an optical drive and having all games at one place such as Steam makes sense.

Then came EA Games with its Origin tool that forces users to install it for some of its games like Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 or Titanfall - and we installed and used this one. Now Ubisoft wants you to use its uPlay tool and so far we’ve used it for Far Cry 3 and yesterday for Assassin's Creed Unity. We will have to use it again soon for Far Cry 4 and one can clearly see a FPS-liking pattern here.

Shortly before Assassin's Creed Unity officially launched, Ubisoft pulled the game from Steam and shortly before launch it got it back again. We are sure what Valve charges Ubisoft for its services, there is such thing as a no free lunch and Ubisoft wants to make its own platform stronger.

One key advantage Steam has over Origin store or uPlay is ability to stream games to other machines, kind of what Nvidia is doing with Shield Tablet but this one is GPU independent and works with AMD kit too. In the short term there is no solution in sight, you will have to live with multiple game stores, multiple accounts and waste more time with every installation, as this is what publishers want.

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