Ubisoft has made a lot of headlines for itself recently (we even talked about one of them here) and most of them aren't good. That's unlikely to change today, as the VP of digital publishing at the company, Chris Early, has been speaking about DLC, suggesting that the pay to progress type of packs that Ubisoft offers are popular and that ultimately, nobody cares whether they're offered or not.
"There was no resistance," he said in a chat with GamesIndustry. "Maybe there were 12 guys somewhere who said something, but whatever. As a whole, there wasn't a problem."
He's referencing two specific DLC packs you could download for Assassin's Creed IV which were priced at a dollar and two dollars a piece. They offered 'upgrades' to your ship and HUD, which gave you extra resources,a bigger cargo hold and showed you the location of every hidden item on the map.They were even titled as "time saver," DLC, so that you could just pay Ubisoft instead of playing the game.
This is one of the worst "features" that's been carried over from the mobile market. Remember when cheat codes like this were free and a fun feature added to the game by the developers? Not anymore. Now you have to pay and Ubisoft thinks that's fine.
"I know people who've spent five digits or more of money in Clash of Clans, spending in the tens of thousands of dollars," Early said. "Who would think of that? But nobody's really angry about that. That's how that guy chooses to play, and he's playing against other people of the same calibre, whether they got there through spending hundreds of hours playing the game or tens of thousands of dollars. Good design, that's what it comes down to."
For some reason though, Early doesn't look at the amounts of people buying this stuff as the success here, but rather that people aren't complaining about it. So lack of bitching is the number one thing on his mind? Sounds like a terrible way to run a big publisher.
