Ubisoft: Physical Games Will Not Disappear Completely!

General news News 10/14/2023

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The French publisher has also given details of how the completion of the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard King deal will affect it.

Chris Early, Ubisoft’s vice president of strategic partnerships and business development, told the company’s website that outside the European Economic Area, Ubisoft will own the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard King games for fifteen years. Early had a big hand in this, as Ubisoft believes that streaming will revolutionise the games industry, just as it has done for TV and film. And yet he believes that disc (or physical) games will not disappear!

“There is a market for collectors’ editions. There’s the aspect of gifting physical items and giving people access so they can easily buy a game in a shop and give it to their friends or family. Some people will always want to own the physical disc. I just don’t think it’s going to go away. Do I think that physical sales will decrease over time? Sure, but will it ever go away completely? I don’t think so,” said Early.

Microsoft is rumoured to be preparing an Xbox Series X without a Blu-ray drive for 2024, and Sony had a 67% share of digital game sales (i.e. the number of people who bought games from the PlayStation Network) in its last fiscal year (April 2022 to March 2023). Many games are digital-only and major titles are moving in this direction, such as Alan Wake 2, soon to be released by Epic Games Publishing. Back in June, Circana (formerly NPD) analyst Mat Piscatella said that digital-only AAA games are already here and will be the majority by 2028.

Activision Blizzard King’s games will be part of the Ubisoft+ subscription service, but there may also be talk of licensing some games to other publishers to be played from the cloud. The catalogue of the service is already available on Amazon Luna (similar to Google Stadia…), but the French company does not have its own cloud service. Early says they’re waiting to see how the market develops…

Source: VGC, GameRant

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Angyal Anikó

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