During Ubisoft’s E3 2019 conference, the company revealed a new subscription service for PC gamers. Uplay Plus includes access to a library of more than 100 games. It also nets gamers early access to new games, including premium editions with bonus DLC content. A new subscription service is no surprise, but integration with Google Stadia adds to the cloud gaming shift that is taking place.
Uplay Plus is $15 per month and those that sign up now will get free access during September, which is when the new program launches. The library of Uplay Plus games currently includes such titles as For Honor, Far Cry New Dawn, The Crew 2, Rainbow Six Siege, Beyond Good & Evil, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Steep, Rayman Legends, Anno 1800, Child of Light, and multiple Assassin’s Creed games. It will also include Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Watch Dogs Legion when they launch.
While a new subscription service itself is news of note, a partner reveal at the tail end of the segment during Ubisoft’s E3 2019 conference was the real blockbuster. In 2020, Uplay Plus will be available for Google Stadia users. This new partnership is an extension of an already existing one, as Google utilized Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to test the Stadia platform.
Google Stadia can be accessed in a free form where players purchase individual games that they can access on the platform and a Pro subscription that gives unlimited access to a library of games. If the games included in Uplay Plus are also already a part of the Stadia Pro library, a differentiator could be that the premium versions with DLC are accessed exclusively via Uplay Plus, while Stadia only features the standard base version.
If those games aren’t already a part of the Stadia platform, this could result in Stadia being a springboard for game publishers and their individual subscriptions separate from Stadia. For instance, we could see a future where EA brings Origin Plus and Microsoft brings Xbox Game Pass subscriptions to Google Stadia. This will add some fuel to the crossplay fires as well, since it’d be a hassle to manage your Uplay Plus or Xbox game content on your PC and not be able to access it on Google Stadia. The biggest key to this is that gamers who don’t have a powerful enough PC to play the games in Uplay Plus will be able to do so with Google Stadia if the cloud-streaming platform performs as advertised.
