Baldur's Gate 3 Dev on Ubisoft's Controversial Program: "You Won't Find Our Games in Subscriptions.”
Ubisoft sees the future of gaming in subscription and streaming services, but Swen Vincke of mighty Larian prefers to keep the precious, traditional distribution model – directly from developers, straight to players.
Ubisoft's latest statement did not win the company's sympathy among players. They aren't the only ones criticizing Philippe Tremblay's statement from yesterday.Swen Vincke from the Larian studio commented on Ubisoft's statement regarding players getting "comfortable" with not owning video games (via X).
As a reminder: Ubisoft claims that such a move is necessary for players to really be convinced to subscribe to things like Game Pass or the Ubisoft+ launched by the French publisher. Tremblay also mentioned that the future of the market is game streaming technology, although he emphasized that the company is not yet giving up on the traditional sales model.
Vincke admitted that such services are an opportunity for many developers. Nevertheless, the president of Larian Studios assured that his team's games will never be included in any subscription because he wants to maintain the "valuable", traditional distribution model.
The Belgian creator agreed with the statement that "content" is the most important thing in the gaming industry. But according to Vincke, it will be much more difficult to provide players with "good content" if subscriptions actually dominate the market and "a select group of people decides what hits and what misses the market." In his opinion, this is already a problem due to the limited choice of platforms, and the dominance of subscriptions would only worsen the situation. He also added that the proper approach is "direct" delivery of content to players by developers.
The creator also hinted at how big a problem (or even impossibility) it is to convince the "management" to accept projects based on "idealism". He was probably referring to Baldur's Gate 3, because he repeatedly emphasized that for the Larian studio it was a "dream project" that in fact might not have happened if the developer was owned by subscription supporters.
