Ubisoft is a big enough publisher to release games on every platform it possibly can (including the N-Gage, once upon a time—RIP), but this week the Uplay team at its studio Massive put out a video proclaiming a special bit of love for PC gaming.
“I really love PC gaming because it fulfills the independence idea of, you do everything,” says programmer Olafur Waage. “You put the machine together, you fix it if it’s broken, you install all the things, and you try things out. You learn a lot.”
The short video is mostly full of bite-sized testimonials like that, and more than a few shots of people playing Ubisoft games together and looking very happy. So yes, it’s transparently an ad, but one that’s still a bit telling about Ubisoft’s priorities in 2018.
A key quote comes from account manager Veith Hellmich, who says “PC is still the lead platform in terms of innovation… Whether it’s niche genres, specific mods created by the community, there’s just a lot of stuff going on on PC that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Product manager Christophe Grandjean also adds: “It’s very apparent that for a lot of developers and for the industry, PC is the testing ground.”
Those who’ve played Ubisoft’s games might point out that they’re rarely moddable, and Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s legendary bugs and some other sloppy ports made for a rough few years for Ubisoft on PC. But this video isn’t the only sign that Ubisoft is trying to make friends in the PC community. The fantastic ongoing support of Rainbow Six: Siege has turned it into one of our favorite shooters, and just recently, The Divison’s latest update has made it a living game worth going back to.
Ubisoft’s buttering up the audience, but with 30 percent more concurrent users on Steam than there were this time last year, it’s clearly an audience Ubisoft thinks is worth buttering.