Earlier this week, Ubisoft's director of subscriptions Phillipe Tremblay sparked massive controversy when he said that gamers need to get used to "not owning your games". Baldur's Gate 3 lead and Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke disagrees, going as far as to say that "you won't find our games on a subscription service".
"Whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king," Vincke tweeted. "But it's going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not. Direct from developer to players is the way."
Getting a board to OK a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster. Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximise profit.
This shouldn't come as a big surprise for Baldur's Gate 3 fans. Vincke said last month that it won't come to Xbox Game Pass. While he doesn't begrudge those who use subscription services, even saying that he respects "it presents an opportunity [for many developers] to make their game", he also argues that "We are already dependent on a select group of digital distribution platforms and discoverability is brutal. Should those platforms all switch to subscription, it'll become savage."
Tremblay likens the shift from ownership to subscription services in games to what happened with CD and DVD collections, as many people now turn to Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Disney Plus, to name a few, for their movies.
He claims that Ubisoft Plus, for instance, lets you access your games "when you feel like", despite many services having rotating libraries, such as Game Pass which just lost Grand Theft Auto 5.
Relying on subscription services exclusively is also a major risk for game preservation. If a digital-only title were to be pulled from stores and services, it would be completely unavailable to play legally. With physical copies, games ripped from online storefronts can at least be preserved and continue to be played. Just look at the Deadpool game which lives on in the second-hand market.
So, while Tremblay argues that the shift from ownership to subscriptions "needs to happen", Vincke says that "you really don't want that".
