Those diligent players who make it past this hurdle are faced with another annoyance. More painful, however, is the in-game checkout flow for those players who wish to purchase microtransaction (MTX) currency inside of Unity. A simple unpleasantness is the way that after each Unity play session, the player is served an advertisement for upcoming Ubisoft titles via uPlay. This setup is less than optimal for customers of both platforms in more than one way. Leading up to the launch of Unity when Ubisoft’s biggest holiday games were temporarily pulled from Steam, one can guess that there were negotiations going on behind the scenes related to the interplay between uPlay and Steam. You can read about my full experience over on Kotaku, but one element of the in-game purchase experience was so poor, I felt it was worth sharing with the game developer community. Although I can thankfully purchase, manage and play my Ubisoft games through my preferred Steam client, many Ubisoft games require Steam to launch uPlay to play the game.Īs part of my ongoing research into all things related to game monetization, I recently took a long look at the microtransactions inside of Assassin’s Creed Unity. Although Origin gets markedly better each time I log in, incentivized by a free game given through the On the House or the desire to purchase a latest release, is still an unfortunate side effect of wanting to play the games EA keeps exclusive to its service. The two publisher mandated platforms are less desirable. Desura is home to all the Humble Bundle games that have not made their way through Greenlight. Of these platforms, 3 have a clear place in the world. Soon GoG's Galaxy will make my backlog of classics much less of a library and more of an active collection.

Steam, Origin, uPlay and Desura are all installed on my gaming rig. However, with the dominance of digital distribution has also come a glut of digital platforms. With my overflowing backlog of games purchased in endless sales and bundles and most multiplatform games being available day one on PC, there has never been a better time to be a PC gamer. There are platform exclusives I am eager to play, but no one system has a critical mass of exclusive titles that demand a purchase. Most of the games I want to play are on PC. Nowhere has this been clearer to me than the ease with which I turned down current gen Black Friday console deals. In many ways we are in a golden age of PC gaming.

Don't feel like reading? Enjoy this video analysis of the AC: Unity checkout flow

Ubisoft ac unity