Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, already a lock as one of my favorite games of the year, and one of the best metroidvanias of all time, is a game you can own but potentially be disallowed to play. In fact, if you didn’t know any better, and bought a digital download on PSN, by the time you found out, you technically wouldn’t even be able to return it. See, Ubisoft recently rolled out the need to be an active Ubisoft Connect account holder in order to launch purchased games on your console or PC. This move coincides with their push to Ubisoft+ and an outspoken C-Suite type telling us to get over the notion of game ownership.
Coupled with PSN’s restrictive return policy for downloaded games (i.e. once you’ve launched a game, the return window is closed), and you have a one-two punch that will leave any gamer who opposes that type of policy out the cost of the game or resigned to sign up for UC. A few other companies are rolling this way: EA, Sony (publishing), and 2K Games among them. But as far as I can tell, they stop short of forcing it on users who have outright purchased a game and don’t mind losing cross-play functionality.
While user accounts for free online multiplayer and games-as-a-service are nothing new, this is the first example I’ve seen for a single-player game that has no real need to be played online at all.
In my case, I must have casually signed up for a Ubisoft account at some point in the past because the link process on starting up The Lost Crown amounted to confirming my email and consenting access to my PSPlus account. It wasn’t until researching why Ubisoft was sending me trophy notices instead of my PlayStation that I learned I would have been locked out without it.
Trying to articulate an argument against this practice feels ridiculous. Like, I really shouldn’t have to say it, right? These kinds of catches, this friction between game fan and publisher has been mixed into the water supply at just the right pace for me to taste the bitter gall too late. No, I do not want to sign up for your account, and you really shouldn’t be able to hold a purchase I made hostage because of that. It’s just one more place for my digital life to be at risk, even if I were to religiously tie these annoyances to an ignored email account. Doing so gives about the same amount of piece of mind as opening up a private browser tab. Never mind the extra password juggling each little applet adds. Plus, I bought the game. Take your hooks out of it. It’s mine now.
The slow pull to pry everything we spend our money on out of our grasp is essentially complete, and I hate it. Here in the venue of a fairly low-stakes hobby, we should be able to take those dollars and vote more harshly with them. It pains me to assume that, like video streaming services and the best places to hang out on the internet, game ownership will be enshitified until the youngest of us remember no other state of affairs.
But Andrew, buy physical media! It still wouldn’t have mattered in this case. And at any rate, new games on disc are increasingly likely to become unplayable due to the online nature of the games market. Talking up Prince of Persia to a friend of mine who loved Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, I just about had him ready to play on my recommendation. And then Ubisoft Connect came up. I envy that as soon as he heard, his mind was made up to skip it, along with anything Ubisoft has cooking. Meanwhile, I’m bummed he won’t be able to join me in loving it.
I will, however, be joining him in not buying from Ubisoft again.
Since drafting this post, a couple of readers have pointed out that some combination of playing offline and backing out of the signup while disconnected can indefinitely delay any kind of hard lockout, at least with a physical game chip on Switch. I, however, feel that my points still stand because if they’ve made it that tricky, they’re in the same league as cable companies and streamers who hide and complicate the steps to cancel service.
Are you with me? Am I overreacting? Am I wrong? What friction have you run into with new games and their various account requirements? Commiserate with me down in the comments or over at the Boss Rush Discord.
Featured Image: Ubisoft
The Boss Rush Podcast – The Boss Rush Podcast is the flagship podcast of Boss Rush Media and the Boss Rush Network. Each week, Corey, Stephanie, LeRon, and their friends from around the internet come together with other creators, developers, and industry veterans to talk about games they’ve been playing, discuss video game and entertainment based topics, and answer questions solicited on social media and the community Discord.
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