Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is, naturally, a modern Ubisoft game—and as modern Ubisoft games are wont to do, it had some really annoying DLC wrapped up into it alongside an in-game cash shop. One point of contention was a day-one map pack DLC for five bucks, which reveals the location of every collectible in game, thus defeating the purpose of… y’know, looking for and collecting them.
What did Ubisoft reap as a reward for this chicanery? Well, aside from a brief dent to its overall Steam review score—one that’s evened out to a respectable “very positive” 80% at the time of writing—not all that much.
According to the analysis work of Alinea Insight, the remaster made a whopping $35.1 million on Steam alone over the first four days. Its day-one DLC, which totals at an eye-watering $85 of cosmetics (and the aforementioned map pack), is responsible for around 2.8% of that number.
Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s still $1 million that Ubisoft otherwise wouldn’t have snagged—and still a tremendous amount of purchases on aggregate. And while my inner gamer naturally balks at the prospect of this DLC, it’s almost hard to blame Ubisoft for the move when this is how it’s rewarded.
Like, looking at these cosmetic packs—yes, the concept art, modelling, and implementation probably costs quite a bit, but certainly nowhere approaching $1 million. And the map pack, though it galls me, is likely just a few lines of code.
I still think it’s deeply cynical, but just like that $90 World of Warcraft dinosaur that made Blizzard $15-$17 million, gamers are not great at actually voting with their wallets in a way that would dissuade companies like Ubisoft, which have no obligation to operate on principle, from basically printing a bunch of free money.
Read the full article here
