Ubisoft doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to its PC releases, but the publisher made a move today that may help it improve that in the future.
The company revealed today that it is the latest corporate member to join the Open Gaming Alliance. The OGA is a nonprofit that helps its members better understand the industry and its consumers, and now Ubisoft will get the benefits of that. While the OGA does more than PC gaming, Ubisoft highlighted how this partnership will help it better understand how to serve that particular segment.
“PC gamers are important to Ubisoft, and we’re committed to better understanding and addressing their needs and to continually improving our relationship with them,” Ubisoft consumer and marketing director Sandrine Caloiaro said in a statement. “By joining the OGA, we’re able to glean gamer insights from their research, learn from best practices in our industry, and contribute to the group’s upcoming initiatives.”
Ubisoft coming out and explicitly stating that it is interested in mending its relationship with PC gamers comes after a number of high-profile failures in the space. The company was one of the first innovators of the despised always-on digital-rights management for its PC games. In May 2010, the publisher’s DRM servers went offline and prevent thousands of gamers from accessing their rightfully purchases software. In November 2011, Ubisoft producer Stanisals Mettra pointed to PC piracy as a reason the company wouldn’t release a PC version of I Am Alive. These moments were also often punctuated by less-than-ideal releases of PC ports for games like Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Dust, and Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Ubisoft releases on Windows, over the last few years, have often suffered from bugs, a dearth of customization options, and terrible optimization.
These days, gamers who prefer the personal computer know what to expect from Ubisoft, and it’s going to take a concerted, unwavering effort from the publisher to undo a lot of that. We’ll see if its membership in the OGA will expedite that process.
For more on what the OGA can do for publishers, check out the Open Gaming Alliance executive director Wanda Meloni speaking at the GamesBeat Online portion of our GamesBeat conference below: