{"id":78544,"date":"2015-07-14T15:30:45","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T13:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=78544"},"modified":"2015-07-14T15:50:52","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T13:50:52","slug":"the-pc-is-ubisofts-2nd-highest-earner-strange-their-pc-ports-always-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/78544-the-pc-is-ubisofts-2nd-highest-earner-strange-their-pc-ports-always-suck","title":{"rendered":"The PC is Ubisoft\u2019s 2nd highest earner: strange their PC ports always suck"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Ubisoft’s latest financials report<\/a>, the PC is their second highest earning platform.<\/p>\n

In fact, PC sales contributes to 23% of all revenue earned by Ubisoft, second only to the PlayStation 4\u2019s 27% — some of the PC\u2019s success undoubtedly being down to exclusive franchises like Anno<\/em>, The Settlers<\/em>, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot<\/em> and Might & Magic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So why then, might we ask, do Ubisoft\u2019s PC ports so regularly fail to impress. More than that, they\u2019re often the worst version of the lot, sporting any number of technical issues.<\/p>\n

Take Assassin\u2019s Creed Unity<\/em>, for example. Assassin\u2019s Creed Unity <\/em>was a very buggy, broken game on all three platforms, but it was the most frustrating on PC: World and character textures often vanished for no rhyme or reason; the game would regularly suffer massive frame rate drops irrespective of the card you used; it was terribly optimised, forcing anyone with anything but a high-end card to suffer awful frame rates; there were network connectivity errors; the game apparently even ignored DX 11 requirements<\/a>; and initially locking the game at 30 fps, really Ubisoft?<\/p>\n

Ubisoft then went on to blame AMD<\/a>; this, in spite of the game working just as poorly on NVIDIA\u2019s hardware.<\/p>\n

And who can forget Watch Dogs <\/em>failing to live up to the hype after a very serious graphical downgrade?<\/p>\n

If Watch Dogs <\/em>was specifically authored and optimised for PC, the PC version would not have required such an excessive downgrade. It may not have even required one at all.<\/p>\n

Then there are any number of issues with Ubisoft\u2019s UPlay, its security compromising browser plugin and how often it broke everything that touched it. It\u2019s still essentially bloatware.<\/p>\n

And finally, perhaps worst of all, Ubisoft\u2019s many qualms with legitimate PC gamers who are stifled at the expense of Ubisoft\u2019s anti-piracy paranoia: I Am Alive<\/em> almost never came to PC<\/a> as a result; Ubisoft\u2019s anti-consumer online-only DRM was an atrocious nightmare that made any game that used it near unplayable; and a number of games had limited installations.<\/p>\n

That has been our general experience with Ubisoft games on PC. And on the rare occasion when it isn\u2019t, it\u2019s still a poorly optimised experience.<\/p>\n

Ubisoft has recent been making waves about winning back PC gamers, much like Microsoft has. But you have to ask, are they only doing this because their numbers are up?<\/p>\n

Let’s keep talking about PC ports<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for PC is more than just a port<\/a><\/p>\n

For F1 2015, it\u2019s DirectX 11 or nothing: it\u2019s graphically demanding too<\/a><\/p>\n

Warner Bros. knew Batman: Arkham Knight on PC was a mess<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ubisoft really has no excuse now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":78546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1969,15397,14780,241,733],"class_list":["post-78544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pc","tag-news-2","tag-pc","tag-ports","tag-sales","tag-ubisoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}