I too am disappointed with Ubi and their Uplay idea. I purchased Assassin's Creed 3 and could not get it to run due to UPLAY complications and it's overlay process. And I have no desire to be affiliated with Uplay or any of their offerings, I just want to play. Their support is not very good, and are filled with repetitive canned responses regardless of the explanation sent to them. Phone support is all but non-existent, however, I think you can find the number if you dig enough. I tried unsuccessfully to work with Ubi through uplay support via email to resolve my games unplayability. I finally had to resort to a relative who found a work around for the Uplay launcher that apparently tricked it into letting the game run. I will definitely think twice before buying a Uplay hampered game next time. I know they can do better because they have before.
remember the first time steam come out? everyone was whining everyday.
this shift from major publishers goes to show that Steam has grown too big and about to monopolize the pc gaming market.
study some economics to know why monopoly is a bad choice in the long term.
do I like these changes? not really, but I hope in time it would make the current market more interesting, Origin did announce some free games on their system and ubisoft has a catalog of free games to entice gamers to stay.
customers not willing to buy anymore ubisoft games due to their poor uplay system could only mean one thing - improvements that they will have to make and prices of their games might drop even faster as a final solution.
so start taking control of your own life and do what you think is best for your wallet and let it speak.
Uplay is the same user experience failure seen in a few other games that pull the same stunt. It's a desperate and clunky enforcement of a new account, disguised as a service we really want and Ubisoft are kindly providing.
Buying and playing a computer game shouldn't require signing up and logging in to multiple services on the internet, with new login credentials, new profile and all that. It's tedious and unnecessary. It's not smart to enforce new relationships at the start either. I need time to work out whether I even like the game before I'll consider signing up to the company's cloud service. If you annoy me at the start, it's not promising I'll be into future connections using that service.
Technically, it's inefficient. UX-wise it's clunky and just another barrier. Design and IA is pathetic. In the options I turned off a setting "enable in-game overlay" and then when I went to play the game the button actually said: "PLAY GAME (not recommended)"... LOL that's gotta be the funniest "play game" button I've seen.
Honestly, after all of the nightmare that I am going through to try and launch a bloody game that I paid for and can't play because the UPlay system is beyond ridiculous!
I will NEVER buy another Ubisoft game again. I have bought loads of games from all over the net for the last 5 years and I have never run into such drama and problems with any of them. Wow.. first time I've heard of a company that actually makes life so bad for their customers that they drive them away!