Ubisoft Talks Streaming As The Division 2 Comes To Stadia

With The Division 2 coming to Stadia on March 17, Ubisoft’s senior vice president of partnerships Chris Early has cleared up some questions about game streaming, Nvidia’s embattled GeForce Now platform, and what it all means for Ubisoft’s library.

When it arrives on Stadia this week, The Division 2 will be the first game on the streaming platform to offer crossplay with PC players. Ubisoft already has four games available on Stadia: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Trials Rising and Just Dance.

In the interview on Ubisoft’s site, Early has revealed some interesting data about the way people are playing Ubisoft games on Stadia, breaking players into two categories. “One is the experimenter; this looks like somebody who came on and played for a couple days, and then we haven’t seen them again,” he said. “They played probably a couple different games, not for very long, and they sated their appetite and that was that. They had their questions answered.”

The other is a more traditional kind of player: “Their behavior mimics what we see with other players of the same game,” Early revealed. “Their play pattern is not particularly different. They are not playing less time; they’re not playing more time. If anything, they’re playing slightly more sessions, at slightly shorter durations.”

As far as looking at what games will come to what platforms, especially as more and more companies start entering the streaming game, Early has said the decision comes down to a few factors: “One, how is it deployed from an infrastructure standpoint? Can people all around the world use it? Can people only in a given country use it? Is it well-deployed within the country?”

The other question regards how easy it is for Ubisoft to release a game, whether it’s old or new, on the platform. “We’re obviously making Xbox games already, so there’s not a lot of effort for an Xbox game to work on xCloud. GeForce Now is a PC-based service so that’s more straightforward. And for Stadia, or other platforms that are more like a console in their overall game system, it’s more work for us to do. It’s actual development of a different build.”

After other publishers like 2K Games, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard dropped most of their support for Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service, Ubisoft has put all its support behind the platform.

“Ubisoft fully supports NVIDIA’s GeForce Now with complete access to our PC games from the Ubisoft Store or any supported game stores,” Early says. “e believe it’s a leading edge service that gives current and new PC players a high end experience with more choice in how and where they play their favorite games.”

The Division 2 just released the Warlords of New York expansion, which will be in the Stadia release of the game from launch.