Pop quiz: What makes Far Cry Primal different than all the other games Ubisoft has released over the past year? No, it’s not the mammoths. Not the fake language they made just for this game, either. Give up? The answer: There’s no season pass.
It’s 2016, man. Big companies don’t just release games and then supplement them with downloadable content like they did in the old days (2013). Publishers like Ubisoft instead try to sell you DLC before their games actually come out, attaching a flashy optional package called the “season pass” that will let you pre-buy all of a game’s expansions before you even know what they are, or what the game is, or whether any of it is really worth your money.
EA’s done it, most notoriously with Star Wars Battlefront. Last year’s Arkham Knight was a very good game marred not just by PC woes but by a notoriously disappointing season pass sold by publisher Warner Bros. Hell, even Nintendo’s doing it these days.
Ubisoft is also quite fond of this practice. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate? Season pass. Rainbow Six Siege? Season pass. Even The Division, which isn’t out yet, will allow you to purchase a season pass that includes three expansions. (The official description for expansion #3, Last Stand, as sent to media outlets via press release, is “Stay tuned for more information.”)
So it’s remarkable that Far Cry Primal doesn’t have a season pass. There’s a pre-order bonus, sure — this is Ubisoft we’re talking about! — but nowhere to give money in exchange for future downloadable content. Maybe someone overslept?
Comments
42 responses to “Whoops, Looks Like Ubisoft Forgot To Give Far Cry Primal A Season Pass”
As long as I can use my UPlay points to unlock Robocops burst pistol I’ll be happy
or there isn’t going to be DLC?
Wash your mouth out!
How else are they supposed to monetize the synergies created by their brands? Or whatever the hell it is they like to say.
well was there any DLC for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon?
that was pretty much stand alone dlc…
I guess the Primal concept is so new that they don’t know what they could advertise to you yet.
What are they going to sell you in a non-materialistic prehistoric time?
A better fireplace? Sabertooth armor? A sharpened stick made of oak?
Don’t get me wrong… I’m as shocked as anyone that they didn’t try.
Mammoth armour.
Some kind of Flintstones-themed expansion? Maybe a car that you propel with your feet?
Future DLC:Tame a bird to be your telephone. Tame a boar to be your garbage disposal. When asked both will say “it’s a living”
First DLC : The Wheel 🙂
No! first dlc is fire duh, theeen comes the wheel 😉
I know, but you already have bonfires in FC: Primal, I think. 🙂
OK perhaps this is a strange sort of marketing thing, but I want the game more now.
I don’t really understand why people buy season passes considering for most games I’ve played only 25% of the DLC was any good.
The same reason that it’s normal practice for gamers to pay for retail games before they’re finished- a decent portion of the gaming market are overexcitable children with too much passion and too little common sense.
You get geniuses saying things like “I like pre-ordering because it’s fun” or “I pre-ordered because I was excited”.
Preorder the DLC 6 months early before it runs out!…
Ah, the digital collector’s edition.
our crappy materialistic capitalist society has brainwashed us all to think more money = better. so it’s only common sense that the best way to get the ultimate experience out of the game you cant wait to play so badly that you paid for it before you could actually own it, is by spending MORE money on it – ie season pass.
and if you’re a diehard fan on the series – then you MUST pay the extra for the deluxe or collectors edition. you’re gonna enjoy playing the game SOOOOOO much more!! totally worth it.
Season passes need to be discouraged. The big publishers took one look at loot crates and said to themselves, “yeah, we too can get people to subscribe for a series of yet to be decided content!”
The only good season passes I’ve seen so far are the Witcher 3 and Borderlands 2. They were up front about what would be in them including rough size and release date.
Not quite sure that’s actually how it happened given Lootcrate started in 2012 and Seasonpasses first showed up in 2011 with games such as LA Noire… just saying. Either way your point still stands that it’s a dodgy as shit practice. But I would contend that there are still occasional season passes that offer decent value. Alien Isolation for instance definitely gave out its moneysworth and Fallout 4, if you buy prior to the price wise, definitely will.
And on top of that, Loot Crate and services like it didn’t really get noticibly big until the last year or 2. Either way, theres no way the game industry is using that as its jump off concept. The concept seems much more like a bundle/bulk/wholesale model, to maximize profits by getting peope to buy all the dlc and not just one. It’s the difference between (as low as, or lower than) $5 or $30 per person. They always want it to be $30, even if that means they had to let go of one of those dlcs in the bundle for free.
Except Gearbox wasn’t upfront with Borderlands 2, because people who bought the season pass were blindsided by the Season 2 pass. Then promptly threw a fit because of it.
Borderlands 2 is a really isn’t the best thing to bring up in a pass/dlc discussion, because it just goes to prove the lengths a company will go through to monitize practically every bit and piece of their game. Even the Handsome Collection is sure to point out that, when all of it was at it’s original price, the price for everything was WELL over $100 -and that wasn’t the collectors edition price…
Maybe there was a meeting that went like this:
“You know what’s popular? Season passes. We should do one.”
“You know Gary, I’ve been looking over the numbers and have found that if you clump together DLC for a discounted price then you receive less money than if people paid full price for separate DLC.”
“That’s… that’s so true Ellen. All these years we’ve been giving people a good deal on season passes with mediocre content when really we could have been getting even more money for mediocre content sold individually. How could we have been so blind all this time?”
Maybe their DLC is actually going to be really good! So good, in fact, that they’re confident that it will sell on its own merits so they don’t need to offer a discount to try and convince people to pay for it all up-front, sight-unseen? They reckon the sheer quality of each carefully hand-crafted piece of DLC will be so good that customers will happily pay full price for all of it!
the reduced price was never a discount, it was more akin to buying in bulk or at wholesale, where buying more then a few things drives down the overall cost.
Furthermore, games/dlc selling on their own merits doesn’t really happen until the game gets released and people play it, or it gets reviewed. The companies can fluff themselves up, or project confidence, all they want to try to sell the product, but it isn’t until the product actually sells something -anything- that they actually know people are interested at all. Sadly that’s what we’ve done to the whole situation and I like to think it’s a bi-product of the price of games; in terms of movies people are much more willing to be honest about them because it doesn’t cost them much to be proven otherwise, but games are priced so much higher that it doesn’t matter what’s being said unless money is changing hands. It’s why the idea of voting with your wallet is a thing that gets tossed around so much more in this industry then other similar entertainment areas, except it works both ways -those who preorder a game or prepurchase all the dlcs show just how truly interested they are. Do people hate that truth? Yeah. But it’s become a far better aggregate for the companies to go by, because of the way gamers handle things, then simply taking a poll. People lie with their words, but it seems they rarely do with their wallet.
Isn’t Primal kind of DLC itself? It seemed to me be a Blood Dragon-like extension to FC4.
I don’t think it is, Blood Dragon wasn’t 60 USD at release.
A 60USD price tag hasn’t stopped something being DLC before 🙂
give it time, I’m sure someone just forgot
Someone in marketing must have thought it would be difficult to charge $17.99 for a booster pack of more brown pointy sticks
Eh, they probably acknowledge they’re taking the mickey at this point and decided to give everyone a break.
It’s refreshing to see a different marketing practice, I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.
It is Ubi we’re talking about… maybe they disliked letting people get a discount on DLC.
Dinosaur dlc e3 2016
Ooooo cynical. Maybe there won’t be any for once, maybe the content is meaty enough, and maybe now they’re thinking, damn we should have cut our game down into chunks!
Nobody is digging it or appreciating it, why even bother?
I’m totally joking, announcement to come soon no doubt!
I argue that the game isn’t all that meaty. Hilariously fun? Hell yes. But the game’s concept is so razor thin that I don’t feel like it it could support much of anything in terms of extra content based on what I’ve played so far of the game. It’s a high concept teetering on the edge of the prior games mechanics (which it does nothing to hide), dlc would push it right into the toilet (imo)
Or maybe we’ve finally looped back around to a game just being a game that can stand on it’s own. But I honestly don’t think it’s that.
Complain that there is DLC
now its
complain there is no DLC
enough internet
Yeah just what I was thinking.
I am happy that it doesn’t have season pass. It’s refreshing in the sense that it’s much like games used to be.
Why no mention of watch dogs. Ubisoft offered a season pass and then proceeded to release a single dlc pack. That was really getting your money’s worth.
Or how about Assassin’s Creed Unity: the game that sold a season pass that they ended up abandoning the idea of just a few months after the games release, leading to the first dlc being given out for free, refunds being issued and no other dlc being released… all because the because game was horribly broken (though I lucked out and had zero issue with it)
This just sort of shows how easily indoctrinated people are. Not really that long ago people were moaning that season passes were a thing that was starting to happen, with all the fist in the air self righteousness the Internet loves so much. Now a game randomly gets released with no pass and it warrants weirdly passive aggressive articles about it’s lack of a pass, and a whole lot of lost deer in headlights comments there-in. How long has it been to get here, 4 or 5 years?
After playing (and having a pretty good time with) the game for quite a few hours since it released Tuesday, I’m going to say that the game doesn’t really feel like it needs dlc.. as in I don’t really see how they could expand the thread thin (but fun and original) concept. People joke about mammoth armor and such, but that’s literally all I could see them adding without overloading the game with too much more-of-the-same. Primal is already using pretty much every mechanic from FC4 (I’ve had to stop myself from pointing out the similarities, or risk driving myself insane), reskinned, without adding all that much “newness” to the base game outside of the setting, and adding much more -which would likely come in the form of what, the usual wave based arenas or watered down mini-story?- would just go over like a wet fart.
If anything this is probably the smartest thing Ubisoft could have done, especially since they’ve had an extremely iffy relationship with the entire concept of the season pass this generation. ACU’s failed because the base game was so buggy that they are just gave up; with watch_dogs the pass was pretty much exactly like the game itself- so hyped up that all it could do was fizzle out; Far Cry 4’s was alright but not good enough to keep it from being pretty quickly bundled with the game not all that long after (and not that long after the game was just flat out being given away, as well). As for more current faire, aside from Syndicate, Rainbow Six and The Division are both games that are set up and screaming for the season pass treatment, if only because one is pretty much Ubisoft’s hail mary pass at Call of Duty, while the other has been sold as an MMO experience since it was first previewed. It’s just whether or not those games succeed to support their passes -which is Ubisofts main issue: they don’t make games that support the dlc that comes after- or if they’ll end up as bad as every other dlc pass they’ve released this gen.
So far I personally don’t think it needs a DLC, therefore no season pass. I’m ok with games just coming out like this. I can indeed see why people would like extra content though (people who play a lot more than me).