Ubisoft Launches Free Share Play Service with Some Caveats

A free Ubisoft gaming service called Share Play went live as part of an open beta launched earlier this week, allowing players to “pass the controller” to their online friends, albeit with some notable caveats. The self-explanatory name of the platform is not to be confused with the significantly older PlayStation Share Play feature which debuted on the PS4 back in 2014 and remains a staple of all existing PS Plus tiers.

Much like other gaming utilities offered by Ubisoft, Share Play is powered by the Ubisoft Connect app, known as Uplay prior to a late 2020 rebranding. While having an account with the service isn’t a requirement on consoles, the company has been trying to encourage fans to sign up for one with a variety of in-game bonuses and discounts since its Uplay days. On the other hand, most of its modern PC catalog does require a Ubisoft Connect sign-in, including games purchased from third parties like Steam.

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Share Play open beta is only available on PC, with Ubisoft being extremely unlikely to expand its reaches to more platforms in the foreseeable future. Primarily because both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles have natively supported near-identical functionality for the past two hardware generations; the PS4 and PS5 have the aforementioned Share Play, whereas Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S offer a comparable “game sharing” feature.

Platform availability aside, the real caveats with Ubisoft’s Share Play lie in its catalog of supported games, which is currently limited to just four titles: Far Cry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, OddBallers, and Riders Republic. The company did promise that more games are “on the way,” but it is still unclear whether that expansion will happen prior to the service leaving beta. Public testing of complex networking tech such as Share Play can easily run for months on end.

In the meantime, another limitation to keep in mind is that Ubisoft’s Share Play only supports 60-minute sessions, much like its PlayStation counterpart, although the number of consecutive sessions is unlimited. Since the functionality is meant to simulate the act of physically passing a controller to a friend, the host can only act as a spectator. PC players who own one of the supported games can start a Share Play session through the Ubisoft Connect in-game overlay, which can be brought up by pressing Shift and F2 in the client’s default configuration.

Share Play is not the first improvement to Ubisoft’s PC gaming offerings that the company introduced in recent times. Back in December, Ubisoft game purchases started carrying over to Amazon Luna automatically.

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Source: Ubisoft