Ubisoft won't be abandoning GeForce NOW, even if they are already heavily engaged with Google Stadia (as you might recall, Assassin's Creed Odyssey was used to test the service back in 2018).
The news comes from Chris Early, senior vice president of partnerships, who was interviewed on the official Ubisoft website last week to discuss all things streaming.
On supporting GeForce NOW, he said:
That’s right. If someone has already bought one of our games on the PC, they should be able to play them wherever they like.
It's a stance that we wish more publishers and developers would agree to, particularly after 2K Games, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard all removed their games from NVIDIA's GeForce NOW.
The Ubisoft executive also said cross-play and cross-progression are goals overall for the publisher. These features will debut in Tom Clancy's The Division 2 between PC and Google Stadia, but Early would like to see those applied across all the platforms if possible.
Early then confirmed that UPLAY+, the company's subscription plan which includes all Ubisoft games on PC, is still set to debut on Google Stadia later this year.
Last but not least, Early also mentioned that streaming probably won't take off entirely until 5G is broadly available.
To get there from a technology standpoint, means that we need to drastically improve the bandwidth to mobile devices. Today, most streaming only works on mobile devices on the home, because you’re streaming from your home router to your phone. Until 5G gets deployed on a broad basis, we just don’t have the bandwidth outside, away from the home, to be able to stream properly to phones. Bandwidth caps are also a concern, but I think that, as we’ve seen over time, those caps tend to rise as use of the internet tends to grow.