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No more console-ation prize: Ubisoft to release Watch Dogs simultaneously on PCs, Xboxes and PlayStations

Watch Dogs is set in a future Chicago where phones are weapons (and not blunt ones).

Watch Dogs is now out; here’s our Watch Dogs review.

We’ve become accustomed to getting our open-world Ubisoft games a month later than our mates on the consoles. By that time, they’ve long since captured all their territories, talked things out with Vaas, and worn out the knees of their white robes on treetrunks. We’ve lived with it – but it hasn’t exactly engendered the sort of shared pop cultural zen moments Ubisoft would presumably like us to be having.

Maybe that’s all about to change? Ubisoft’s schedule for 2014 would seem to confirm as much. Watch Dogs is set for a May 27 release on Xboxes, PlayStations, and PCs.

The customary delay wasn’t so evident for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, the release of which was unusually staggered across several platforms to account for the appearance of the new consoles late last year. But every Assassin’s Creed game since 2009 has been missing on the PC for at least two weeks after console release – and sometimes two months.

It hasn’t made things easy for Ubisoft, forced to spread their marketing efforts across the weeks rather than drop their promo salvo on one, eventful date. And it hasn’t made things easy for us, easily upset as we are.

So let’s hope this Watch Dogs date stays where it is – and that it becomes a new standard for the French publishers.

Ubisoft released South Park: The Stick of Truth in this week, simultaneously across PS3, 360 and PC (though not across all regions). It’s turned out to be dead good. Are you pleased to be able to play it now, rather than in April? Or are you uninterested in participating in any fleeting pop cultural conversation?