Assassin's Creed: why DLC and companion apps are gaming's next war zone

The latest Ubisoft action adventure locked certain content unless players downloaded a special app. The feature has been abandoned but it says a lot about where games are

Until recently, if you bought Ubisoft's historical action adventure Assassin's Creed: Unity, and came across a blue chest while exploring the game's luscious depiction of revolutionary France, you wouldn't have been able to open it. At least you wouldn't unless you downloaded the special companion app on your Android or Apple phone and synced it to your PC or console.

The Assassin's Creed: Unity app also provides a range of puzzles and a heat map showing how players have competed levels in the main game. But unlike other companion apps recently released for games like Call of Duty, Titanfall and Battlefield, it's not free. Well, not strictly. Players who download it either have to pay to unlock certain features, or pay for the completely unlocked premium edition. On Wednesday, however, Ubisoft announced that it was unlocking the chests for all gamers. A look at the app's Google Play page tells you part of the reason why: dozens of players complaining that they couldn't get the app to sync with their console, or who had updated the app only to lose data.