"If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."
He could just as well be telling the rest of Ubisoft (and the games industry) that in order for customers to be comfortable you need to not delete things and allow people to keep what they invested in the game, and that if you take things away from them then people won't be comfortable.
"One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
"I still have two boxes of DVDs. I definitely understand the gamers perspective with that. But as people embrace that model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you'll be able to access them when you feel like. That's reassuring"
This is the longer context. I understand where he is coming from but people like to own things so that they can enjoy them later without getting the company involved again. Sure the save files are there but if the company changes their terms and services it just straight up stop offering them in their subscriptions what good are they? The guy claims that they support multiple mediums now but at the end of the day that's a business decision and they could decide to not sell DVDs or things like that anymore.
The difference here is that Game makers they want the video model - entirely DRM encumbered on DVD or BluRay (trivially broken, but still...) or streamed with an ongoing cost, as opposed to the audio model where you have the option of downloading DRM-free content from multiple sources (Bandcamp, Bleep, Qobuz, etc.) or buying it without DRM on CD.
There are some DRM-free gaming - GoG for example, and while Valve still has DRM, Steam hasn't been caught up in forcing people to go to perpetual streaming models.
From a preservationist standpoint, I really want media available in ways that will last through corporate shenanigans, and platform DRM limited or streaming-only isn't it.
I see both arguments here. Games just aren’t the same as music or video - when an album or a movie is finished, what you get can be frozen in time and still work without the film or record company again.
Games used to be entirely this way, and some still are, but any manner of live-service game can’t realistically work in that model for an indefinite period of time like movies and music can. This is also true to a lesser extent for patches and DLC, although they shouldn’t be necessary (but day one patches are a thing, I imagine the games companies aren’t unhappy about this, as there’s an incentive to release a broken game with a day-one patch as a future copy protection measure).
> but any manner of live-service game can’t realistically work in that model for an indefinite period of time like movies and music can
I'm not sure why you think that? A "live service" game is just a game that's updated a lot and is backed by a server. So whenever they stop updating it, that's the finished product.
The main issue is that they then turn off the servers without any alternative method of playing and tell players to go f themselves when they want to continue to play it.
Well yes that’s what I was saying above. Selling you a product one time for a fixed fee isn’t going to fund keeping servers supported and online forever, and even if it did, the games company has no incentive to do so once you’ve already paid and they’ve met whatever legally mandated warranty periods exist in that country.
But why can't them let the players host it themselves? It isn't like hosting a game server is expensive, plenty of people have done so with unofficial servers for games.
I mean, maybe, but if the game relies solely on matchmaking and doesn’t allow a server browser then it becomes way more complicated. The companies don’t want to be liable for what little Timmy might see or hear on a server they don’t control for a game they no longer support and have already moved on from.
That's moving the goalposts. That may be true for a small fraction of games, e.g. MMOs, but for the vast majority of games, they could easily be frozen.
> Games used to be entirely this way, and some still are, but any manner of live-service game can’t realistically work in that model for an indefinite period of time like movies and music can.
Which is why the industry keeps pushing these and why we should oppose them.
> This is also true to a lesser extent for patches and DLC, although they shouldn’t be necessary (but day one patches are a thing, I imagine the games companies aren’t unhappy about this, as there’s an incentive to release a broken game with a day-one patch as a future copy protection measure).
Patches can be distributed as standalone installers that are fixed once released just like the original version remains fixed. This is how things used to work.
Being able to go back to earlier versions even if the developer wants to change things (for whatever reason) is precisely why we need archivable games.
Live service games are closer to social media, IMO - they're a version of Twitter/FB with better graphics and things to do, and as you say that can't be turned into a static product.
There are plenty of folks trying to reverse engineer the protocols used for older live gaming environments - for example the Dreamcast/Gamecube Phantasy Star Online has a fan-run server here: https://schtserv.com/ , but that's the exception, not the rule.
When internet infrastructure was much less advanced, the server application used to be part of the delivered product so you could host it yourself at a LAN party.
I understand that packaging, documenting and supporting an additional application is a cost that the company would rather avoid if possible. But upon shutting down a game's servers, it would cost them nothing to provide the discontinued app code "as is" with no warranty or support, to let fans figure out how to run or improve it themselves. I doubt most game companies have any incredibly valuable and cutting-edge networking code worth protecting.
Middleware with limited licenses is also a problem the developer chose. If there was a legal requirement to publish the code (source code escrow should be required for copyright to be enforceable IMO) then developers would take care not to fall into that trap.
Even standalone games can have operating system and hardware dependencies. Not all of course. A few years ago, I went through a few months when I tried getting back into some older Windows games. They ran--mostly, often with patches--but it was all too flaky and crash-prone to be much fun and I mostly gave up.
Btw, if you are ever in that situation again, Linux + Wine/Proton is now often the better stack to run old games than newer versions of native Windows, both in terms of backward compatibility and performance. Not always, but often.
This is a perplexing situation as Microsoft used to be the queens and kings of backward compat (due to true invested engineering effort), but even they had to let go of some things, gimp an API or two by quick-porting them to newer infra, etc. due to finite resources.
On the other hand perhaps not that surprising. Just as with projects like MAME or ScummVM or Dosbox, preservation activities are perhaps best placed in the community, the Commons, vs. a commercial business with commercial pressures of the present-day market. But then it's important the community has the legal conditions and stability to do the work, of course.
And as tech folks, we all know how insane it would be in the B2B space to suggest that the service provider can end their service at any time, not refund you anything, and have no liability. We should have MSAs with defined SLAs and contract terms for consumer SaaS (like video games and streaming) as well.
Exactly, and equally critically -- the death provision.
Given we're on the first generation to purchase licenses-instead-of-physical, it will be some years before this starts to snowball.
But when it does, I expect the mismatch between customer expectations and company policies are going to make for some bad PR.
"Grandmother left me her collection of music, and then Amazon took it away" isn't a rosy headline.
And I refuse to believe that most streaming media/game services don't already have actuaries in their pricing departments, and so have already thought very hard about this.
> They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection
GenXer here: I'm not comfortable not owning my CD collection. I still either buy CDs, or at least high quality DRM-free digital files that I can archive. Unfortunately, some bands that I really like don't issue CDs in thr US anymore, or sell good quality files, so I've had to buy CDs from outside the US and have them shipped here.
> One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games].
"Needs to happen" is a pretty strong statement. Why does it "need" to happen? Are current customer behaviors/preferences some kind of existential threat to humanity? Nothing needs to happen. The company might want it to happen, but that's different. Companies talking about a mass [and profitable] shaping of population behavior as being "necessary" should alert our antennas a little.
Current consumer protection laws are lacking in the digital world. Purchase should mean ownership. Rent and lease should mean non-ownership.
We still don't have a quality definition of ownership. Example would be that the ability to edit the OS "hosts" file to prevent a device from accessing say "twitter.com" should be a requirement in ownership.
Owned / purchased content should not be able to be revoked. Such as Ubisoft locking your account and preventing you from playing the games you purchased. Rental and leased content would fall into the account locking ability by Ubisoft.
There is a misunderstanding among consumers, be it individuals or corporations, that by purchasing a physical medium you simultaneously purchase a perpetual license. While in gross majority of consumer cases that was true, or at least implied, it certainly was not true in the commercial space where plenty of software was licensed for term. The SaaS model only made that more apparent/transparent.
While I personally loathe the general corporate subscriptionism, it does have its benefits and drawbacks which in most cases can be addressed by market forces. The ultimate pressure on video games publisher's subscriptionism may be to touch the grass.
> "They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection."
This isn't what happened at all.
People got used to streaming services which is a different product entirely.
Many people stopped buying movies and music altogether, and those that still do are rightfully outraged when, say, Sony deletes a movie from their library.
There is also a difference between games and movies/tv shows… if a streaming service removes a movie I like, I can either buy it or get it from a different streamer and I have lost nothing.
If a gaming service removes a game, will I be able to keep my save history when I buy it from somewhere else?
We should get away from using the term buy with respect to media. What you're actually doing is licensing in. Why not just say the latter, even if it sounds awkward? At the very least it will build awareness of the actual nature of the transaction.
No, we should continue to use the term "buy", and clarify in the law that copyright shenanigans don't trump purchase rights and consumer protection obligations. In the meantime, since the law is wrong and makes a mockery of its legitimacy, people should treat it as optional and follow it to the extent they personally feel fair and appropriate.
Everyone knows it would be absurd if you bought a chair, and then you opened the box and there was a piece of paper inside that said actually you're just renting it indefinitely and the manufacturer has the right to take it back at any time. Likewise if the outside of box said you get an indefinite "license"; the expectation would be that the seller is acting in good faith and that that's the same thing as perpetual. Taking the chair back would be called a scam. Any government that goes along with the scam is a clown show and deserves the contempt of its citizenry.
The publishers don’t have to provide physical media, just the ability to install it at any arbitrary point later. So an install file is fine (even if it’s 100GB) and backing that up can be up to the consumer.
In terms of your argument with older devices this exists even with physical media. Who still has reel to reel or laserdisc? The publishers don’t have to make it future proof, just make themselves only necessary at the purchase step.
Bull.shit. I call bullshit. Will it exist after the company goes bankrupt?
What an idiotic thing to say to people. It's one thing to have a company do this, but to argue that an entire industry will make sure that their services will exist in perpetuity is madness.
What’s weird about this statement is that gamers on platforms like Steam and PS Store already have that confidence. No Steam customer is worried about losing their library. PlayStation gamers see a PS3 store that is still functional and have confidence in buying PS5 games digitally. (Granted, Sony almost disabled purchases on the PS3 store, but came to a good compromise by moving payment processing off of the platform).
It’s only shitty, badly run stores like UPlay and Nintendo’s always-shutting down console-specific stores that make customers lack confidence.
I think GOG disproves this somewhat. A decent number of my coworkers who game buy their favorite games again on GOG to get the offline installers. Trust, but verify.
Well, that’s an anecdote among people working at a tech company right?
Steam distributes 75% of all PC games. So obviously the DRM-free offline installer (which is nice and I appreciate) isn’t something that most people prioritize for their purchase decisions.
Users will lose what they non-bought eventually if they don't own it. It's just a matter of time.
Even if the company earnestly believes, at this time, that they will continue to provide access forever, circumstances will inevitably change in the future and might cause a change of plans. Or the company might be acquired by another with different ideas, or bring in new management that decides to refocus on different business opportunities. Or the technology they use to lock down the product will fall out of support. Or they just go out of business. Something will inevitably happen, and users will lose access.
Isn't the fear that the game will go away and unable to be played?
I'm not super interested in if a game is rented or not, but the argument I've always heard was "online services shut down and unable to play - or requires internet connection" never whether or not the save progress would still be there
That would be my fear. My Steam library has over a dozen titles which can no longer be bought.
Thankfully Steam still provides them for those who have purchased it before they were pulled from the store. Though IIRC some have been fully removed (with refund).
While I definitely like (and mostly trust) Steam, there are some issues like songs being removed from GTA games due to licensing that make me want to hang onto pirated copies, just in case.
As much as I hate to defend Ubisoft on basically anything... Yeah reading that article it's very clear he's discussing this in the context of their subscription service. It's no crazier than someone wouldn't own their games through acquired via Ubisoft subscription than movies via Netflix or music via Spotify.
Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing? I don't think so. And yet I also begrudgingly admit that I listen to a much wider variety of music via streaming than was ever available in my cd/mp3 collection...
I don’t mind steam, but it’s not like you really “own” your library even on that platform. So it has probably been a while since most of us actually owned a video game the way it was 30 years ago.
Sure, the subscription services are taking it even further, but as long as you’re not in total control of the stuff you own, it’s not really yours. At least in my opinion.
As a practical matter, if I had a 30+ year old game still up in my attic, it would probably take more time/knowledge/money in many cases to get it running usefully than most people would reasonably put in.
Honestly, as talking about "ownership" in terms of the law I find to be an argument that just goes round in circles. Like yes, you don't own the game because the EULA says so, but no EULA's aren't legally binding, but yes because they can revoke the game without recourse, etc etc.
What's more interesting is ownership in practical terms, in my opinion. And I don't think you can really blanket all the game in Steam under one rule here - some have absolutely 0 DRM and you can back them up and run them just fine anywhere and some have Steam DRM which is trivial to crack; these games you practically own. And then there are games which use Denuvo or other DRM means, where unless its one of the rare games that get a crack.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, regardless of anything else, digital ownership to me boils down to "Can I copy these bytes to a hard drive, and then 20 years later still use them?"
I would argue, on average, it actually is. Because it's not that we are getting nothing in return: We are getting stewardship.
Let us at least acknowledge this part of the equation: Hosting things securely and reliably is only naively easy and cheap, and on top only like drawing a picture is easy, if you are Picasso. Sure, you can put those years of professional devops experience to use to maintain a private data haven – but that's not something that will work for most people and it is fairly obvious that, on average, our collective data would be a lot less safe if rolling hosting became everyones favorite passion project.
That is certainly a convenience that is gained by renting something, but (1) the significance of that convenience is minimal compared to the threat of the company taking away what you've bought, intentionally or not, and (2) paid backup services exist.
It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe. It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.
> It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe.
You would probably reconsider if you spent more time around the, to this day, ocean of outdated and unmaintained-until-physical-failure-windows-2000ish-servers sprinkled throughout fairly touchy parts of our society, connected to the, gasp, internet.
> It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.
If I have to chose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra, I will, until further notice, gladly have the former every time and let legislation take it from there.
I'm confused. We're talking about video games and other digital media. You would put those on an external drive or similar. Why would the vulnerabilities of such a solution have any overlap with windows 2000-era servers used for infrastructure? What does infrastructure have in common with personal backups?
Except that I can control whether the server I run is up to date, or internet-connected, or has appropriate NACLs, whereas I know firsthand that most large companies do not meet patching SLAs, or have properly-configured security controls.
This is a tech space; if you work around security, you know that someone's home computer is going to usually be harder to hack than a big corporation that has an attack surface a million miles wide.
Maybe I can phish you and get on your machine, but maybe not. But I can definitely phish at least one person at a big company, and usually many more. Your home machine doesn't have an ssh key buried in a git repo's commit history, or in a public S3 bucket, etc.
Most large-scale botnets running on consumer machines target either IoT or routers, both of which are difficult for consumers to patch, so that's more bad business security once again, than bad consumers.
> choose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra
My god, what a false dichotomy. Yes, every computer not run by Google is running freshly-installed, never-been-updated Windows 95, but Google is totally absolutely positively doing better than all the others in the same space. /s
That's a false dichotomy. Bandcamp will sell me music I can download _and_ let me stream it.
But separately, I don't want stewardship for my data to rest with whoever I transact with to acquire that data. Why not a digital locker standard, where you sign in with your digital locker when purchasing digital content, and that content is saved to your locker, with whatever metadata? You can then search and play your purchased content through whatever client you like, regardless of where you got it from. You can sort of do that today (to the extent that you can still purchase digital content--there's music that's available to stream that I have not been able to find for purchase) with files, but you lose the stewardship and it's a lot of work.
You can argue that the subscription model pays for the stewardship in a way purchases would not, but surely digital content is easier to work with than CDs and DVDs.
I think most consumers don't really care, though, and I'm guessing content platforms don't really see the point of supporting something like that.
> It's no crazier than someone wouldn't own their games through acquired via Ubisoft subscription than movies via Netflix or music via Spotify.
Which doesn't say it is not crazy :-).
> Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing?
At least with movie/audio it's easy to download. I tend to be okay paying their subscription if I can download it on BitTorrent later. For games it may be a bit harder? Not sure.
Streaming does let you discover lots of new music which I like.
But musically for my "daily driver" playlist I want to go way down a particular rabbit hole and find new stuff. It is less good for that. I am happy streaming exists.
On PC I am totally digital download. Consoles, I am more of a collector, so I prefer physical games which I actually own. Eventually having a disc will be the only legal way to play those games if you did not download them. (Some not even then like Destiny)
If streaming were a better deal for consumers than ownership do you think streamers would push it so hard? Every time I try to buy an MP3 I hit a bunch of anti-patterns trying to get me to click on get this with a subscription.
People think of it as the price of a subscription today vs the price of ownership today. The problem is that every service model business has learned to boil the frog slowly.
It's not a non-ownership tend. There never was ownership of the content. It was a dillusion. Content was licensed. The thing that's changing is the licensing model, from, arguably, perpetual to a short term with indefinite options for renewal.
It sounds like Ubisoft wants their streaming and subscription services to grow, but reality doesn't line up with their vision.
They are purchasing long term streaming rights from other companies like Activision Blizzard.
"Ubisoft recently announced the completion of the transaction with Activision Blizzard giving
Ubisoft the perpetual cloud streaming rights for Call of Duty and all other existing Activision
Blizzard Console and PC titles as well as those releasing over the next 15 years. These rights
will further strengthen Ubisoft’s content offering through its subscription service Ubisoft+ as
well as allowing Ubisoft to license them to third parties."
It seems they are betting on a speculative market. They assume people will treat owning games like owning DVDs in the past.
From what is said in the article, it sounds like they are probably worried about losing a lot of money on this bet.
They reported a net loss of nearly half a billion euros last year.
Thanks for pointing this out. I had only heard about this in passing and assumed there had to be more to it. It's always good to do your own research on these things, because sometimes you realize its not as bad as an out-of-context clip makes it sound. But then on the flip side, sometimes its Unity's Runtime Fee and it is as bad as it sounds.
Or it could be the usual self delusion inherent in corpospeak where he tries to frame the issue as one simply about progress files and not about control or ownership.
Even this framing makes no sense: You don't lose what you've built as long as the game is still available to you. Should you end the subscription or should Ubisoft at any moment decide to discontinue your game then your savegame file will help you exactly nothing.
I lost my games library and progress when Stadia shuttered.
Likewise before that when Ouya went under.
Even this month I’ve lost access to content on Audible (bookmarks, marginalia, etc) that I previously paid before because that particular book was optioned.
I understand the rationale for these companies to push for subscription models to pump their PE ratio and get that predictable revenue bump. Adobe famously went from a $15 billion to $400 billion market cap by switching to subscription/“own nothing be happy” services rather than selling CS licenses.
But as a counter-party? No thank you.
Two decades on (and particularly seeing this as a docent at the Media Archeology Lab in Boulder working with 50+ year old media) I think it’s rational to push for digital ownership enforced by a community and not a corporation because otherwise the outcome is predictable. I’m happy to see recent developments enabling ownership, despite the (surprising to me) HN criticism of those vehicles.
> I understand the rationale for these companies to push for subscription models to pump their PE ratio and get that predictable revenue bump. Adobe famously went from $15 billion to $400 billion by switching to subscription services rather than selling CS licenses.
For Adobe it makes sense. Like, the full CS suite is 50-60€ a month... that was probably 10k worth of purchases before. Even as a student, you can usually afford a CS subscription, whereas you all but had to pirate it under the old model.
Personally I would prefer something like the IntelliJ license model - subscribe for 12 months, and you get the last version you had permanently if you cancel the subscription.
For games though? For the calculation to make sense even remotely, the monthly subscription game would need to be in the cents, maybe a dollar a month. Everything else is just a ripoff.
> For Adobe it makes sense. Like, the full CS suite is 50-60€ a month... that was probably 10k worth of purchases before
Nah - the big-box Creative Suite Master Collection was $2300 in 2012 (link below) and it's a perpetual license, and (as far as I've personally tested it) Adobe's main titles (Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat) dating back to version 7.0 (circa 2001) work perfectly fine on Windows 10 (obviously things like high-DPI support is lacking).
...wherewas my Creative Cloud sub is costing me $65/mo now ($780/yr), and I've been a paying subscriber for 10 years now, so Adobe has gotten at-least $6,000 USD from me, even though I only use the base functionality we've had since the late-1990s - so I'd be $3000+ better-off right-now if I had the foresight to buy a big-box of Master Collection right-before Adobe discontinued it.
I think I'm just getting older and the more they try to push stuff on me as "we own it, and you pay us to borrow it" the less I'm interested in participating. Apple store/hardware is kind of my last hold out on this front. I still use it as my daily driver but use linux more and more than just getting work done. I generally play old consoles/pc games, have an older car I can work on easily (thanks dad/mom) even though I could afford something newer, use FOSS software whenever I can practically, buy dumb appliances, etc. It's as if we quit valuing simplicity and ownership as a society or manufacturers are just slipping it in more and more like a slow boil? We seem to be adding complexity and extra steps without any pragmatic advantage other than more money for corps. I'm not sure.
The ability to buy and sell used games is really nice. I can get a game that came out a year ago second hand for like $15-30 in some cases. Not being able to do that for digital exclusive games is really annoying and often means I just don't play them.
Does the cost of buying and reselling games for slightly less end up equaling out to the cost of a games subscription model? Maybe, but my concern is fragmentation. I definitely can't afford more than one game subscription so I don't like this trend.
You can always pirate old games if you know you will never buy them. I used to buy (10 years) old PC titles (AA) from my local 2nd hand market, but then I noticed most of them required connecting your account to activate the game. And that is only valid for 1 account, meaning my purchase was absolutely useless. Next thing I did was to download a pirated version, and it worked smoothly on my linux machine.
I've found that some old PC titles are available on Steam, DRM free (if you're willing to futz with the install directory -- they're running open source game engines and proprietary vintage assets; you can just copy the assets out).
Typing this reminds me: I should look into switching to GOG for such purchases.
And even if they’re not, a lot of games (used to) use Steam’s DRM and then never actually called the extended license check APIs. That’s to say that a lot of times the same “steam_api.dll” that pirated games have may work for a bunch of games.
I found that out a few years ago when I tested out virtualization graphics performance and wanted to avoid installing full Steam every time for my (legally purchased) games.
It is possible (at least for playstation) to buy single game accounts. Then change the password, play the game and sell the account once you are finished with the game.
Epic may not be saying it but they are doing it. Epic literally bought the company Psyonix, makers of Rocket League and then stole the game Rocket League from people who had bought it and been playing it for years. They literally unreleased the game for MacOS and Linux users. They tried to hide this theft by letting linux and mac users still start the game and look at the menu interface. But playing the game itself no longer works.
Epic is at the forefront of revoking ownership, not Ubisoft.
Epic took away player to player trading in rocket league just to support a new game mode in Fortnite (rocket racing). Now the only way to get items is through the item shop using real money. Have a dozen copies of the same item because you’ve been playing since 2015 and want to gift it to somebody? Too bad, not possible. Rocket League is dying, but hey at least rocket racing in Fortnite has familiar assets!
When I was a teen, I wanted to grow up and become a game developer and one day perhaps work for Ubisoft. Prince of Persia (2003) was my favorite game as a kid.
Now, I cannot think of a more creatively bankrupt game studio. (Maybe Naughty Dog? They've been releasing the same games for like 12 years) I don't understand how they can fall so low and also remain in business. Who buys/plays their games?!
I worked for Ubisoft for 6 years and theres a combination of:
* the business reality being harder than you think
* certain peoples ego. (notably Serge Hascoet, and his pressure to push games to be the same; towers to unlock the map etc)
* Good intentions being misconstrued (uplay is designed to give people cheaper games while staying within the letter of the law of valves distribution platform)
The majority of people are really doing their best for the players: even the people you think are doing stupid things.
I think AAA game development has to end to be honest, the risk is so high that most publishers play it so safe that in the end everything is milquetoast and overpriced
> Good intentions being misconstrued (uplay is designed to give people cheaper games while staying within the letter of the law of valves distribution platform)
This may have been the official line but I don't buy that the reason that Uplay was created was to "give people cheaper games" or that it had to do anything with "good intentions". No player ever asked for yet another launcher.
> The majority of people are really doing their best for the players: even the people you think are doing stupid things.
The majority of individual developers, sure. They don't call the shots when it comes to deciding the anti-features put into the game though. And some individual developers end up implementing those anti-features.
> the business reality being harder than you think
> I think AAA game development has to end to be honest, the risk is so high that most publishers play it so safe that in the end everything is milquetoast and overpriced
The ever-increasing scope (especially graphics wise) is something that game development studios and/or their publishers decide on though. They could instead choose to have multiple more reasonably scoped but less risk adverse games though. For all its checkbox design in the main titles Ubisoft does do some of that though.
It's also hard to empathize iwth the business reality being harde when the leadership of these giant game companies rake in ungodly amounts of money. That's really the main problem with the AAA industry: the ones in charge generally only seem to care about increasing their own net worth rather than have any pride in the games they create.
Same story with Blizzard - I used to be the biggest fanboy, spending thousands of hours with SC,WC3,WoW and Diablo.
Ever since they got acquired by Activision it’s just been very disappointing.
Now I don’t even check out their new releases anymore.
Assassin's Creed player here. The AC series excels at rendering famous places at specific times in history, and then letting you explore them on your own terms. The historical and environmental detail in each (mainline) AC game is amazing.
It's never perfect, of course. But who else is even trying to offer the same experience? *
I also play lots of indie games (shout out to CrossCode, Soma, Signalis, and Tangledeep particularly) and lots of JRPGs and puzzle/detective games. Never bought any Call of Duty (I will admit to renting CoD4 on Wii once).
Sometimes people like things you don't like, and that's OK. You don't need to feel superior about it.
* While the question is intended as rhetorical, I would like to hear of other games in this particular space.
Behold the Prince of Gosplan written in 1992 and inspired by the original Prince of Persia game published in 1989 by Broderbund. There was no Ubi back then and that the franchise is still being "owned" is an insult.
met someone who worked at Ubisoft once at a party....I realised why their games suck and they are more interested in taking all the money they can get....dude had a coke problem and was bragging about being a senior dev working on their latest title whilst throwing a 'bruh' out in every other sentence and stumbling around the party like he was king of the world because of Ubisoft.....bad culture. bad incentives, and when asked about development couldn't even explain anything other than buzz words and was more interested in how much money their micro payments would get them
The computer industry is rapidly approaching a performance plateau, i.e. next year's model will soon not be a significant improvement over last year's model, and the planned obsolescence turnover will slow down - such that device lifetimes will become more like automobile lifetimes.
The industry is trying to fight this by making devices difficult or impossible to repair and moving software to a subscription model - because they don't want people spending their time with ten-year-old games running on ten-year-old consoles.
It's not just the hardware speed improvements that are slowing down but also innovation in the games industry itself. Really early games can be a bit hard to get into because conventions and features that are taken for granted today weren't established yet. But that is already much less of a problem for a decade or even two decade old game. Games made in a decade will probably be even less different from games made today. That means that future gamers will have much more existing games to choose from that they can easily get into. Games which all compete with new releases.
Essentially the games industry is no longer the fast moving new thing and now has to deal with it becoming harder and harder to top its own classics.
I did my bachelors degree on this topic but have been interested in this problem since years before university. Specifically, the direction that we’re headed in terms of video game preservation [0].
I can still play most of the games that I grew up with, and nostalgia is well-known to be an important form of emotional wellbeing. Where will we be when the youth of tomorrow can’t experience that nostalgia? Sure there’s books (if they’re bought physically), but what else? Music isn’t guaranteed either and I won’t be surprised if in 30 years it is extremely difficult to _buy_ (legally) music.
> I won’t be surprised if in 30 years it is extremely difficult to _buy_ (legally) music.
When was ever feasible to legally buy music? I mean for the average Joe, not a record company or Michael Jackson.
It certainly hasn't been in my lifetime, and I'm old by Internet standards. The only thing that has meaningfully changed is that the license period terms have become shorter and shorter.
I remember CDs well, but the music on them was never owned, even if Napster tried to make a case otherwise (if you don't know, it failed to make that case, leading to its eventual demise). You're going to have to go back way further, if there was ever a time.
Nope. The music was generally licensed when those were popular. Ownership was retained by the licensor. Maybe in the wax cylinder era ownership of the music was usually passed with the physical media? That is getting to be before my time.
Interesting question and I did some research on it. (AI results were awful and downright misinformation by the way)
Early copyright law didn't explicitly cover music and audio recordings, because the technology did not exist or was not widely available at the time. However, I suspect that they may have been covered by early copyright laws.
Copyright Act of 1790 in the United States primarily focused on protecting written works, such as books, maps, and charts, while Early recordings were created in the 1870s.
Herbert v. Shanley Co., 242 U.S. 591 (1917), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held hotels and restaurants that perform music must compensate composers, even if the venue is not separately charging patrons to hear the music.
From this, I infer that music during this time was copyrightable, so commercial production of it via wax cylinder would also be infringement.
>and nostalgia is well-known to be an important form of emotional wellbeing ... Where will we be when the youth of tomorrow can’t experience that nostalgia?
Talk about overstating the case. Any problems that the youth will have in the future, will not be because they cannot re-play a live service game they are playing today.
I think you are missing the point (and think it is an interesting one).
I don't think they are overstating games as the single biggest factor, just part of a possible trend, which could be undesirable when considered in its totality.
More of a question if we are heading towards a future where "you'll own nothing and be happy", and the downsides of that on psychological wellbeing.
His point was we (probably) won't be able to play old video games as adults and that will be bad for our emotional well being. I think that's silly. In 30 years that will probably be the least of our worries. As an adult who played Doom and Duke Nukem 3d as a younger kid, I can assure you, that's the least of my worries. There's plenty of other things as an adult to harm our emotional well being.
"you'll own nothing and be happy" is a completely different topic but slightly related.
The original post was not just about video games, but ownership, nostalgia, and emotional development in general. I say this is obvious because they clearly discuss other media and property. They call out books and music as other parts of the trend.
As a gamer, I think this is wonderful. Being able to subscribe for a month or two once a year means I can check out their latest titles released this year for less than the price of a single game. Many of their games don't have much replayability anyway and there's no point in "buying" it.
When Steam first came out, people made a big bruhaha about how digital licensing (no right of first sale, etc.) isn't the same as owning the game. True, but so what? Steam completely changed the PC games industry on that model and created an indie explosion. People like to complain about the lack of ownership rights, but the convenience is what really matters, especially coupled with a generous refund policy that we never had in the physical media days. A subscription service is a logical continuation of this model.
Now, a couple decades later, games have become super commoditized, and frankly it's hard to tell apart one title from another, much less remember them years later. For every Baldur's Gate 3, there's a hundred no-name RPGs that are entirely adequate but ultimately forgettable. They're not very different from an average show on Netflix or a song on Spotify. Subscription services are a lot cheaper for most people than renting or buying individual titles, and is the only sane way to explore a marketplace that has more content than you could reasonably consume in a lifetime.
If Steam offered a subscription service I'd give up my whole library (hundreds of games, mostly bought on sale) overnight. It's not just Ubi, EA, Microsoft, Playstation all do it, along with Google and Apple on mobile, and it's wonderful. Now for $30 a month split between GeForce Now and PC Games Pass, you can play hundred of games on a 4080 on a Chromebook. Games have never been as affordable or accessible. This is a good thing for gamers, enabling fixed-cost gaming that's easy to budget for and much cheaper a month than games used to be. Even if you have two or three subscriptions from different companies (which can vary month to month).
There are more games coming out every day than a person can consume. It's not the 90s anymore, no reason to clutch on to treasured old titles when a similar game will be out in a few months anyway.
Steam has a track record of continuing to provide games even if the publisher and developer both cease to exist.
On the other hand, I own Age of Empires 3 and Fallout 3 on Games For Windows Live. How do I play them now? (real answer: I've re-bought Fallout 3 on a Steam sale. But I shouldn't have to.).
There are many types of gamers tho, some move on to something new and exciting every week or month, some fall in love with a game and are slow to change.
This isn't about the type of gamer we are, this is about corporations trying to make more $$$, still stop. It's not about the games themselves, making the games and services better for us, the consumers. It's about money. I'll clutch on to old titles because all new games coming out are shit shows, and because if I paid for a game 10 years ago and I want to play it again then I'm going to do so, as I please and without a fucking cloud subscription or online services.
They can allow people to own games, but then they'd make less money.
> Subscription services are a lot cheaper for most people than renting or buying individual titles
> It's not just Ubi, EA, Microsoft, Playstation all do it, along with Google and Apple on mobile
These two sentences are not compatible. Companies do not choose to push business models that make them less money from the average customer.
> There are more games coming out every day than a person can consume. It's not the 90s anymore, no reason to clutch on to treasured old titles when a similar game will be out in a few months anyway.
Whith all due respect, go fuck yourself. Games like kinds of art are not fungible.
I agree but on the other hand what happens when you want to play the game in 6 years and they removed it? Or they removed it for political reasons? I have used Ubisoft+ in the past especially for assassins creed so it’s good but it has drawbacks. I would hate to stop owning most of my games. I mean it doesn’t help that Ubisoft games after 2010 are just throwaways anyway. Remember when Ubisoft was the king?
Well here's the thing, the people who think they might want to go back to play a six year old game are probably buying it, the people who play most games once and never go back are just going to get a better deal with this kind of subscription.
So long as there's always a choice to "buy" the game then I really don't see it as a problem. That's certainly Microsoft's approach with gamepass, I assume they and ubisoft both will happily let people give them $70 for a game if that's what the customer prefers.
Yeah exactly. It's an option for those who prefer the old ways, but since they offered the subscriptions, I haven't bought any more Ubi or Gamepass games. Starfield was a bullet dodged due to Gamepass, lol. Talk about throwaway games...
These days only the indie studios are making the actually good titles. The AAA ones are just high production interactive movies with little actual gameplay. They fit the play once subscription model quite well.
I think the games industry is just to competitive for subscriptions to work. Indie games are more often than not are some of the best games in the year and usually cost half as much as AAA games. Subscriptions could work but there are few publishers that have produced consistent quality games to justify it.
That's a very polite way of saying that may AAA developers/publishers can't put together a quality game for shit these days even if they tried, especially since the AAA industry has pivoted towards "monetization" and "engagement" and not actually producing anything of value. That a game is produced is more of a tangential side effect of their business at this point.
It's about volume * unit price. Just because AAA games and indie games do not have an order of magnitude difference in unit price, they definitely have several orders of magnitude difference in volume.
Everdrive is amazing, well worth the money. I've got gb/gbc and gba EDs, they're so good.
Plus the creator is Ukrainian and has supported and updated them for a long time, it's 100% better to pay a little more so he gets paid than to buy a Chinese clone that rips off his hard work.
I think you would have been better off with an emulator connected to your TV (or an android tablet if you wanted mobile) and a modern style PC/android USB or BT controller. I don't think the original hardware is a good investment. I did this recently and had a great experience. The emulator can render at higher resolutions.
I have a RaspPi400 set up as a PS1 emulator (FFVII), and it'll obviously emulate any legacy hardware... but the actual N64 console is prominently displayed on my gamer cabinet, and frequently spawns a late night SmashBro and/or Goldeneye match.
This conversation has led me to sell some of the less-social titles [e.g. Conkers] & then invest in an EverDrive64; I'm super-excited to play optimized Mario64 at 41fps [vs OEM 20].
I'm not really sure that Ubisoft is to blame here. Blizzard pioneered this with World of Warcraft. You never "own" the game because all the value comes from the server, and if you don't pay you can't connect to the server. If you write your own server, then you are nuked from orbit by the legal department.
Speaking of which, someone should revive that project now that Blizzard is owned by Microsoft. Watching the new "we love open source <3" Microsoft stumble around the IP issues would be mildly hilarious.
It’s hot air. Ubisoft has no leverage. Streaming and digital services are a product of torrenting. If you try to prevent players from owning games they buy they’ll find a way to do it. I mean warehousing and backups have been a thing for 30 years.
Of course they have leverage; backing up an online–only game doesn’t give you the ability to play it once the servers are shut down. For a recent example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU
I used to play a defunct Japanese online only pvp and pve mech game on a pirate Taiwanese server. With a big enough fan base anything is possible. I’ve personally never heard of The Crew but there are some old flash games I’ll never get to play again because they were served on an encrypted site but I think they’re obscure.
Yea, if you can reverse–engineer a server then you can bring the game back to life. That’s a little more than the average player can do, even if they backed up the game files.
Some things are outside the average player’s control. Personally I miss Inishie Dungeon and it’s gone but it motivates me to keep studying to try and make games.
I am fine with renting multi player game server access. But I want to ensure that if I invest time and money in a game, the servers have an open source DIY end state when the company decides it doesn’t want to host the game anymore.
as long as you don't care about the latest and shittiest version of Far Cry then a couple of hundred bucks on gog will result in enough games to last more than a lifetime
But a lot of scams can be setup with this "for as long as the publisher likes". Since this is a "Service", I guess it depends on the laws regulating the "services".
It looks like everything does favor the publisher, and the gamers get nearly only the right to shut up whatever happens. I wonder.
Instead of creating extra value for an extra price, they want to take away the normal benefits of a transaction. Wrong way of doing business. They are enemies of the gaming community
A lot of people are comfortable barely even playing games they bought. I think this shift isn’t too far off. Some even have growing backlogs of games they haven’t played and may never even play.
Concerns about company bankruptcy aside my thing is this: I don't want to have an ongoing relationship with a company. My entire adult life I've watched company after company succumb to enshittification. I have no choice but to assume that the company I buy from today will soon become a company I no longer want to do business with. And yes, of course I always can technically decide to cancel a subscription but then I no longer have the thing I paid for. I'm old enough to remember when I didnt have to worry about this and I definitely prefer owning my stuff.
This is why I've gotten into "retro" games. Modern games are crap, I haven't been excited for a release and not let down since like 2012.
Now I'm collecting and playing og Xbox, ps1, Wii, xb360, psp, ds/3ds, gb/gbc/gba and I'm loving it.
I don't need you, Ubisoft. I don't need you Blizzard, Bethesda, Nintendo, Sony, etc.
TESVI is going to be a flop. GTA VI is gonna suck. Calling it, now. After Cyberpunk, Starfield, 76, new cods and bfs all sucking hard, I've completely lost faith.
Nintendo can't even talk either bc they Apple it up, nostalgia bait, no new IP, franchise only gets a new game once every 6~ years, long wait for new hardware; compare snes/gb era Nintendo, look how many fun and interesting games are on gb/gbc, so many wild franchises that might have never got a sequel but were fun nonetheless. Now Nintendo only goes for the big hitters bc like all other games companies now it's just purely about the $$$. So lame.
The idea that somehow one of the worst game developers in the world is going to usher this new age in is extremely laughable. Sounds like Ubisoft needs to recognize what a joke their studio is.
Depends on the definition of "stealing" and whether you consider intellectual property to be private property. Private property is a social construct and it seems you've subjectively decided to exclude intellectual property from your definition of private property. That's fine but realize that this decision is a subjective one. It is no more or less absurd that I can "own" a collection of atoms as it is that I can "own" an arrangement of bits. They are both absurd notions. But we subscribe to these ideas because they are useful.
IP is certainly private property under the laws of pretty much every developed nation. But infringement of IP rights is not “stealing” under any laws I’m aware of.
If I (unauthorized) take the AutoCAD design files of something, say a next-gen semiconductor, is it theft? The law would say yes. This guy went to prison for it.
Of course if you just make a best effort to immitate the design of something, say a new Ferrari, you might get a lawsuit but won't go to prison. Just like immitating a piece of music, you won't go to jail, it'll be hashed out in the civil courts.
I agree ideologically but intellectually this isn’t true. A movie ticket is a license to watch the movie. If you sneak in, would anyone say that’s legal? Piracy is the same thing. Buying a video game these days is a contract for a license to use the game. I hate it, but that’s the legal aspect
I say hypothetical because they are actually only there if you would have bought the game/sub/etc. if you couldn't have pirated the game. But in many case that's not the case (and in many others it is). Most commonly the actual damages are much smaller then whatever companies get away with claiming they are. And there had been studies showing that for some games piracy actually increased their sells long term. Through definitely not all games.
Anyway causing financial damages != stealing, mainly on a per-case basis financial damages from actual stealing tend to hugely outweighs the ones from piracy.
Piracy is a clear and self-evident moral good irrespective of how close or not it is to stealing. Justifying piracy based on wordplay opens you up to attack by people and organizations that like to destroy what is good through manipulative wordplay.
A corporation predicted huge increase in profits the next year, but didn't achieve it, so they blamed piracy for it and pressured governments to stricken punishment for piracy. A corporation felt entitled to money they didn't get and felt as a result vicitimised.
That’s not a good argument because what if you stole something from a store ALL the way in the back covered in dust that literally no one even knew about. Would you say that’s not theft because it’s not a loss of value?
Your analogy falls down because the act of taking a physical good deprives the current owner of that good without recompense. That is the definition of stealing.
Software and digital content piracy does not deprive any other owner of anything else, this is isn't stealing in the legal sense. It may be financial harm or copyright abuse but those are both separate crimes from theft.
it's a huge difference when you consider how it will affect how people see and what people think is okay to prevent privacy (people including law makers and judges)
The issue is that if piracy were legal, the financial damage would become very real. Therefore it has to be made illegal. The fact that it’s not technically stealing is a side issue.
It's very much not a side issue, it's powerful players completely warping the discussion by abusing their power in order to emotionally load their argument.
If consumers framed subscription services as literally rape that wouldn't be a side issue either.
Yeah, we’ve had this discussion for at least 30 years now. I don’t buy it, because everyone ought to know that piracy can’t be made legal without killing much of the products. All that’d be left would be Kickstarter- and Patreon-style projects.
I'm sorry but no, "We" as in "Us in society" haven't had this discussion, in fact literal billions have been spent towards preventing this discussion from happening.
I'm not saying that every piece of data should be free to sell and distribute always, but the current state of intellectual property and DRM is nothing sort of a disgrace.
I agree that piracy being legal would be an issue (in general, in specific cases it probably should be legal).
But a major question is what is acceptable (practically, legally) to prevent piracy.
And by framing piracy as stealing it is much easier to convince law maker and the general public that very much not reasonable solutions are acceptable.
So that it's not technically stealing is really important for proper law making.
Piracy is only immoral if you consider the state should prevent people from reusing everyone’s copyable work, and protect the companies for it. It’s a ridiculously difficult task which is ridiculously costly to maintain, at the expense of taxpayers.
If you consider that the state shouldn’t intervene, or shouldn’t intervene in this way, then it’s not immoral. For example, the state could say “DRM and if anyone can break the DRM, they’re free to use the game” or it could say “Any software becomes open-source after 20 years” (which, at least, would have the benefit of being useful). Same goes for songs or other artistic work, it will be much less monetizable but maybe it will restore the “art” part in “art”.
I would think the analogy is more akin to Netflix vs owning a copy of a movie. In many cases, consumers have a choice. They can spend a bit more and always have access to a copy of a movie that they own or they could hope that it’s available on one of their streaming services (the availability being beyond the control of the consumer and subject to arbitrary decisions).
This is setting aside the fact that subscription-based access almost always requires an Internet connection and DRM protections which can be viewed as an invasion of privacy.
That would be trespassing, but is it actually illegal to experience license content or just to copy/share it?
If I'm in a bar and they are playing illegal streams of movies are we all commiting crimes or just the bar owner?
There’s a popular view that piracy is not theft. But in UK law at least (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/crossheading/de...), although copyright infringement is a separate offence, it kind of is theft too, arguably. It would be interesting to know to what extent that’s been tested, here and elsewhere.
If I stole Coca Cola's recipe, or the design files for the new Nvidia chip, it wouldn't be theft then? Because they still have the original, they've not been deprived of it.
I think it would be theft and I think a jury would agree.
> If I stole Coca Cola's recipe, or the design files for the new Nvidia chip, it wouldn't be theft then?
If i steal something its theft tautologically. If i break into the coca cola vault and take a the physical copy of the recipe that is theft. If i hack into the coca cola IT infrastructure and copy a file that contains the recipe without deleting it, then it is not necessarily theft depending on jurisdiction.
> If I stole Coca Cola's recipe, or the design files for the new Nvidia chip, it wouldn't be theft then? Because they still have the original, they've not been deprived of it.
correct, it's not theft because it doesn't meet the definition of theft under the Theft Act
this is not difficult to understand, it's spelt in crystal clear unambiguous language in the GPs post
> I think it would be theft and I think a jury would agree.
you can think whatever you want, but it would never reach the point of a jury because the police wouldn't charge for theft and the CPS wouldn't prosecute for it either
because it isn't theft
now if you compromised a computer system to get those chip designs they might try under the Computer Misuse Act, but that's a different offence and not theft
There is no evidence that it harms sales, as the EU found out after spending over €300,000. Actually, it leads more towards the idea that overpricing hurts legal consumption far more. And lost sales are not theft anyway, neither is copying a file.
No, I will have to strongly disagree. Years worth of effort for hundreds of people go into a AAA Game, just like a blockbuster movie. The agreement then is, you pay somehow for the right to consume their effort. You pay directly to the game, or you pay a subscription service that then distributes its pot to the game according to their agreement, but you have to pay. That’s the social agreement. If you don’t, then you’re breaking the social agreement and you’re stealing, there’s really no justification for it.
Let’s say you somehow find that you pirating does not matter in the grand scheme of things, or might indirectly increase sales. It still does not matter. You are a part of an agreement that you should honor, not break, they didn’t hire you to market the game or to improve their sales.
Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer. Now I can only sympathize for piracy if it’s for educational resources that uplifts you, kind of like Sci-hub. For games/ movies you need to think, do you deserve to consume years worth of effort that they put into it? Do you deserve to be entertained by their effort? In my eyes you only do if they willingly give it to you, which only ever happens if you buy or subscribe to a game.
While I also disagree with the 'memefied' version of the quote, the publishers where first to break the social contract, when they removed stuff from libraries which where 'bought'.
The wording in the stores is 'buy' not 'rent'.
yes they have some clauses in the 20 pages long AGBs, which makes it legally ok, but imho it's still a break of the (social) contract.
So, if I 'buy' product A on platform Z and it gets removed without any money returned and they expect me to 'buy' it again on platform Y, I wouldn't have any issues pirating product A
Or if I bought product B v 3.0 with an unlimited licence and they suddently stop the licence server tell me I can't use B 3.0 anymore but I can get B 5.0 as a subscripton, I'd be mad as hell.
I personally have issues where the publishers suddenly alters the deal afterwards. (and tell you that you should be happy they don't alter it further...)
The justification is that there is no social agreement. It's quite clear that the direction is moving away from even the possibility of ownership, and because of obscure reasons you don't care about, the original often becomes unavailable (e.g. music in a game or show being removed, or some aspect being censored, or the controlling entity loses interest in old material, or people lose track of who even holds rights). The law has been corrupted to last so long that if you wanted to share parts of your childhood with your descendants, you'd have to go through gatekeepers until your great great great grandchildren (i.e. never).
No one agreed to that any more than they agreed not to use marijuana. They were born into a world where others use violence to coerce them. As a software developer, I'd be quite happy if the law required all source to be put in escrow to receive copyright and then released into the public domain after 10-15 years, along with bans on technological measures to prevent people from modifying software. Likewise with putting masters in escrow for sound/video. Maybe even give them a full generation of protection (~25 years) since their work doesn't become obsolete and unusable like software. But the important thing is to receive a monopoly from society, you should need to give something as your part of the trade (e.g. source materials for the next generation to be able to use and add their own flavor to), and the goal should be to create cultural wealth for future generations, not to keep it from them. We can trade our rights to enable that, but not theirs; our children's rights are not ours to trade. Given that things are so one-sided, I can't imagine begrudging people at all for ignoring the "agreement".
Here's my two cents, not directed towards you, but to the discussion in general.
If someone wants to lease a product to you, and you would rather they sell it, that doesn't give you the right to pirate it. When the only way to buy a thing is to "buy" a misleading lease, piracy becomes more "permissible", as in people will blame you less for pirating it, but that doesn't make it morally good.
It's obviously a bad thing for the publisher to make it seem like you're buying something, then pull the rug out from under you. It's extremely misleading, maybe it should be illegal. It's definitely a bad thing, even if it's all technically there in the fine print that nobody reads. Pirating the thing in response to this is a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. It's debatable, sure, but it's morally gray at best.
No matter how you slice it, you're still depriving the creators/publishers/etc of the money they ask for in return for the thing you want. Maybe you don't like the publisher, maybe you think the platform is evil, but you are still taking what doesn't belong to you.
A big reason it's bad is the plain ol' categorical imperative. If everyone did it, there would be no more music, movies, games, etc, because the people making them wouldn't get paid. That's true regardless of how the thing is sold.
If you don't like how they're selling it, boycott it. That's fine. It's not like we're talking about essential goods like shelter or food. Most of the time, the discussion is around entertainment.
TL;DR Pirating is morally gray at best, but it is not 100% morally good, and I wish people would be honest about that.
The idea that there would be no more creative works without copyright is pretty obviously false for music (so many people enjoy making music that the only way it could disappear is if we evolve to no longer have ears, and even then it will probably exist in the form of deep bass that you can feel), and most likely false even for things like movies and video games. It may be the case that high budget works become extremely rare, but things like short films would continue to exist, and the existence of things like Spring or various total conversion mods show that even video games would continue. It is definitely false for things like business software, where people will pay for professional services to make their business more efficient.
On the other hand, there are plenty of interesting creative works (e.g. mashups) that are illegal today, and obviously they're being made without monetization. With new tools we even have people making things like Plankton from Spongebob singing Tool songs[0]. There would still be plenty of creativity in the world without copyright.
It's not obvious that we should prioritize the ability to easily fund high budget works over the ability of people to freely share their remixes and mashups, for example.
"Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer."
When you're in an unfair situation, you are willing to break the rules to your benefit. But when you have wealth, suddenly only the wealthy "deserve" to be entertained, and all the poors need to know their place and follow the rules which disadvantage them.
Ok, but then I want companies to get used to not getting paid what they used to be paid. A game I can resell or revisit with my kids 20 years later is worth $60. The one I am not sure I can still play a year later is worth $10. Honestly will save me money, but I will still look for an alternative source for things I really want to invest in. GoG seems to be pretty good.
When I stopped owning movie DVDs I started paying $10/mo for watching a whole catalog of movies. When I stopped owning music CDs I started listening any song I want on demand for $10/mo. For $10/mo I'd be fine not owning games and playing any game I want from a large catalog on demand.
But then that $10/month for a whole catalog of movies became $60/month as the whole streaming ecosystem fractured and every studio decided it needed its own platform. Now you scroll through Disney+ and think you're seeing a whole bunch of options, but if you look closely you realize that the same movie is showing up in 4-5 different categories to pad out the home page.
That's the direction games are headed—it's not going to be a subscription for a whole bunch of titles, it's going to be a subscription for a single studio's titles, with a different subscription needed for each studio.
And that's why people are getting disillusioned by the streaming model, and why media piracy is back on the rise after a while of being on the decline.
Not to sound snarky, but try to find an older movie like "Lost Boys (1987)" on one of the many streaming services. This is not an infinite library but they pre-select what we can and more importantly can't watch.
For now. People have learned from Netflix that soon it won't just be Game Pass, but Game Pass + EA Play + Ubisoft Play + Paradox Streaming + 2k streaming + Square Enix + ....
Yes but they want your $60, not just the $10, while making you accept to basically get less.
They are in the money making business, not in the make people happy and still able to play great memories with their kids 20y down the road, occupation.
They want to get used to getting paid more overall. It's about the same lately with most products at the grocery store. Big brands know they wouldn't be able to charge more for the same thing, so they charge about the same for less of the same thing. Your 180g 2 bucks chocolate biscuits box is now a 150g. Sometimes they push the envelopes and up the price just a bit. Because they feel they can. And they do.
I highly doubt their tactics will work much longer, people learn and are starting to see, and angered by the squeeze. Brands would have to invest even more effort to find new ways to successfully trickery, diminishing even further value put in the product itself.
Good on GoG. Games are loved when they are fun, AAA aren't all that fun anyway. GoG's great choice for your wallet.
Back to being able to play good old games with kids decades later, imo emulators will support, at least much more likely so that a console to still be found and boot so long later.
I've had one experience with Ubisoft in the last decade. Their demo works on my switch, but the paid game can't log into their cloud and is unplayable (my ISP uses a CGNAT, and the IP address was banned).
Of course, I bought it from the Nintendo Store, which means no refund (a charge back would get me banned from the Nintendo Store, nuking unrelated purchases).
They've definitely trained me to not buy their games. I'm strongly considering setting up a Switch emulator so I can play the title in question.
I've called Nintendo support and asked for a refund before. They said they don't allow refunds, but as a one-time exception they would refund my game. Others online have had this happen too. I think this must be an internal script they must have. You can refund a digital game, but only once ever.
You could try doing that for your Ubisoft game and see if it works.
Although, the refund came in the form of store money; my card didn't get anything back.
I've contacted Nintendo on the phone three times in the past and have received three full refunds for digital purchases and every time they said it was a one time thing, so that part is just a script the phone agent is required to say. They don't actually track or enforce it as the second and third times there was no mention of my previous refunds.
That seems very shortsighted. I would stop buying titles if I only ever got one return. Particularly in this case where the thing doesn’t even work out of the box. In fact I’d say it’s a good reason to avoid the platform entirely.
I agree, it is a good reason. At least if you buy it physically, e.g., at Walmart, you can get a refund, or resell the game if not. It's a less risky purchase if you buy it physically.
1. Your ISP, for blocking access to a game server
2. Ubisoft, for requiring a cloud connection to play a game
3. Nintendo, for not allowing refunds for digital goods.
Seems odd to focus your blame on just one of the three.
(Instead of blaming anyone, you should get your Switch to talk to a VPN and then enjoy your game.)
The ISP didn't block the game server. Ubisoft blocked the entire ISP, so there are only two parties at fault. Presumably, they also block VPNs. Either way, switching to emulation is cheaper / easier.
I'm guessing Nintendo is more worried about Switch emulators than Ubisoft, so I think my rage is directed appropriately. :-)
Ubisoft connect is a horrific, bug ridden piece of shit on windows, too. Every once in a while I accidentally buy a Ubisoft game and every single time I spend 15 minutes fighting with the game/launcher then give up. It’s not that I couldn’t eventually get in, but it’s just… why bother? This shit should be seamless and transparent.
This is a ideological divide that people are going to have to come to terms with. Corporations want people to be slaves to external will. It seems like a minor issue, like with the example of paying for a subscription to Xbox’s Game Pass, but what this really says about ownership in the ultimate sense is that you have chosen to believe that you don't own anything.
That has a big negative impact on society because it moves us further and further way from whats good for the public when it comes to private ownership for individuals.
It's an ideological position that doesn't benefit you, but only benefits organizations that are hijacking free will and ownership. Anyone that considers this for a moment could understand that your decisions have an impact on the world. And I guess it comes down to the idea that maybe there are import things to consider outside of your own personal need for convenience.
I always found the phrase vote with your wallets strange. Does that mean larger wallets get larger votes and smaller wallets smaller ones…?
I would say don’t vote with your wallet. Rather get out and actually vote in an election, write your representatives and senators, call them, make appointments with their offices and go visit them to discuss your concerns.
Everyone seems to have this learned helplessness that if they don’t buy something that it will somehow change, rather than just engaging the democratic process to effect laws that shape the society they want to see.
Engaging with the democratic process means changing laws, which requires the consent of lawmakers, so either deep pockets or an extremely broad consensus of citizens who care enough about the issue to vote on it. Those laws might also have negative side effects that we didn't anticipate, and changing the law once it's enacted is very difficult. This makes this strategy very high cost and unlikely to have the desired effects.
Market solutions require no coordinated action, no new laws that could have unintended side effects, and is much more likely to succeed. Products and companies fail all the time because they don't offer something people want to buy! This has a much higher success rate as a strategy and is also easier: don't like the product? Don't buy it.
Obviously this isn't universally true: there are things we have to buy, like food and shelter, and so those industries ought to be more carefully regulated (and they are!), but we're talking about video games, which are a luxury leisure purchase.
> Engaging with the democratic process means changing laws, which requires the consent of lawmakers…
You have it wrong, lawmakers are elected by the consent of their constituents to represent them. In a democracy people are not at the mercy of lawmakers but rather lawmakers are employed by the people.
> Those laws might also have negative side effects that we didn't anticipate, and changing the law once it's enacted is very difficult.
This nihilism is overrated, of course people have to change things and should change them rather than refusing to do anything because of some “fear” of change.
> Market solutions require no coordinated action, no new laws that could have unintended side effects, and is much more likely to succeed.
If the market was perfect and worked how you described this conversation wouldn’t even be happening.
> Obviously this isn't universally true: there are things we have to buy, like food and shelter, and so those industries ought to be more carefully regulated (and they are!), but we're talking about video games, which are a luxury leisure purchase.
No, we’re talking about ownership and which class of people in society are allowed to “own” goods.
> Does that mean larger wallets get larger votes and smaller wallets smaller ones…?
If it is something that can purchased multiple times from the same wallet, then sure, why not. But in most cases of purchases, one is all someone wants/needs. This would mean that the smaller wallet has the same voting power as the larger wallets.
Steam has done more to normalize digital "ownership" than any other org.
A whole generation of gamers has been brought up to think that they're buying "Steam" games when they're really buying PC games that artificially have a middleman now where one never had to be before.
Steam always treated games as collection items. They understood that gamers wanted to collect games and today most games bought are not even played, they are sold to be collected.
Unfortunately, even when purchased on steam, Ubisoft games will launch through the Ubisoft app (forgot what it's called), where they're free to make you sign up to play and advertise their subscription services to you.
"If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."
He could just as well be telling the rest of Ubisoft (and the games industry) that in order for customers to be comfortable you need to not delete things and allow people to keep what they invested in the game, and that if you take things away from them then people won't be comfortable.