It’s a license to play the game, so when you pirate it is like sneaking into the movie theater. There’s no additional cost to the producer, but theoretically a loss of revenue from the license (movie ticket) you didn’t buy.
All that ignores the fact that they sure do pretend they are SELLING the game when it’s convenient.
I think a better comparison would be a “Drive-In Theater”, because with pirating you’re just seeing the film, not using their seats/venue (servers) so it’s like you’re sitting in the neighbors yard watching it from their porch. Still costing them what would be considered a “viewing purchase” for the data but you’re really not putting a strain on the theater itself by “attending or sneaking in”.
I agree with this point, and it’s also why I think the class action suit makes sense. Some of the people who bought The Crew got a physical copy, which is now just a useless disc. It’s still just a license like you said, and I agree that it feels like they’re selling the game.
It’s like if the movie theater sold a DVD for a movie, but the disc will only work while you’re in the theatre. Pirating might still be a crime legally but I don’t think anyone should feel bad about doing it here, Ubisoft absolutely does not deserve your money over slimy business practices like this.
the fact is, that most people who pirate, wouldn’t pay for it if they couldn’t pirate. It’s not a loss of revenue in most cases. I sure as shit wouldn’t pay for media if i couldn’t pirate. I’m poor as fuck.
No one should own an Ubisoft game. Its a company thats at the top of the list with Nintendo as far as the level of hatred and vitriol they have for their own paying customers goes.
Half Life 2 works offline just fine. You can even run the exe directly without Steam open. You just cannot compare the two. But yes, if Steam get shut down you obviously cannot download them again. Same goes for games on GOG. You could archive them, but you can also archive games from Steam, it’s all the same.
I wasn’t saying you can’t play them, just that you don’t own them. This is still true with DRM free games. GOG’s agreement is different to Steam’s in that you own your purchase
You don’t think you own every house with an unlocked front door, do you?
It’s a nice sentiment but seriously - the whole “if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing” thing is both overused and has always annoyed me. How are the two related? You can still be stealing regardless of if you have an option to buy or not. You could still steal an item that isn’t for sale.
What we really should be focusing on is whether pirating in and of itself is stealing, and whether it should be a crime. This overused phrase is distracting from the issue at hand, imo.
A user obtains the game through legitimate means by “buying” the game. However, they do not own the game, and are in fact, just renting something. This is despite decades and decades of game buying, especially pre-Internet, equating to owning the game and being able to play the game forever, even 100 years from now.
By pirating the game, a user has clawed back the implied social construct that existed for decades past: Acquiring a game through piracy means that you own the game. You have it in a static form that cannot be taken away from you. There’s still the case of server shutdowns, like this legal case is arguing. But, unlike the “buyer”, the game cannot suddenly disappear from a game’s store or be forcefully uninstalled from your PC. You own it. You have the files. They cannot take that away from you.
The phrase essentially means: You have removed my means of owning software, therefore piracy is the only choice I have to own this game. It’s not stealing because it’s the only way to hold on to it forever. You know, because that’s what fucking “buying” was supposed to mean.
I think Ubisoft is clearly in the wrong, but you’re not making a good case. You’re conflating very different meanings of the word “own”.
In terms of legal ownership, only the copyright holder owns the intellectual property, including the right to distribute and license it. When a consumer “buys” a piece of media, they’re really just buying a perpetual license for their personal use of it. With physical media, the license is typically tied to whatever physical object (disc, book, ROM, etc.) is used to deliver the content, and you can transfer your license by transferring the physical media, but the license is still the important part that separates legal use from piracy.
When you pirate something, you own the means to access it without the legal right to do so. So, in the case at hand, players still “own” the game in the same sense they would if they had pirated it. Ubisoft hasn’t revoked anyone’s physical access to the bits that comprise the game; what they’ve done is made that kind of access useless because the game relies on a service that Ubisoft used to operate.
The real issue here is that Ubisoft didn’t make it clear what they were selling, and they may even have deliberately misrepresented it. Consumers were either not aware that playing the game required Ubisoft to operate servers for it, or they were misled regarding how long Ubisoft would operate the servers.
Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty, i.e. a promise that what they buy will continue to work for some period of time after they’ve bought it, and an obligation from the manufacturer to provide whatever services are necessary to keep that promise. Game publishers generally don’t offer any kind of warranty, and consumers don’t demand warranties, but consumers also tend to expect punishers to act as if their products come with a warranty. Publishers, of course, don’t want to draw attention to their lack of warranty, and will sometimes actively exploit that false perception that their products come with a perpetual warranty.
I think what’s really needed is a very clear indication, at the point of purchase, of whether a game requires ongoing support from the publisher to be playable, along with a legally binding statement of how long they’ll provide support. And there should be a default warranty if none is clearly specified, like say 10 years from the point of purchase.
I’m not trying to frame this in the context of the lawsuit, even though that’s the point of the original article. The Crew’s nonfunctionality is just a consequence of our lack of ownership.
Perhaps this article would explain things better than I could.
Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty
No. That’s not true. Otherwise people wouldn’t be reciting this phrase over and over again.
Consumers want to fucking own shit again! Renting everything is the entire fucking problem.
believe it or not, it’s possible for 2 things to be true at the same time. ACS is cool even though Ubisoft is evil. what you call virtue signaling is just people having interests
What I love about being a broke bitch retro gamer is that I own my games. I have a Tetris cartridge that is older than I am and still works. The batteries on some of my GB and GBA carts have died, but that’s something I can fix. No one can send a stealth update to my Sega Genesis that forces me to create on an account to play or even bricks it somehow. There’s no room for human shit behavior, just a war against the realities of mechanical decay. (And it’s easy to rip ROMs in case of the inevitable.)
Older generations of gaming are well preserved. I don’t think the past ten years or the future will be. “Games as a service” is too big a draw - the goal is to turn everything into a subscription model because why make money once when you can make it forever?
We should all start a boycot and stop buying anything ubisoft, then release a statement when they go down saying: “cannot complain” and weren’t “deceived” by the lack of “access to our decade-old money”.
EU cutizens can sign European Citizens’ Initiative that aims to prevent publishers using killswitches to permanently disable games. If it gets 1M signatures, it will be discussed in European Comission.
Let’s compare with Destiny 2’s back cover, a game that is a MMO and thus “cannot be owned” by the players. Hey, a “Online Play (Required)*” sticker that is not present on The Crew! The fine print has a bit that states that “Activision makes no guarantee of regarding availability of online play or features, and may modify or discontinue online services at its discretion without notice.”
FF14 . It clearly states on the rectangular bit above the T Rating: “Users are granted only a limited, revocable license and do not own any intellectual property in the game or game data”
You deceived consumers, Ubisoft. “Online Play Required” is not there, so the game should remain playable offline.
I did and have read about it and disagree. I dont think anyone was tricked and thought they’d have the crew forever. This all seems very self entitled in my opinion. Point out any technicalities that you want to, people should have expected the game to be sunset eventually, and that it would be gone after that, just like every other online only game.
Which was a deception in the first place, because it clearly distinguishes between ‘1 player’ where it doesn’t say anything about needing a network connection, and 2-8 player where it says network and playstation plus required. It also says network features can be removed at any time, but nowhere does it say 1 player is a network feature. It specifically does not say that.
Why weren’t people upset when they first bought the game and realized they needed to be online to play it then? Why did it only become a talking point after the fact? You could argue it was shitty to make it a network only game and I might agree, but to say people were deceived and didnt realize it couldn’t be played offline until the servers were shutdown is absurd.
They probably were upset, but not upset enough to do anything about it because they still wanted to play it. I personally would have refunded it right away, and lots of people probably also did that.
Oh boy. If you look at Ubisoft’s stock prices, it’s way down.
Like high 80s in 2018. And now it’s 8, roughly 1/10th if it’s value.
They aren’t going to survive another few years at this rate without some bangers. How stupid their leadership has been, with NFTs, with their sexual harassment lawsuits, with bonehead anti-consumer practices is just accelerating this downfall.
See, boycotts do in fact work. They may not work instantly, but they do work if it’s your actual customer base doing the boycott. The Bud Light boycott also worked. The Target boycott currently has their stock in a tailspin, regardless of what they are claiming are the company’s actual issues.
That’s why I boycott video games from Ubisoft. I loved and am nostalgic of their previous outstanding games from when it was great - think of Beyond Good and Evil, the original 3 Prince of Persia games and the assassin’s creed games until odyssey(I’m hesitant to include Valhalla, but I’m at witt’s end here as Einar Selvik sang and composed the ost of the game for goodness’ sake). I even paid a (🤮) connect+ subscription that they threatened at some point that some accounts may be lost as per a number of days of innactivity.
But enough is enough, Ubisoft be better prepared to not own a company and be manned by Tencent. As much as I hate even the latter, Ubisoft is a scummy company and needs to be properly grouped in the scummy companies even by allegiance.
I hope the European Citizen’s innitiative for video games passes, in the end. The source code/maintenance of discontinued/stopped projects ought to be maintained by the players and its community.
I didn’t play the new Prince of Persia because they wanted you to be logged in to play. It looked good, but there are just too many options for me to put up with shit like Ubisoft.
Ubi used to have some neat stuff but post far cry 3 it is just the most generic, worst gameplay slop possible. And avarage person just loves repetetive slop.
To think this is the same company that has to use mythic quest show to promote its propaganda as good PR, guessing it’s partiall Rob’s machelennys fault for being so thirsty to stay in Hollywood spotlight he had to approach something like ubisoft.
Having watched all of Mythic Quest, I had no idea what you meant and looked it up - I didn’t realize there was any connection. How does the show promote Ubisoft?
My friend loves quoting a line from that show where HyperScape was uttered in the same breath as games like Call of Duty as a “mega franchise” to try to will its success into existence. That episode is only a few years old, but HyperScape is already shut down forever.
Anno 1800 was an Epic exclusive (and Ubisoft’s Uplay) for a year on release. It was available for pre order on Steam. I believe people that bought it on Steam prior to the one year exclusivity deal still got it. It was a whole thing though. Definitely would call it a controversy.
Nah, they are published by Ubisoft, so they go on regular ubisoft style sales. They are pretty good games though. I haven’t played the second one yet, but first one was really well made and polished game.
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