I think this model can work, and has its benefits (like with Game Pass). To be clear though, Ubisoft’s offering is shit and not worth the price they’re asking. And one thing I absolutely hate is the (sometimes timed) exclusivity on some of these platforms. The Lost Crown looks great for example, but Ubisoft are trying to force people to use their service by not offering it on Steam.
Personally I don’t really mind not ‘owning’ the game in most cases. 9 times out of 10, I’ll play a game and be done with it. Short, linear indie games for example are perfect for a Game Pass type model. What we don’t need is 10 similar subscriptions with their own exclusives.
This. I already don’t own my music (Tidal, Spotify) or my movies (Netflix, etc) and I already have been using Gamepass for years just fine.
But movie streaming is a HOT MESS right now. I looked up the X-Men movie franchise the other day for some reason. No joke, it’s split across 3 or 4 different streaming services! And next month, it could change. There are streaming services like Peacock or Paramount that have absolutely NOTHING worth watching except one or two shows (e.g. Parks and Rec or Picard) and I really want to watch it but there’s no way I’m throwing down money for a streaming service just to watch one fucking show. All it does is piss me off.
If the same garbage happens with gaming where everyone thinks making their own is the way to go, instead of just using a few big ones, it will not succeed. Ubisoft making their own is a bad idea. It’s bad for us for the reasons above and it’s bad for them because we won’t use it.
But movie streaming is a HOT MESS right now. I looked up the X-Men movie franchise the other day for some reason. No joke, it’s split across 3 or 4 different streaming services!
We already don’t own our games, because we can’t sell them. We used to be able to sell and exchange games, but with digital platforms like steam, we don’t have the right to sell them anymore, meaning we only bought the right to play the game, not owning it.
Not that there are many pro NFT folks here, but even with that approach it’s still just a transferrable license that they can change to be meaningless.
They added DRM to a more than ten Year old game I had bought. I'll never purchase another ubisoft product without then heading to the high sea to get a uncrippled copy. Odds are, I'll just not bother.
One downside of always-online DRM is that it kind of deanonymizes you. I mean, the game retailer knows that a given person is at a given IP address at a given time, and that information has value that could be used down the line to combine with other sources of data.
Avoiding that would require something like a VPN system that uses a different IP for different services.
It doesn’t matter any more than any other individual data point. The concern is that when all the data points are collated, it gives a LOT more information about someone than many people realize.
It’s not the game in particular – it could be any service that one makes use of over extended period of time. The issue is that one can correlate with other data.
You have the same problem with Steam already for years.. I mean you do not have a physical copy anymore. In fact if Steam is down, you might not be able to download, play or play multiplayer. So you own nothing and be happy - WEF.
I did thought you were crazy in the past indeed. Since digital is the future, right? It might still is, but for some reason all game studios, producers and distributors like ubisoft or steam just create bad software/games. Where you need 24/7 internet connection and doesn't allow you to own a digital offline copy of the product. It's not just games.
Steam is different, though; many games have no DRM and even more just have Steam’s DRM that’s already been cracked globally and is super quick to patch. They also maintain access to paid games even after they’re delisted.
AFAIK, the only problems with maintaining access to Stream games are software-as-a-service games when servers go down (MMOs and multiplayer servers, basically) and music with expired licenses (fuck the RIAA and copyright law for that one; not much Steam can do about that.) I have many delisted games in my library and I can download them any time I want.
Sure, Steam could go down, at some point. Maybe. But it’s not a big concern.
Nope.. Some games will fail to start if the "main" server is down or some authentication server or whatever server it nowadays might depend on. So even if you install a game now and let it rest of years, the changes it will start again over 10 years is very low. I'm not even talking about multiplayer, since multiplayer will be definitively broken by then. And LAN features are no longer implemented by game devs.
I do agree that gamepass will only make matters worse.
I could see myself not playing with a subscription service. I can only play games only so many hours a week as I have a lot more commitments now. I’m not gonna spend money on a monthly subscription for a handful of games that I might play. I’ll just go back to pirating games.
One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.
I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:
2021 - 23 million
2022 - 25 million
2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.
If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?
It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.
The reason people I know tend to give for not using GamePass is you’re essentially paying for demos (which still exist on PC pretty often. I just bought Roboquest because of the demo.)
EDIT: Also, $12/month is a huge amount of money for me to spend on something like that. Just shy of 150/year for games that aren’t good enough to own, but are good enough to play, doesn’t strike me as valuable.
2 other people play on my account from sub accounts on the console. They each play multiple games per month. $12 is less than $60, so even a single new game each month saves me money.
Paying for demos? I’m not sure why you think there aren’t any good games on there. Halo, Starfield, Fallout, Cities Skylines, Forza, Mass Effect, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Assassins Creed, Yakuza, Dead Space, blah blah blah.
And that’s not including all the smaller games my kids have found. Human Fall Flat, Rubber Bandits, Donut County, Frog Detective are all games we found that we otherwise would never have spent money on.
I don’t support subscription only models, but that doesn’t mean some aspects aren’t a good value.
If the games stayed I’d check it out, but having a game for a few months isn’t something I find value in, which tends to be what people I’ve spoken with about it. Especially since you don’t choose the games.
Also, seriously the PC app is absolutely awful. The games work worse on it than on steam. It crashes, has terrible performance, and break installs constantly.
You also can’t mod a lot of these games, which particularly on PC is a pretty large missing piece.
That’s also not to mention the cost has doubled in two years.
You’re allowed to enjoy it, but I think it’s also clear why it isn’t taking off.
My issue with getting into indie gaming is I have no idea where to start. I always end up with some frantic platformer that doesn’t do anything for me. But I just want games that aren’t a mess on release and everyone says to go indie.
I just go by reviews, usually from people I know. The only real difference between AA/A and Indie titles now really is marketing budget and size of team. Not much else is different. You also run into issues about what counts as indie now: it used to mean without a publisher, but it seems to have morphed into ‘a smaller company.’
But yeah, just look up reviews. Games like FTL, Hades, and so on tend to become known by word of mouth.
I have stopped giving even the slightest fuck about Ubisoft games. There are way more games than I have time. It’s just another filter for what to play next.
Buying a CD/DVD was never ownership of the media that’s on it. It’s ownership of a piece of plastic and a license to play to the content on the plastic within certain limitations. If it was ownership, you would be allowed to project the DVD on a wall and charge patrons to view it, but legally you can’t, because you don’t own anything but the plastic. Buying a CD/DVD was always just a more convenient version of buying a ticket to a concert/theater to see the same thing. You’re paying for the experience of viewing their artwork.
So, as long as you also agree that sneaking into a concert/theater to view a show without paying also isn’t theft in any way, then I can’t argue.
Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.
If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.
Just want to highlight how unnecessarily antagonistic your response was. Not sure if that was your intention, but I don’t care to engage with it. Cheers.
I respectfully disagreed with the top level post, and stated facts about why. If that was interpreted as not in good faith, I’m sorry, and I’m open to any counter arguments. So far, two people have pointed out that physical media can’t remotely have their licenses revoked, and I agree, that is relevant to the discussion. If you have anything relevant you’d like to contribute, I’m all ears.
You’re replying to everyone in this thread with half-assed insults and underhanded comments and then playing victim and complaining about how “nobody wants to discuss this in good faith”.
although I could picture you wanting to be if that makes sense.
From my perspective, it sounds like you’re reading my posts with an unwarranted intention behind them. I have to assume this stems from you disagreeing with what I am saying, but to my knowledge, nothing I’ve said is incorrect. If you could point to something I’ve said that’s incorrect, I’d be glad to discuss it. Also, if you could refrain from the namecalling, that would also be appreciated.
I think his point in this case is you own the physical item but not the information on it. If not then I could buy some musician’s cd then I could say “Now I own their music” and start selling copies of their cd, publishing it, stealing their rights to it, etc. I think we can all agree that would be bad.
‘No, see, he meant exactly what you thought he meant.’
Again: I know the difference between individual property and intellectual property. I am condemning the corporate word-games that would deny one of those exists, and the the tutting of people who take that for granted. I don’t need a fucking primer.
Yes, you own the information on it. You don’t own the rights to distribute it to others, but you bought the information and the right to personally use it. When you buy a painting, do you only have a licence to view it?
When you buy a painting, do you only have a license to view it?
That’s a good question. My guess is that the rights to create prints of the painting usually remain with the artist. You own that painting, you probably even own the right to display it for an entry fee, but unless the artist has granted you a license to the artwork, I don’t think you can freely create copies.
Indeed, the right to make copies are often licenced (although you can also sell that right) because it is explicitly written in some conventions (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention?useskin=ve…) that the copyright resides with the creator to begin with. I don’t think the Berne Convention deals with the option of transferring intellectual property and the copyright to them, but I’m assuming it’s mostly defined well enough in some contract law or other.
You’d be surprised. There seem to be vanishingly few people here willing to honestly discuss the legal questions around piracy and copyright. The vast majority are just here to circle jerk about how much corporations suck, completely forgetting about the rights of artists they’re defending in the anti-AI circle jerk one thread over. I honestly think they spend more time flaming anything they disagree with than actually putting any thought into the matter. The dogmatism rivals that of conservative forums.
If I’ve said something false, let me know. As far as I’m aware, what I’ve said is how the law works (at least in the US). I understand if you don’t like those laws, but that doesn’t make them not exist, nor does it make them irrelevant when someone makes a reductive statement like “if buying isn’t ownership, then piracy isn’t stealing”. The fact is, in some cases, it is.
Yep, this is a valid point. The volatility of access seems to be a convenient side effect of modern streaming technology. I agree that there needs to be regulation around this as it’s currently too easy for a company to suddenly say “we’re pulling access to the thing you paid for right now, sorrynotsorry”.
It’s not reasonable to expect that they have to have servers available serving the content 24/7 indefinitely, but either govts need to force companies to clearly label access to digital media as some sort of “rental agreement” similarly to how renting a video on youtube or amazon works, and making it clear that the user will only be able to access the stream for a minimum of some specified amount of time, and/or they should be required to offer a download of the media for a certain amount of time.
This isn’t a side effect of streaming technology, they could let me download content on my NAS and burn my own discs but they don’t because their goal is profiteering and NOT serving the best content in an open technological environments.
“Corporate enshittification and commodity fraud” is a more apt term.
“Fraud” would imply a crime. I’m always happy when some european country has a law on the book that enables people to hold a company accountable for their shitty behavior, but in the US, we have some work to do there.
“Enshittification” is a…surface-level description of what is happening. I’m more interested in the “how we got here” and “what needs to happen to prevent it”. Because no company has “make the experience objectively shittier” on their list of new features. Blaming “enshittification” holds as much weight to me as blaming “the deep state”. It’s not a real thing, it’s just how you perceive the emergent result of a system with certain rules and incentives. The real question is, which rules and incentives should we prioritize, and how can those changes most effectively be implemented.
Not true. You get personal ownership of the media in it, and even if ripped, you can personally keep it without “unauthorised distribution”. These were the 2 keywords they used to use on the rim of every disc. DRM implementations were a method to prevent ripping, but ripping always happens with DVDFab.
Streaming prevents that ripping part, or having it on your personal storage, and the ability to play it forever without an expiration date. The obvious purpose behind it is to gatekeep any media to repeatedly buy it and “consoom”. And some of the streaming DRM these days (fuck you Netutv/hqq) prevents 1:1 stream ripping, so screen recording is the only way, or using a HDMI cable with recording output capabilities.
You already don’t own your games. Or much of anything else really. You purchase a license to use the product.
At any time the people who sell you these products decide they don’t want to offer their products or services, if they want to abandon them altogether, if they want to brick your hardware and not accept responsibility, if they want to remove features, if they want to add new paywalls, they can do all of these things and see no repercussions.
The only thing you can do is wait until the game has demonstrated that it might be worth what they’re charging, buy a copy from a DRM-free store, then create a local/cloud backup.
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