I legit wonder what would happen if this argument is used ( in a professional way by a professional lawyer ) in a court of law. Like, could this legit be argued to be the same?
NAL but technically speaking Ubisoft would lose because they would be unable to prove that they were deprived of anything or anything was appropriated from them with their current stance. Realistically they would just pivot and find some other nonsense to try, like claiming a theft of their computer server’s processing power everytime a pirated game accessed their lobby or some other nonsense that would barely fly, but fly none the less.
What if the game was purely offline? Also, how can a pirated game access online lobbies? The last time I pirated a game was because Epic had a BL3 exclusive. And I couldn’t matchmake.
I wonder who would have to prove what. Ubi, that they missed profit (because you’d want to buy the game and didn’t) or the player (who’d argue he wouldn’t ever buy it anyway).
Well the moving party has to prove their allegations, aka Ubisoft moving to sue you means they have to prove everything they say. Since their stated public position is that they are sole owner at all times irregardless of circumstances, they would be legally barred (estoppel) from arguing that any one could hurt their possessory interest (rights and share of ownership). They essentially would have to shift the argument over, similar to a theft of service argument (not paying a train fare is a crime but you didn’t steal a train or turnstile). The question then becomes what service does ubisoft provide? Online servers that do content distribution seem to be the only thing. If you got it on the high seas you never hit their network, so all I see left with my hypothetical napkin math is all that random network traffic ubisoft games seem to always have (even offline).
There’s a number of cracked games now with online play enabled, you just need to make a burner Steam (etc) account to use it so your main one with purchases doesn’t get nuked if they catch on.
I’m not sure how you drew this conclusion, since most people I know consider paying full price to obtain a digital copy to be extremely close to ownership.
I liked Telltale’s Law and Order series. They can’t sell it anymore, but I can still download my digital copy because I bought it full price.
The whole argument in the article is about monthly subscription rentals.
When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.
Audible is open about it. Well, if you dig through the fine print. Easy enough to rip copies but I’d say most people only realise they need to when they loose access. Maybe not, but $30 for an audiobook seems like pretty shity value if you’re only renting it untill you cancel your subscription.
Forgery usually involves submitting what you faked to some other entity in order to do something. Maybe if you illegally copied and sold that music. Regardless the penalties are similar anyway.
Incorrect. Last I checked, theft is depriving the original owner of their product or service. When it comes down to it, piracy is essentially making an illegal copy, meaning the original is still there.
They already fucked me on this years ago. One day I logged into Uplay and Battlefield 3 and my 2 other games were just fucking gone. Haven’t touched them with a 10 foot pole since.
Well I’m comfortable not buying any of theirs. They’re in my steam ignore list along with EA 🖕🖕
Ubisoft disable multiplayer in games like splinter cell and then have the nerve to charge you 20 ducats for a 10 year old game with only half the gameplay requiring a shitty launcher and with glaring bugs that they just didn’t bother to address.
As for the future. There is still emulation. So stock up 😉
Agree, I own a lot of games in Steam but most come from bundles or were not bought a full price. I do buy full price games on GOG because I can have a backup offline. hack score match 2023
Not even slightly. I tried to explain this concept to my friend some weeks back and he downright refused to believe Steam or other platforms would leave players without their games if they were to go belly-up, for example.
I’m quite comfortable not owning Ubisoft games, and have been for years. It helps that other than one Switch game that I have physically, they haven’t released anything really worth purchasing.
Agree, I own a lot of games in Steam but most come from bundles or were not bought a full price. I do buy full price games on GOG because I can have a backup offline.
The only difference is a huge difference though. Pay once for a game that you can access anytime versus paying continuously for the rest of your life to keep access to a game.
Some games are not worth keeping access to and subscription may end up being cheaper, but it is trading one benefit for another.
The only difference seems to be that steam doesn’t demand a monthly subscription cost, yet
Which Ubisoft isn’t doing either. This is just Ubisoft’s gamepass style subscription, which has been available for a few years now, it’s just getting a 2 tier pricing model.
I’m not enough of a Linux user to inconvenience myself so I’m just using Steam. The cloud sync is the killer feature for me - if GOG had something like it even if I have to pay extra, I’d so use it.
My big problem with quitting assassin’s creed is that it’s the best representation of what these places looked like hundreds of years ago. I know it’s not 100% accurate, but the fact that my wife could guide me around Rome in game because she’d lived there is one of my favorite gaming experiences. Replaying an AC game and reading all of the research has made vacations to places where they’re set amazing.
That said, I’m never buying a subscription to games. The second I can’t buy the game and have it, I’ll stop taking their abuse.
Sadly its also going to steal the position of a lot of people on AA and middle to indie size studios that need to cut costs to actually stay alive. Obviously some studios will stay afloat without cutting people or going deep into AI content but expect that to the exception not the rule.
It’s so dumb. Instead of struggling with AI to do what your employees did you could make your workforce 20% more productive using AI. Go further faster
Those two things are linked. I'm a frequent Economics Explained viewer, and the old comparison is that 1 accountant with a spreadsheet program can do what 5 accounts could do without one. If you only need the amount of productivity that that one accountant with a spreadsheet can output, that means you don't need four of your accountants anymore.
To use the accountant exemple AI right now or at least the way corp seem to use it is like asking someone without any accountant or spreadsheet knowledge to do the job of 5 accountant sure it might work but for how long and how many accountant you gonna need to repair and clear the problem later but that part don't interest them only short sight profit is important
If they want to put out poor quality products in pursuit of short term profit, they can deal with long-term consequences as they lose their customers' trust. This game is reviewing quite well at the moment, and most of the ways we're fearing AI will be used will result in poor quality products. I'd argue Ubisoft has been putting out poor quality products for a long time, and even this game won't be available in a form that I can consume it due to the short-term deal they made with Epic.
I don’t know if you could call this a positive, but I’ve definitely seen signs that the results of these projects will routinely turn out soulless and flop hard. In the past few years we’ve seen some VERY well-funded projects turn out as total flops. If that’s happening even with human creative input and corrective steering, what should we expect from AI following a straight algorithm?
We all could see that Unity’s layoff was coming, that pricing backlash not only drove away many developers, also probably was driven by troubling financial within the organization.
Twitch is sort of unexpected, but when I see the number of impromptu rules they rolled out and rolled back last year, whether from restricting multi-streaming, to limiting showing brands logo on stream, to restricting / unrestricting female streamers from showing too much skin, etc. I assume that means that even with all those intrusive ads, Twitch is still losing money.
I guess from now on, when a tech company starts to arbitrarily change their T&C / rules to either protect their revenue / market share, and maybe rolling back from backlashes, then it’s a sign that there’s trouble brewing (if you work at those companies, beware)
Unity is firing people as a result of a failed monetization attempt by the chief executive. I would argue the employees should have a case against the company and the chief executive. As this was so poorly implemented, fault could be argued.
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