Part of me is sad because some of my favorite games might get shitcanned as a result, but it’s a loss I’m willing to accept if it kills such a parasitic company.
Ubisoft is clearly a tone-deaf company. But that doesn’t change that this comment has been frequently cited in some very out-of-context ways.
For those who don’t know, the not-owning games comment was in reply to an investor asking why people were reticent to try out Ubisoft+, their monthly service that lets people play pretty much all their games. He was suggesting many people are not used to the option of mass rental as opposed to ownership. But, many Game Pass subscribers (at least before their price increase) can attest that when the value proposition is good enough, it is an appealing option, wherein you accept impermanent access to get more games. In that sense, he was right.
So far as I can see, the intent of the comment had nothing to do with people who buy “lifetime” copies of their games. There’s separate criticisms to make about poor online implementations leading games like The Crew to be yoinked, and I’m in favor of that regulation. But Ubisoft is hardly alone in the way they’ve mishandled that, and the quote had nothing to do with it. I feel like most people pointing to it have only a vague idea of what corporate greed it represents, as though CEOs just want a way to delete your library and somehow make money from it.
Id just like to point out when you read the full article the context is different than the headline as usual. But regardless Ubisoft deserves their demise.
This article is from That Park Place, a right-wing website, so I’d take it with a grain of salt. It’s coming from “anti-woke” people who salivate over the idea of “go woke, go broke.”
A year ago Ubisoft exec gave an interview where he said that the next leap in gaming industry should be fueled by gaming subscriptions, and that gamers should get comfortable playing by subscription as opposed to buying and owning game licenses.
He then proceeded to give an example on how players got comfortable switching from physical media and full ownership to digital licenses.
This caused a massive player backlash on the wave of protests against the migration from ownership to subscriptions (aka “You’ll own nothing and be happy”). Ubisoft has got a financial dent as sales and subscriptions dropped, and is now facing a problematic financial future.
That’s what happens with DRM and digital licensing, which was considered by the exec to have most players already onboard.
Here, he was talking about gaming subscriptions, i.e. paying a monthly fee to have access to a library of games. Once you stop paying, games become unavailable, and games outside the subscription are not available either. His idea is to make more gamers comfortable with the subscription model despite it taking away any possibility to play when you stop paying.
It is difficult to know where to start, since there have been a lot of unpopular actions. A lot of these are pretty standard for the triple A studios unfortunately. Think DRM with always online and authentication server issues, toxic workplace, decommissioned games by removing the servers for them and not giving ways for people to self host, rehashing existing properties to milk success, having their own launcher so having double layers of authentication, microtransactions, subscription based model pushing, game variants locking out certain content unless more money is payed etc.
This is rather pedantic and obfuscates the reality and consumer rights. Don’t shill for big corp with that narrative, you could argue you don’t “own” a book either if we’re just doing silly talk in here.
Devil’s advocate: you obviously own the physical media that constitutes the book, but do you really “own” the contents of the book if you’re not allowed by law to make a million copies of it and sell them?
First off, I only called them a moron on a condition, and I stand by my assessment.
Second, playing devil’s advocate is meant to enhance discussion. What they’re doing is muddying the discourse and playing into the hands of copyright-holders. It’s very close to the “just asking question” bullshit that’s so prevalent recently.
You don’t, though. Or rather, you don’t own its contents. It’s not being pedantic, it’s simply correct.
This isn’t a perspective shilling for big corp. If anything, understanding that society has already sleepwalked into a post-ownership era long ago, and that technology has only just now appeared to let the logical conclusion of that come home to roost, should only increase one’s unease of mass unchecked corporate ownership.
You can’t buy a book, copy it, and profit from those copies because you don’t own the IP. But you own the book for your personal use (and you can lend or sell it) in perpetuity, without any dependence on whoever sold it to you. That last part is no longer possible in the digital world with games that are architected specifically so that core functionality is server-side only.
Like with pirating, it was always an issue of expense. They could legally take away your disk at any time and force you to uninstall the software from your computer. It just would never be worth it to go after any specific individuals for any minor infraction of the license. Digital licensing just made them capable of doing that with the press of a button.
It seems I’m miscommunicating. I’m being interpreted as saying, “We’re already here, and this is fine actually.” My point is “We’ve been on the setup for ages, you shouldn’t be surprised this is where we are going without intervention, and we need to intervene right now”.
The world hasn’t slowly built up to being this bad. They’ve been laying the traps for a long time. We’re in the late game, not the early game. There is a lot to undo.
It was not like this back in the '90s. Games you purchased were on disk/disks. You installed the game and played the fully completed game that did not require an online connection. You owned that game.
After the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 things changed. So it has not always been like this.
I guess I personally don’t really care about the legal aspect, I’ll make my own moral assessments on what I find reasonable to pirate etc. regardless of legality. Law only occasionally overlaps with ethics.
But on a philosophical level, a rethorical question I ask myself is; what does it really mean to “own” anything digital? I have to ponder on that for a while.
Before the internet, the concept of game ownership was much easier. Whatever the seller chose to call it, as long as I had complete control over when and where I could play the game, I owned it. I would consider any game where the ability to play it cannot be willfully taken from me by digital means to be owned by me. Nowadays, that mostly applies to cracked games or systems only. No game that requires an online connection to play would apply.
Oh that’s easy. For me at least. In my analysis, the law is wrong.
Where are the assets stored. On local storage? Then I own a copy of the assets.
Where is the game logic executed? Locally? Then I own a copy of that game logic. A server? Then I own non of that logic. A hybrid of the two? Then I own a copy of what my hardware processes.
Where is the game save data stored? Locally? Again, that a copy I own. On a server? I’m licensing it.
Here’s a good analogy: Monster Hunter: Processing, assets, and saves are all on individual machines. I can be cut off from the internet, and still play. I own a copy.
Diablo IV: the assets are local, processing my inputs is local, but my saves and the game logic are all processed on a server. I own a copy of the assets and input logic. Blizzard owns the rest as they process the rest.
If they want to do the whole “resources=expense” then I get to consider MY resources as expense too.
I don’t think most people’s sense of “ownership” of a copy of a game has anything to do with whether or not they’ve legally bought a license.
For most of my collection, I own a physical thing, that represents the ability to play that game, using hardware I bought, whether I bought those things today, last year, or even a decade ago. Some of my games are digital, but I still have possession of a copy I bought, and can play it whenever I want. I paid money for the right to play a game when I want, and that’s a notion of ownership.
If someone can take it away from me, that isn’t aligned with my notion of ownership, and also isn’t worth spending money on imo. I own some GameCube games, and yes, technically that means I have a license, but they still work physically and legally. There’s nothing to enforce against me.
The thing that changed is the ability to revoke that license. And that amounts to a different concept than ownership. One not worth paying for.
That’s not what they meant. The person who said it was “director of subscriptions.” They meant gamers need to get used to all games being SaaS because they are of the opinion that that’s what’s going to happen. SaaS is capable of generating magnitudes more money than any other paradigm, so this is of course the wet dream of the bean counters.
The problem with the statement, of course, is threefold:
People don’t like being told things that sound a lot like "just hand over your money and like it, dumbasses"
SaaS is also capable of failing spectacularly
(most important) In no conceivable world would it be possible to have every single game be a subscription service
Shit, the world can’t even support half a dozen streaming video subscription services, but they think everybody’s going to gladly pay monthly fees for every game they play?
Not sure what you mean. They needed more NFTs and AI from what I can tell! /s
Honestly though whenever I hear big companies like this fail, it keeps making me go back to the Steve Jobs interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
I mean, it’s not true inside a bubble. I’m sure there’s some incredible games that have been made by one person that didn’t find the kind of success that Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, etc did. But at a giant corporation like Ubisoft, they’re not on their own! They have marketing people, interns, studios and sub-studios, finance people, trend analysts, etc.
Ubisoft has some great IPs. But all of their best games came out over 20 years ago! So yes, quality is not the only thing, but it definitely matters.
I’ve hated what ubisoft has done to gaming ever since the fc3. Only shining beacons were early siege and rayman games. They have incredible artists and programmers working at it and could make some great games but the directors completely double down on the most generic, most mindeless wide appeal possible. I regret buying wildlands because the setting is unique. The game is as tactical as far cry which is just mindleslly run into camp, use your overpowered character against deaf and dumb enemies and complete the collectable.
I remember “Far Cry Blood Dragon” as the only entry that really stood out. The gameplay was exactly what you described but dialed to 11 (as it should be).
FC 3-6 … same game, identical mechanics, less over the top fun more boring and repetitive tasks. Somewhere at Ubisoft there is someone who is responsible for this, including all the consequences.
FC3 was a game changer. It was absolutely wild in its time. It’s just a shame that all of its successors went the same road… I stopper playing midgame FarCry V because it was… bad. The scenario was shit. The gameplay was shit. The map was huge but lacked substance.
Not for me since i had already played better open world games. Games like stalker which had amazing a life and animals that were programmed to act like real ones rather than spawning a tiger and an antelope 20m infront of you and setting one hostile to other, fc2 which was flawed but the ai interactions were mind blowing like sniping out a guys leg and watching allies drag him to cover, arma, crysis etc. all were better but fc3 was casual, accessable and marketed.
My solution to this is to buy at a price I think the game is worth for me, and if I overpay, I think of it as supporting the developer to make more like it.
lemmy.world
Aktywne