I really enjoyed Driver: San Francisco. Then Ubisoft introduced UPlay and I couldn’t play it anymore. That was the last time I installed anything from Ubisoft.
I tried to reinstall it recently and it complained that you can’t install 32bit software from Steam anymore. I guess I’ll never play another Ubisoft game.
I entirely stopped playing Ubisoft games because they require me to sign in to play.
I straight up can’t play half of their games on PlayStation because of this. I had a different PSN account 15 years ago that my Ubisoft account is associated with and apparently your Ubisoft account can only be tied to one PSN account EVER. I’m not creating a new email just to sign up for Ubisoft play. So I don’t buy their games 🤷
The rest can burn, but man, Anno 1800 really is/was the best in its series, mandatory logins or not. It’s the only game I still hold on to my ubi account for, and I dread the day they’ll go under, because they’ll take the Mainz team and the Anno games down with them.
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?
A shame; the way they make their open worlds with lots of little things to collect and do are oddly pleasant to play for that. Definitely something only I really enjoy, I realize, of course.
Agreed. One reason I loved Majora’s Mask was that the game was dense. Every square inch of the game was used for something and in a lot of different ways. I also appreciated a checklist for my collectables so I could pinpoint what I was missing, but that’s rather off topic. I lean way away from open world games now both for excessive time commitment and most of it is just empty space.
Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla scratched an itch that few other open world action RPGs have been able to for me (of course, they were copying Witcher III, which did it far better). Despite everyone saying all their games are the same, I haven’t enjoyed any of their other ones like I did those three (oh, except for Watch Dogs 2). If Shadows is the same thing again but in Japan, I’ll be satisfied.
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