Ubisoft games have such a weird “design by committee” feel to it. Like they poll the internet every few weeks and make decisions off of that. New hot game has battle pass? WE HAVE BATTLE PASS.
They also seem to follow a checklist of mediocrity. Every game needs a dozen collectable items. Every game needs to have the same l types of quests that GTA3 had. Every game has to have a massive open world. Every game needs a online component and live service. Every game needs a incredible hook, which then they Marvel-safe it to avoid offending online babies.
Their games come off with 7/10 energy. Ubisoft games don’t move the needle. They’re pretty adequate as a game. But when I have thousands of games to choose from every year… Ill pass.
They CAN still be fun. General fact of the matter is that the games we find fun aren’t always necessarily innovating much. Sometimes it’s just a comfortable routine.
Absolutely not going to fault anyone that finds their games boring though.
I played the Division 2, Ac Valhalla and FarCry 6 for 100+ hours. They helped me during the worse times of the pandemic.
But if I was talking to friends or making recommendations, we’d be taking about games that are better than that. The Elden Rings or the Ghost of Tsushima
I think the problem is that they use the same open world formula that they started, but others have taken and improved it and they haven’t kept up with the times. Shadow of Mordor/war scratch the same itsch as assassin’s creed with more interesting mechanics. Those aren’t even new games at this point. Horizon zero dawn and forbidden West offer a more action focused experience with a better open world, again not super modern games.
It’s like Bethesda, they are still putting out games that are straight from 2010.
I like steam as a user but it’s still proprietary software and I’m slightly concerned about what is going to happen when Gabe Newell steps down as president and ceo of Valve.
They are a Russian Developer with contacts to military units who support the war in Ukraine and also mocked Ukrainian with screenshots in their game…so why expect you no shitty behavior from them?
From what I found they have made no comment other than “they will not leave any markets due to war”
As for being Russian
"We have a mix of talent, some veteran developers, some new to game development. But everyone loves guns and FPS games. One of the studio leads is actually a former Spetsnaz officer, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Special Forces."
I am aware they are Russian, and I don’t expect them to actively condemn the invasion, as it would be dangerous for them. If there is proof they were actively supporting the war or mocking Ukraine, that’s a different story.
They moved their office to London (wonder why…) but part of the team still works from their origin in Russian St. Petersburg. And here is what I’ve found:
And this happened more than once, so that is a long-term partnership. Buyanov recorded joint videos with Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov, a Russian translator and blogger known for his anti-Ukrainian stance. And Puchkov himself was a guest at the Battlestate Games studio.
Nikita Buyanov and his company actively partnered with companies in the Russian military-industrial complex. This group actively funds and supplies separatists, they ask for donations to supply their members who are going to fight in Ukraine, they participate in podcasts from occupied cities and Tarkov’s developers prop up their platform by including them (in no small capacity) in their game.
One of the new traders they are planning to add into the game is named “Khokhol” which is an anti-Ukrainian ethnic slur used by russians. There is also a feature in the game where you can become a character called a “Scav” when you become one you are assigned a random russian name, sometimes they are memes like “garandthumb” or “robokop” but in their depravity, there is a chance that your character can be named “Hohol” which you see when you die, or other players see when you kill them.
The developers of Escape from Tarkov, the Russian studio Battlestate Games, have published several new screenshots of the game. As Artem Lys noticed, on one of them the character shows the middle finger to the player in pixel uniform and with yellow tape on his hand, which clearly symbolizes the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
" A moderator on the game’s Discord server, for instance, said “watching u all cry, amuses me so much,” while another said on Reddit that complaints about weapon nerfs were perhaps in reality a question of “skill issue.” "
Are you kidding? That’s fucking hilarious. Learn to use a different weapon than the railgun you absolute chuffs.
There is this exercise you can do for Agile/Lean estimation where you run a multi stage beer store by passing only order quantity notes up and down a chain.
The intent is to trick the participants into a whiplash effect where the retail store has a one off jump and so orders bigger than normal, and the whole supply chain then gets excited and thinks this is the new normal rather than an anomaly.
The exercise ends and the excess beer in the chain is counted.
You are not wrong, but remember that they only employ like 40-50 people. Even if the playerbase goes down to 10% of what it is that’s still not a lot of people.
David Rosen of Wolfire Games (Receiver, Overgrowth, Lugaru) is alleging that steam reps have threatened to de-list his game if he lists it as less expensive on other platforms. Specifically not just steam keys but other distribution platforms.
Which is hard to believe, considering how many times I’ve bought steam games on other (legitimate) platforms that were cheaper than on steam, that are still on steam today and werent removed for being cheaper on another platform.
I believe it is in the Steam marketplace agreement, and applies to all games. Are you referring to sales on other platforms, or to the full listed price?
Sure, but Valve essentially reserve the right to no longer sell your game if it’s offered cheaper elsewhere. See the quotes on pages 54 through 56 of the complaint.
I think the justification would probably be that if they continued listing the item:
It maybe mislead consumers into paying more for the same thing
The reason why people pay more in that scenario is for convenience (IE all games in the same place) but that would be exersizing valves monopoly, so it may be safer to just remove to reduce complaints to steam about the higher pricing because there will be operational cost to processing those support requests and complaints
I don’t feel like valve does everything because of lawsuits. Open sourcing proton wasn’t due to a lawsuit. Releasing Cs2 as a free upgrade to csgo wasn’t due to a lawsuit.
On the other hand and in response to your comment, I think the regulatory fix is that platforms must display their platform fee clearly and separately to the publishers price.
CS2 as an “upgrade” to CSGO has been less than well received from what I can tell. If they wanted it to be free it should have been a new game and left CS:GO in place. Removing a game many of us paid for in favor of a newer, different game isn’t something that should be praised, and should be called out as the anti-consumer move it was.
It isn’t the peoples’ company, but nor is it a publicly traded company that is obligated to pursue profits above all else. It’s Gabe’s company, and he gets to run it as he sees fit.
Ultimately Wolfire’s argument falls apart not because Valve is setting the terms, but because their claims about Valve’s position in the industry and supposed abuse of power don’t hold much water.
No corporation is “the peoples corporation”, but some corporations treat their customers with a lot more respect and fairness in pricing/policies than others.
“I do think, though”, he concedes, “we have stumbled, and it feels like stumbling on a mechanic that has never been seen in a game before.”
“And a lot of this is very mystical because I’m trying to avoid to tell you what it’s like. But it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience”
I’m not really familiar with those games, only with the infamousness of molyneux, but wasn’t the player’s actions leaving behind a pretty clear effect on the world a common theme in those games? That may have been what he was referring too.
It may also be him naming those because those games were the heights that he wants to go back to. The games he had made when he was still relevant must be much more present in his mind than they are in ours.
it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience
Based on this description and given the only thing two of these games have in common, I can only conclude his latest project is a game focused on using your floating god hand to slap the shit out of your minion(s). I’m just not quite sure about the Fable connection…
Nintendo was able to sue palworld using a patent that didn’t exist before palworlds release. It’s not right, but they can do whatever they want regardless of what the law says.
People say this, but I believe it is mostly technically untrue. It’d be a relatively easy argument to say that a downloaded ROM that isn’t exactly the digital copy YOU purchased with a license would be seen as not legal.
However some people talk about literally ripping the game off the physical device themselves, hence copying their own copy of it. Now you are in grey territory of making copies of copyrighted materials, and in the case of more modern games like the last decade, they almost assuredly have language that specifies you don’t actually own the code and all that.
All I’m saying is be careful and probably refrain from repeating the fallacy that owning a game makes emulation of it legal, because that implies having the ROM is legal and that’s doubtful.
Copying your own game and materials for backup purposes is no grey area, and neither is development or use of emulators, and panicky, uninformed spewing of gut feelings are how public knowledge of your actual rights gets muddled into people with zero knowledge waxing poetic about how they THINK it works because they like games and think that makes their ramblings valuable.
/edit: I was WRONG. This is my memory failing me. I explain it further below, and apologize for wasting any time.
After the DMCA passed there was a case of a judge finding it legal to bypass DRM to make backup copies, but illegal to distribute the software used to do so. I have no idea if there was ever further clarification or new law about this. That was like 20 years ago. It was part of a case going after the company who was making the software, but the name slips my mind. I’ll try to look it up if anyone cares enough and wants to look for something more than hearsay on a forum.
I get you! I was bigger into copyright some 20-30 years ago myself when we would’ve all been on Slashdot.
To that end, I was WRONG in my post, I think I was conflating two things, and for that, I’m sorry. I was certainly thinking in part about Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley (2001). That was the case that decided that the software DeCSS was illegal, and you could distribute the software. I was thinking that while the court did agree with Universal over the software, that it did not find that breaking DRM on a product you owned was inherently illegal. (I legit think this was a “take” at the time. Probably wouldn’t hold up in court these days, sadly.) And I did find that years later the Library of Congress offered exemptions for breaking DRM on some hardware (vehicles, medical devices,) but I believe even those were temporary and have since lapsed.
Sorry I spoke so surely about something I was wrong about.
Not to be a stickler, but this does not say making copies is illegal - it makes circumvention of drm methods illegal. You can make drm’d copies as you like as long as you don’t circumvent the drm method. If your game isn’t encrypted, and the emulator doesn’t implement the drm, you haven’t circumvented drm - you are playing your legal copy on a device that does not implement the drm. It’s distinct from removing the drm from a device that implements it.
I do get that most consoles encrypt their software these days, but let’s be clear - it’s not as simple as “DRM means you have no rights.”
I don’t agree with any of that noise around the DMCA for the record. I feel like we effectively lost our right to archival copies.
On a PC, what you said about copying the DRM along with the data is largely true. It is possible sometimes to copy the DRM and reproduce the image with the DRM intact. It also might not be depending upon the copy protection mechanism. Commercial video DVDs used to employ tricks with the storage sector that made it almost impossible to properly copy by a standard computer disc drive. You could get around this with additional program like AnyDVD, but that was only available for sale outside the USA because of the fact that it allowed you to bypass DRM.
And like you said, the content can be encrypted. Decrypting it is, IIRC, considered bypassing DRM - at least in the USA.
Again, I don’t agree that this is how things should be, but the legality of emulation is complicated depending upon what we’re talking about emulating.
I also don’t like how things are legally speaking with DMCA, but the main takeaway is - the creation and distribution of an emulator, without DRM protections, is unequivocally protected and legal. ROM backup is certainly in most cases not, but if you are making your own copies for your own use, even while illegally breaking encryption, it would be difficult to prove and prosecute on an individual basis.
The right we must continually remind people is NOT even REMOTELY in question is the right to create and distribute emulators. This is by far the more important one, because people cannot reasonably develop their own emulators - it requires an open, collaborative community to ensure future preservation, and it’s a constant battle to keep people from actively trying to cede this right because they have nebulous loyalties to soulless companies that return no such feelings.
The emulation itself is legal, assuming you’re not using any copyrighted code, BIOS, etc. to make work.
The backup copy of your game that you need can be made legally as well, but in the USA, if the source contains a form of DRM, then you cannot legally make a copy.
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