Ubisoft about to take away games you bought
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
Then release a container image of your last working server software so that anyone can host it privately. And release a patch to the games to allow pointing at a private server.
It's really not realistic to do what your saying.
Then again my feature is only a part of the game and I designed it so you'd get 80% only hosting parts of it statically on S3.
Provided as context. The amount of effort the company (not ubi) has given to keep the servers running since 2011 and through gdpr is surprising given how few people actually use the feature. It's be way cheaper to refund the 10s of people actually playing their full price game license. many more people than actually playing would be offended though that we shut the feature down.
Even just half-assing it and asking the community to help would make a lot of people happy. People reverse-engineer closed games/consoles/services all the time. That's what a lot of cheat patches are anyways.
Otherwise, it's the kind of thing that usually ends up as a positive feedback loop: "We need more money" -> "Cripple some old games" -> "Users are buying less of our games" -> We need more money" -> "Cripple more old games" -> ...
We've seen it before with DRM, we've seen it before with microtransactions. When there's no organic way to complain other than "don't buy", execs don't get the message.
Asking for additional development work on a game that is being shutdown obviously won't work, as that that amount of time spent on a dead product is just a waste of money for the business. For example, asking the company to dockerizing the server software, or split their code from the licensed third party tools like speedtree, RAD Game tools, etc and release it open open-source just wont work.
However, I do think most companies could justify asking one of their developers to spend just a single hour to document/copy+paste the _bare basics_ of the network logic for the good PR alone.
They could literally copy+paste their network serialization logic (whether it's something high level like protobuf, or just a raw C++ enum for associating the packet ID's with descriptive names). That's it. Just that one thing alone would immediately raise my opinion of any company that has to shut down an online game service. Just that single thing alone would save their fanbase hours of time spent on reverse engineering the networking for server emulator development.
And as I pointed out that still won't work without hacking the actual console game because the console game has pined ca certificates and dependencies on the game network authorization that relies on crypto that just cannot be released. So to make the actual game work you'd actually have to make a change to and recompile the game.
Note this is running on a console so there are limited ways to hack/alter the game.
Grow a fucking brain and consider the implications of this little "stunt" where a user who has been playing an old game suddenly cannot play anymore. Why do you think that user will spend their hard earned money to pay you for a new game when they know the company will shut down their servers after a few years?
There are limited ways to fuck this up and the company is looking like doing the absolutely worst in terms of looking bad to their "target audience".
Cool I guess if that saves them a week or a month of a full time Devs time. That's worth more than the clusterfuck of PR nightmare it is going to cause. Nice.
I don't know man. The technical limitations you mentioned should not be difficult for the company that built the darn thing in the first place.
Again, I'd say its a matter of priorities.
Software isn’t a bunch of prepackaged recordings cut together and copied over and over again. You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in. Server software needs maintenance because it lives on a network and networks attract people who will screw around with it if vulnerabilities are known to exist (and there will always be vulnerabilities); and if the entity maintaining it decides that it is no longer worth the expense, they stop maintaining it. That’s their goddamn right so the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them because more often than not it is not if they will shut it down, but when and what you can expect afterwards. A $60 game you bought once probably doesn’t entitle you to full service for the rest of your natural life. Even a subscription has a time limited term of service.
I understand how the cost-benifit analysis today favours shutting down servers and retroactively taking away recently sold products. This is probably why the previous comment suggested the need for legislation.
What you don’t own are the servers running the server side features or the software not on the disc you bought.
It is true that the players do not own the servers, but it should also be illegal for game companies to abuse their customers using that asymmetry.
This is true even though Dark Spore was apparently a pretty dull game (I never played it myself).
If you’re buying a game with a substantial single player game, LAN-based multiplayer, and online multiplayer, the part you don’t get to keep is the latter portion when the game ends. You’ve effectively bought a game and a ticket, and you should know you bought a ticket because business entities don’t have the obligation to keep existing or to continue owning their assets beyond whatever their contracts require (and there’s even ways to sell those out depending on the contract). But you still own the rest.
In the case of a MMORPG or live service game, all you own is a ticket. And even then it’s not as if you can’t be banned from accessing the servers effectively at-will but usually for cheating or harassment. You have to know the difference, because an online game is an experience in entertainment terms where as an offline game is a re-runnable piece of media. That’s not to discount the scummy things software shops can do, but check the original article; they’re shutting down the servers mostly for games 9+ years old, one that’s only a few years old but is online-only (never heard of it, must not have been too successful), and I have no idea what Ubisoft is doing with the access to DLC part in some of those titles. The article didn’t explain that part very well which is basically what I expect from game journalism, but is this DLC that is intrinsically part of the online experience? Is it offline DLC you can still keep, but not redownload? Is this a little bit of column A or a little bit of column B?
Point is, for some things that you “buy”: when the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets taken down.
I will note the DRM server shenanigans are something I think should be illegal (on the basis that’s it’s a kind of fraud, but different than what you wrote about) though, and I’m surprised you didn’t bring that up.
Darkspore just didn’t have the cachet that SimCity did, so it didn’t attract as much attention.
that opinion is pretty convenient for the game publisher considering I've yet to see a single one who made it possible for a consumer to know the date they would pull the plug before purchasing the game.
How generous that it's our responsibility to do what we cannot do, but misguided to expect game publishers to do what they can do because it would be more expensive for them. Ubisoft makes billions in revenue. They can afford to not be deceptive and to make sure that players have an opportunity to access and continue to use their purchases for as long as the company has purchases on offer.
How you spend your money is up to you, but unconsidered legislating has much broader implications for society. If you think companies are not upfront enough now, or that it is not completely bleeding obvious that services with a cost component to them can be shut down at will after some length of time, then maybe that’s something to be arbitrated in court before we start flippantly talking about Acts of Congress for every paper cut we experience in life and it’s a meme at this point that like clockwork, somebody can go into some level of detail in what is involved for what people are asking for and you’ll almost immediately find someone saying “we need legislation” in nearly those exact words to the point that I don’t even think it is said in good faith; it just a reflex some people seem to have.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the multiplayer and live services components of games are more like an experience that you buy a ticket to than an ongoing game you can always return to. When the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets torn down.
Those are the requirements for making it easy to host it in an alternative location. Laws for incompatibility don't need nor usually require it to be easy, only possible.
Microsoft was able to release the network protocol for smb without releasing the binary, the assets, or the environment for their Microsoft server. They were able to release the network protocol without needing to be responsible for the development and maintenance of samba. Microsoft is not in any form responsible for security vulnerabilities in samba.
If Ubisoft released the protocol for Assassin's Creed 2 multiplayer then the only person responsible software updates would be the group implementing that protocol. A law requiring that minimum disclosure would not be expensive nor take a lot of work (unless the protocol documentation is conveniently deleted).
The biggest issue would be certificates, but if companies know before hand that protocol and authorized keys need to be published by the end of the product life, then companies will plan ahead to make those things easy for them. People who run companies can plan ahead when they are required to do so.
Counterpoint: No it's fucking not.
(It's not much of an argument in either case is it?)
We are talking about games that do like $150M+ in their first week of sales.
They have the money to put a dev on this for a week and shepherd it through legal or whatever. They could put a dev on it for a month.
There is no excuse, they're just being cheap and seeing if they can get away with it.
Why don't you go write your own open source game?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RagnarokOnline/comments/dj3l9c/so_t...
Release the binaries and installation instructions.
I used to play on a pirated WoW server. I was not in the community long enough to know /how/ there were rogue instances of a Blizzard hosted server software in the wild, but it was fun.
The same should go legally for games that age out of company support.
That's why Blizzard has such a hard time doing anything about them. There's no violation of IP with the server.
If you want to own your games, get used to either having old games and going to flea markets to find them, or buy from GOG. I've made a deliberate and purposeful shift to buy my games from GOG for this reason.
Except for a stupid prank ( https://www.criticalhit.net/gaming/breaking-gog-com-shuts-do... ) that - to this day - I am a bit annoyed by, I've greatly appreciated their service.
It was a marketing prank. Someone, high up in their company, thought it would be HIGH HUMOR to pretend their site went down before users could download their drm free games. They relaunched a completely new redesigned site a few days later, but this was a mistkae.
I still haven't forgotten or forgiven about this, but I still buy from them because the alternative is much worst.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...
Update: the highlight for anyone who doesn't care to follow a random link:
> The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”
Or, to this day.
Kind of reminds me of the Funnybot episode of South Park.
I for one think the prank that GOG pulled is HILARIOUS
Happened to me. Awful customer service.
Of course, it might be ridiculously expensive (go through the courts)--but that's what these companies are counting on.
For example going to the Steam checkout page it very clearly states that I have the option to "Purchase for myself" or "Purchase as a gift". I, like most English speakers, understand the word "Purchase" to mean something very specific. The words license, lease, rental, etc. do not even exist anywhere on any page in the checkout flow all the way through entering your payment information. I can only assume this omission is by design.
We all hate middlemen but this shows why they're needed (in the absence of regulation).
It's not perfect, as GOG does not have everything, especially most of the recent titles from EA, but it does alleviate the problem to a large degree.
For example, your Titanfall purchase on Steam is now useless, and actually it was useless for the entire time it was available for sale (since the servers were never operational at any time during the period it was available).
All of these titles they're talking about Ubi are available on Steam too (and the article specifically notes that some of them are still on sale with no indication they will be removed in less than two months).
"Steam games can't be taken away" is false, and "valve as a company hasn't taken away your orange box yet" is not a particularly interesting or insightful observation. And to be clear, they are legally allowed to do so under the ToS under some circumstances!
> If a game is removed from your Steam account for any reason, such as through manual deletion or a refund – we reserve the right to remove the games from your GOG.com library. (see https://www.gog.com/connect#faq)
I'd say it's unclear at best how well you'll be protected, but at least you can download and backup the DRM free installers for use even if GOG pulls the games out of your library.
> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services
> F. Ownership of Content and Services
> All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Content and Services and any and all copies thereof, are owned by Valve and/or its or its affiliates’ licensors. All rights are reserved, except as expressly stated herein. The Content and Services are protected by copyright laws, international copyright treaties and conventions and other laws. The Content and Services contain certain licensed materials and Valve’s and its affiliates’ licensors may protect their rights in the event of any violation of this Agreement.
> G. Restrictions on Use of Content and Services
> You may not use the Content and Services for any purpose other than the permitted access to Steam and your Subscriptions, and to make personal, non-commercial use of your Subscriptions, except as otherwise permitted by this Agreement or applicable Subscription Terms. Except as otherwise permitted under this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use), or under applicable law notwithstanding these restrictions, you may not, in whole or in part, copy, photocopy, reproduce, publish, distribute, translate, reverse engineer, derive source code from, modify, disassemble, decompile, create derivative works based on, or remove any proprietary notices or labels from the Content and Services or any software accessed via Steam without the prior consent, in writing, of Valve.
> You are entitled to use the Content and Services for your own personal use, but you are not entitled to: (i) sell, grant a security interest in or transfer reproductions of the Content and Services to other parties in any way, nor to rent, lease or license the Content and Services to others without the prior written consent of Valve, except to the extent expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use); (ii) host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet, network play utilizing commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks, websites or services, without the prior written consent of Valve; or (iii) exploit the Content and Services or any of its parts for any commercial purpose, except as expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use).
Which illustrates a large part of the problem. The sales page is designed to deceive you with the expectation that a very small number of customers will ever see and read through those terms. The terms by the way are 4,676 words and would take an average reader more than 15 minutes to read even if it wasn't obtusely written legalese.
Should that be legal and OK? To me this seems like an area where the offer needs to be plainly stated, and since that isn't happening then perhaps a consumer protection agency needs to step in.
(edit: previous word count was from the wrong version of the terms)
IDGAF, just because you wave a license agreement around doesn't free you from the moral responsibility to be honest about what you're selling. If you say BUY NOW and then bury specific redefinitions of 'buy' in a 5,000 word contract then you are engaged in deception. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you're not running a fraud, it's just a particularly elaborate and narrowly specified one. It's not that I don't understand contract language, but most people don't and there's a reason most service contracts are rendered in 5 point type and optimized for leverage rather than clarity.
I rarely bother to pirate anything, but lose zero sleep over the phenomenon because so many corporations engage in deceptive practices.
It's okay to lie everywhere else, as long as they tell the truth somewhere inside the small print nobody reads? And we are supposed to know which parts are lies and which the truth?
It's really frustrating to me that "say one thing on the page and another thing in the terms" has been steadily creeping from "that's a scam" to "that's a completely normal business practice", and it's even more frustrating that some people defend it.
Maybe we need a law that says "if advertising and the terms of purchase say different things, whichever one is more favorable to the buyer applies, even if the less favorable one has a provision that says it always applies in cases of conflict".
On Steam at least games don't depend on Steam for network play, nor do they depend on Steam's existence for them to work.
They is a fraction of Steam games that don't integrate with Steam in any way and therefore can be started by running their binary, but in my experience that is not most games.
Off-topic I know but Samsung retroactively disabled the oxygen sensor software for Samsung phones in Canada. I had been using it for a few years but one day after an update it was disabled by Samsung. The physical sensor still existed obviously but it was no longer usable on a Samsung phone that I owned. I think that should be illegal.
As a general rule, it should be illegal to issue updates that are not easily consumer-revokable to any device, if it changes functionality to be different to the time of purchase.
Unless you live in a country with actual consumer rights. Like Australia, as Steam found out when they tried to claim that their games weren't actually goods [0].
I think that the headline article with Ubisoft will also attract the attention of the ACCC, because how they're withdrawing access to a sold good's service, particularly the withdrawal of DLC, is likely to breach the conditions for how you're allowed to advertise and sell items in Australia.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/valve-has-copped-a-audollar3-...
However, I hate to point out that, GoG does in fact have some games with DRM, even though they make a big deal of the fact that they are an anti-DRM shop, and they get away with it buy pretending the definition of DRM is different to what most people think.
E.g. I recently bought Worms WMD. You need a Galaxy account to play. I'm not even sure you can cross-play with Steam, I think you can't. Without it, the game is crippled. I would not have bought it if I had known.
I'm not installing Galaxy either, and GoG has developed some dark patterns to try to push it on you (links to the actual installers keep getting buried deeper and deeper) but as long as they continue to let you download games without it I'm happy enough.
You forgot the great equalizer that is internet piracy. Download cracked copies of every single game in your steam library and you'll be fine for as long you can emulate your current platform. It doesn't stop online services from being shut down, but it does mean you can at least play games offline in 15-20 years as well as you can do it now, not matter what happens to steam or your account.
I'll say I love GoG though, and it's the first place I look when I'm buying PC games.
So here we have Ubisoft taking away, I presume, some amount of single player downloaded content from people who "bought" it because they don't want to maintain the servers that confirm they continue to be licensed to use it.
Sure, the company needs to control their resource commitments, but this sort of exposes the whole shell game. It would have been smarter of them to just unlock the downloadables when the servers go offline. It would be cheap goodwill.
I dont think any consumer expects an older program to no longer work just because the company decided it shouldn't work anymore.
No, you never could. That's copyright infringement.
As much as I dislike companies having the ability to revoke licenses and ownership, the climate impact of physical media means they should remain firmly in the past.
I’m more curious about why people think things ought to be preserved forever at all costs? I’m sure there are many video games from the 70’s and 80’s that have been forgotten.
the lack of optical drives in consoles isn't because the tech is 'dated' it's because forcing users to online-only and preventing players from owning physical media they can let their friends borrow or sell used makes more money for gaming companies and gives them greater opportunity to collect your data and push ads at you. It gives them greater control to censor, patch, and remove content too.
Optical drives in computers can also be a nightmare for consumers. Try playing 4k bluray content on your PC for example. It wouldn't be unreasonable for people to complain to Dell that they bought a computer with an optical drive but can't play the media they own without jumping through hoops due to DRM like this: https://www.pcworld.com/article/606652/4k-blu-ray-support-is... so Dell saves themselves a lot of problems by removing those drives.
Not true, because publishers or other middlemen can't censor the games that are on my shelf. My shelf also won't remove music from my games after license disputes arise. My shelf doesn't care if my ISP is down or if cloudflare experiences an outage either.
If I burn down my shelf, or step on a disk I'm on the hook for replacing the games. Physical media comes with its own vulnerabilities, but at least those are mainly in my control.
Sure they can. Tons of games sold on physical disk only had part of the game on the disk, with the remainder requiring internet access to download. Particularly more recent AAA games that are tens of gigabytes.
The fact that the companies selling the media make it useless without an account is a different, though absolutely material, discussion. It’s been a slow March, though, from “this is your unsecured audio disc and you can use it and copy it within fair use and sell it if you want”, then DVDs in 1996 with “you can use and play this disc if your hardware with this idiotic, fatally flawed encryption scheme says you can” - quickly amended via the DMCA in 1998 with “well, we meant as long as we and your hardware says you can, and if you break that it’s Bad”, then continuing on to later physical disc formats with other, still idiotic and fatally flawed encryption schemes. You could still sell your disc though, or loan it to your friends.
Now? Yeah, it’s all lies about it being a purchase, all the way down. How it would be nice, though, to see a court bitch-slap Amazon and Apple, and force them to facilitate your doctrine of first sale right for the Kindle ebooks and iTunes Store media you “purchased”.
Also... can we talk about the fact that they're killing off these old games because of, supposedly, the maintenance burden... but they're keeping the remastered versions. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just use the same game server in the first place?!
PC Gamer published and updated this article soon after: https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisofts-online-decommissioning-may-...
Ubisoft's FAQ: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/help/gameplay/article/decommis...
Additionally, the remastered versions of listed games will be retaining online features.
And remember that these have DRM, so your IPA file won't let me install the app on my device.
The do say that "player unlocked content will transfer over" but you'll lose the game dynamics of the first game forever...
Edit - grammar
This is something I don't like about the modern game landscape. But it appears to be overwhelmingly popular, for reasons that escape me.
Every time an existing game is updated, you lose the dynamics of the first game forever. How is Overwatch 2 replacing Overwatch 1 any different from that?
OW2, however, is going to be a very different game. And from the look of it... much worse.
That's one kind of update. It's not obvious that it's the majority of updates. The modal update appears to be motivated explicitly by the concern "we thought you might get bored if the rules of the game were too stable, so we're changing some of them".
Dice/EA's Battlefield 2142 (2006) was one of my favorite games on PC as a teenager. It's still fun - many of the game mechanics and game modes have not been replicated in any Battlefield title since.
For some background - Battlefield is a mostly multiplayer game, only a few have had anything approaching a campaign and it always feels like an afterthought.
Progression in BF 2142 is tied to you having an online account, whether you're playing a LAN game or not. Obviously today's landscape is way worse than even that, but it was something that felt egregious at the time. The game even came with a dedicated server binary so you could self-host game servers. However, it had to communicate with EA servers to check progression data of people joining the game and such. When EA shut it down, they took out both the matchmaking AND the progression service - meaning self-hosted servers and LAN matches were taken out as well.
Some people reverse engineered the progression service for what was essentially a decade old title at that point, and EA brought the hammer down on them. Let me remind you that you still needed a valid key for the game, this wasn't a crack to get a free copy, it only replaced the progression server so that LAN and self-host (official binary) servers could still function as originally intended.
EA said something about how it was their right to decide whether or not they were going to do something with the IP in the future, but it's dystopian to me that deciding the future direction of an IP can include reaching out and making previous content that people paid for inaccessible. We're not even talking about piracy in this case, we're talking about restoring function to people with real copies.
If you had bought them, they would be on a DVD, in your home, and they couldn't take them away.
In short, no, you have not been “granted a license” to view/play the content of a DVD – you don’t need one.
But in most jurisdictions, what you do with a DVD that you bought, in your own home, is totally up to you, so you can install the game even if the company that created it no longer exists. Heck, in most jurisdictions you can even legally disassemble the game and remove any form of online activation or similar, if the servers are no longer available
Expansions, other scenarios, etc.
This is part of why I believe in making multi-player exceptionally cheap and stable over time. I'm building serverlesss game infrastructure which is super cheap. It's a small tragedy when a multi-player games loses critical mass because the operational and maintenance costs don't out weight the revenue.
Or are you literally building your own atop something else?
Company-provided servers are an expense the company suffers, not something that's cheaper or more convenient than letting the player base operate their own servers. They make the game worse for both the company and the players. Why do you think they're mandatory anyway?
I'm building a new kind of serverless which requires one to use my language, and it is a completely vertical stack (by myself).
My serverless infrastructure will be price competitive with dedicated hosting.
The core reason why serverless sucks so bad is that every-single-interaction is metered, and generally you have no state which amplifies the costs.
This is high cost software that people rely on for business but since that era our phones and macs update all the time in the background, rendering sw we thought we owned non operational and requiring 'upgrade$'.
It's insidious and has created a whole generation who feel 'ownership' is ephemeral and at the whim of the sw creator, while being encouraged to think of products like creative suite as pay as you go, pay to play rental services.
We really need to get some user rights laws back in place around the idea that if you buy something you own it permanently because vehicles are rapidly evolving to be rental software cash cows too.
I've also heard horror stories of Adobe going after publicly listed companies who have multiple licenses for CS but who have people in offices in other countries who have gone shadow IT and are running unlicensed creative suites, with Adobe insisting they can sue the multinational company for license revenue for every single employee the company has worldwide.
None of this is healthy, whether a game, creative software or a car....
I think adobe is pretty happy with the results of their switch to subscriptions, but I personally don’t get enough use out of it to pay monthly. I used CS5 for years and years - I don’t need to have the latest and greatest. Maybe for someone else it is worth it.
To substance designer users, Adobe is about to *shut down substance share* with all its shared graphs, materials, textures and tools alongside it, they will not port any of these graphs onto the new monetized platform they made, and newly added tools on that platform will be locked off for learning as they are stored on the innacessible sbar format rather than the open format of sbs
They will shut down substance share on September, so if you want to keep local copies of tools stored there, it is now or never to back it all up
For reference to non-substance users, all of the info above was corroborated after a lot of discussion with adobe's lead product management, they will do it anyway, no matter what, there's nearly a decade worth of collective knowledge in that repo, and yes, they will nuke it anyway because it can't be easily monetized
The Ubisoft situation here is different. This wasn't ever positioned as a subscription, it's not sold or priced as one, so it's I think tantamount to theft by Ubisoft. They're stealing from everyone who bought the game.
Games have never been priced that expensively and so are less compelling even if they are subscription.
But in the case of games, it’s like a movie, you can’t go Agile with a movie and release the first two scenes and see what stories customers would like you to develop.
A better example is Stadia - where you buy the game, can only play it in Stadia and since Google seem likely to pull the plug on it; those games will quite likely become unplayable forever.
I can only partly sympathise with Ubisoft's argument that online services can't go on in perpetuity. Since there are a lot of really reasonable counterpoints:
1. Ubisoft aren't discontinuing online service for remastered editions
2. Is it really unrealistic to keep running such a service, at least until it is no longer played by large numbers of people? Also similar to your line of thinking, it's a shame that Ubisoft can't be compelled to release the server software when they discontinue online play.
3. They are literally still selling a title which will no longer be playable in less than 2 months.
4. DLC for these games wasn't free, and it'll be gone.
People aren't being unreasonable here, they're right to be upset.
* Adobe: Creatives/agencies were almost always on different versions of the software, or simply didn't have all of the apps. Something that hamstrung the industry and made it very difficult to switch agencies. Secondly each app began to reproduce functionality of their sister applications because it wasn't realistic to possess the master suite (e.g. 3D, vectors and video in Photoshop.) Now with the suite available to everyone, the apps are becoming more focussed for their purpose, and developers can spend more time enhancing that core purpose, rather than having to code shoddy me-too functionality.
First: I don't like this click bait headline. Ubisoft does not take away the game I bought, Ubisoft deactivates the online feature.
But saying that I totally agree with you that this is a bitch move.
But hey, let's think about "the system" here:
The internet and digital products changed some basic capitalistic processes: If you bought a conventional good, a chair or shoes, you were never able to just copy them. You have this one unit.
If you bought some piece of software, you could easily duplicate it and give it away. That is this great pain point that "the industry" is facing since the internet emerges (it's not the internet, I know, I'm just simplifying things here).
Now "the industry" tries to find a way out of this dilemma - and that is totally fair. The concept of "buying" a piece of software, a product, does not fit to the conventional concept of buying goods. A shoe is a shoe. You used it and at some point you throw it away. A software needs to be maintained. Someone needs to maintain it. It's just not comparable to a physical good and therefore the buying process cannot be applied.
Sure, Ubisoft could help the customer to get over it: Offer a server that you host for your own. I'm pretty sure: At some point in the future they will.
I don't like the concept of paying a monthly fee to use a software. Like probably most of us. But keep in mind: You cannot compare a piece of source code to a pair of shoes. So eventually we have to accept different business models like that.
So yes, people will be able to play the base games but will no longer be able to play the additional content they purchased.
Seems very easy to patch out. They should release one final patch that downloads all DLC for everyone and removes the server check. That'd take a lot of the sting out of losing multiplayer and be a nice way of saying "thanks for supporting us and playing our games after all this time" instead of saying "fuck you for supporting us, now buy the remaster and pay us for it all again suckers!"
The headline seems click-baity, and strictly speaking it's wrong - they're taking away one (online-only) game, the others are losing online features. Ubisoft pulling online support for multiple games would have been a more adequate title.
Obviously yes, and it was as obvious when those games were launched and sold.
> This mass decommissioning also demonstrates the preservation issues inherent to walled garden online services
Many game companies are not aspiring to build some everlasting cultural artifacts, but to provide entertainment today. Preservation is not some intrinsic moral obligation
It was obvious that they'd become a pile of junk bits in less than a decade?
> Many game companies are not aspiring to build some everlasting cultural artifacts, but to provide entertainment today. Preservation is not some intrinsic moral obligation
Okay? That might apply if they were simply, say, no longer selling the product (although at that point there's no reason for them to retain their copyright and other parties should be free to rip, crack, distribute, etc). But that's not the case here. They're taking something which users may have already preserved and saying you can't fully use it anymore.
--------------- <- the line
A server that exists to facilitate online play.
I would be satisfied with releasing the server as freeware (or open-source!) and adding a feature to set the multiplayer server by domain or IP address.
I do wonder if Ubisoft would gain some commercial advantage from being known a company that isn't just waiting to rip off their customers. Hard to speculate as most of their games look pretty mediocre in the first place, IMO.
I agree – I was not arguing that anyone should be allowed to do that. It’s just obvious why they would do this, if it was allowed. And Ubisoft is allowed to do this, so they do it.
You've rediscovered that concept as applied to video games.
Or they should be required to tell you when you purchase it at what date multiplayer function will become unavailable so you can make an informed purchase decision. Perhaps they can give disclose a minimum service period and offer full refunds if they shut down before that date.
2) Really? 9-12 years is too long for you? I can still play the entire version of virtually every single game I bought prior to 2010. (Okay, that's a lie, I've lost a lot of the discs and keys. But if I hadn't I could.)