Ubisoft Says Out Loud: We Want People to Get Used to Not Owning What They Bought
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"If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."
He could just as well be telling the rest of Ubisoft (and the games industry) that in order for customers to be comfortable you need to not delete things and allow people to keep what they invested in the game, and that if you take things away from them then people won't be comfortable.
Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing? I don't think so. And yet I also begrudgingly admit that I listen to a much wider variety of music via streaming than was ever available in my cd/mp3 collection...
Sure, the subscription services are taking it even further, but as long as you’re not in total control of the stuff you own, it’s not really yours. At least in my opinion.
It took a few minutes to download AND install.
What it really boils down to is the ever-downward trend to destroy ownership by converting as much as possible to a service or hidden rental.
Me? I prefer to own games that work now or 30 years from now.
The phrase I use for that is "erecting toll-booths".
[0] when you can't its because of publishers purposefully blocking it.
Whatever the specific license may say about your rights, it's usually easy to make a completely portable backup.
What's more interesting is ownership in practical terms, in my opinion. And I don't think you can really blanket all the game in Steam under one rule here - some have absolutely 0 DRM and you can back them up and run them just fine anywhere and some have Steam DRM which is trivial to crack; these games you practically own. And then there are games which use Denuvo or other DRM means, where unless its one of the rare games that get a crack.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, regardless of anything else, digital ownership to me boils down to "Can I copy these bytes to a hard drive, and then 20 years later still use them?"
But musically for my "daily driver" playlist I want to go way down a particular rabbit hole and find new stuff. It is less good for that. I am happy streaming exists.
On PC I am totally digital download. Consoles, I am more of a collector, so I prefer physical games which I actually own. Eventually having a disc will be the only legal way to play those games if you did not download them. (Some not even then like Destiny)
I would argue, on average, it actually is. Because it's not that we are getting nothing in return: We are getting stewardship.
Let us at least acknowledge this part of the equation: Hosting things securely and reliably is only naively easy and cheap, and on top only like drawing a picture is easy, if you are Picasso. Sure, you can put those years of professional devops experience to use to maintain a private data haven – but that's not something that will work for most people and it is fairly obvious that, on average, our collective data would be a lot less safe if rolling hosting became everyones favorite passion project.
It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe. It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.
You would probably reconsider if you spent more time around the, to this day, ocean of outdated and unmaintained-until-physical-failure-windows-2000ish-servers sprinkled throughout fairly touchy parts of our society, connected to the, gasp, internet.
> It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.
If I have to chose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra, I will, until further notice, gladly have the former every time and let legislation take it from there.
This is a tech space; if you work around security, you know that someone's home computer is going to usually be harder to hack than a big corporation that has an attack surface a million miles wide.
Maybe I can phish you and get on your machine, but maybe not. But I can definitely phish at least one person at a big company, and usually many more. Your home machine doesn't have an ssh key buried in a git repo's commit history, or in a public S3 bucket, etc.
Most large-scale botnets running on consumer machines target either IoT or routers, both of which are difficult for consumers to patch, so that's more bad business security once again, than bad consumers.
> choose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra
My god, what a false dichotomy. Yes, every computer not run by Google is running freshly-installed, never-been-updated Windows 95, but Google is totally absolutely positively doing better than all the others in the same space. /s
But separately, I don't want stewardship for my data to rest with whoever I transact with to acquire that data. Why not a digital locker standard, where you sign in with your digital locker when purchasing digital content, and that content is saved to your locker, with whatever metadata? You can then search and play your purchased content through whatever client you like, regardless of where you got it from. You can sort of do that today (to the extent that you can still purchase digital content--there's music that's available to stream that I have not been able to find for purchase) with files, but you lose the stewardship and it's a lot of work.
You can argue that the subscription model pays for the stewardship in a way purchases would not, but surely digital content is easier to work with than CDs and DVDs.
I think most consumers don't really care, though, and I'm guessing content platforms don't really see the point of supporting something like that.
Which doesn't say it is not crazy :-).
> Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing?
At least with movie/audio it's easy to download. I tend to be okay paying their subscription if I can download it on BitTorrent later. For games it may be a bit harder? Not sure.
People think of it as the price of a subscription today vs the price of ownership today. The problem is that every service model business has learned to boil the frog slowly.
"I still have two boxes of DVDs. I definitely understand the gamers perspective with that. But as people embrace that model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you'll be able to access them when you feel like. That's reassuring"
This is the longer context. I understand where he is coming from but people like to own things so that they can enjoy them later without getting the company involved again. Sure the save files are there but if the company changes their terms and services it just straight up stop offering them in their subscriptions what good are they? The guy claims that they support multiple mediums now but at the end of the day that's a business decision and they could decide to not sell DVDs or things like that anymore.
There are some DRM-free gaming - GoG for example, and while Valve still has DRM, Steam hasn't been caught up in forcing people to go to perpetual streaming models.
From a preservationist standpoint, I really want media available in ways that will last through corporate shenanigans, and platform DRM limited or streaming-only isn't it.
Games used to be entirely this way, and some still are, but any manner of live-service game can’t realistically work in that model for an indefinite period of time like movies and music can. This is also true to a lesser extent for patches and DLC, although they shouldn’t be necessary (but day one patches are a thing, I imagine the games companies aren’t unhappy about this, as there’s an incentive to release a broken game with a day-one patch as a future copy protection measure).
This is a perplexing situation as Microsoft used to be the queens and kings of backward compat (due to true invested engineering effort), but even they had to let go of some things, gimp an API or two by quick-porting them to newer infra, etc. due to finite resources.
On the other hand perhaps not that surprising. Just as with projects like MAME or ScummVM or Dosbox, preservation activities are perhaps best placed in the community, the Commons, vs. a commercial business with commercial pressures of the present-day market. But then it's important the community has the legal conditions and stability to do the work, of course.
I'm not sure why you think that? A "live service" game is just a game that's updated a lot and is backed by a server. So whenever they stop updating it, that's the finished product.
The main issue is that they then turn off the servers without any alternative method of playing and tell players to go f themselves when they want to continue to play it.
There are plenty of folks trying to reverse engineer the protocols used for older live gaming environments - for example the Dreamcast/Gamecube Phantasy Star Online has a fan-run server here: https://schtserv.com/ , but that's the exception, not the rule.
I understand that packaging, documenting and supporting an additional application is a cost that the company would rather avoid if possible. But upon shutting down a game's servers, it would cost them nothing to provide the discontinued app code "as is" with no warranty or support, to let fans figure out how to run or improve it themselves. I doubt most game companies have any incredibly valuable and cutting-edge networking code worth protecting.
The company can’t just give up functional source code if it’s built on top of some licensed tech.
Middleware with limited licenses is also a problem the developer chose. If there was a legal requirement to publish the code (source code escrow should be required for copyright to be enforceable IMO) then developers would take care not to fall into that trap.
Which is why the industry keeps pushing these and why we should oppose them.
> This is also true to a lesser extent for patches and DLC, although they shouldn’t be necessary (but day one patches are a thing, I imagine the games companies aren’t unhappy about this, as there’s an incentive to release a broken game with a day-one patch as a future copy protection measure).
Patches can be distributed as standalone installers that are fixed once released just like the original version remains fixed. This is how things used to work.
Being able to go back to earlier versions even if the developer wants to change things (for whatever reason) is precisely why we need archivable games.
If a gaming service removes a game, will I be able to keep my save history when I buy it from somewhere else?
Everyone knows it would be absurd if you bought a chair, and then you opened the box and there was a piece of paper inside that said actually you're just renting it indefinitely and the manufacturer has the right to take it back at any time. Likewise if the outside of box said you get an indefinite "license"; the expectation would be that the seller is acting in good faith and that that's the same thing as perpetual. Taking the chair back would be called a scam. Any government that goes along with the scam is a clown show and deserves the contempt of its citizenry.
"How long do you expect to run the necessary online components for me to be able to use this?"
"What will you do when you turn off the online components required for me to be able to use this?"
Are important questions that most services haven't provided clear answers to.
Getting a global right-to-jailbreak after service is terminated by the owner would go a long way towards making me comfortable.
Given we're on the first generation to purchase licenses-instead-of-physical, it will be some years before this starts to snowball.
But when it does, I expect the mismatch between customer expectations and company policies are going to make for some bad PR.
"Grandmother left me her collection of music, and then Amazon took it away" isn't a rosy headline.
And I refuse to believe that most streaming media/game services don't already have actuaries in their pricing departments, and so have already thought very hard about this.
GenXer here: I'm not comfortable not owning my CD collection. I still either buy CDs, or at least high quality DRM-free digital files that I can archive. Unfortunately, some bands that I really like don't issue CDs in thr US anymore, or sell good quality files, so I've had to buy CDs from outside the US and have them shipped here.
We still don't have a quality definition of ownership. Example would be that the ability to edit the OS "hosts" file to prevent a device from accessing say "twitter.com" should be a requirement in ownership.
Owned / purchased content should not be able to be revoked. Such as Ubisoft locking your account and preventing you from playing the games you purchased. Rental and leased content would fall into the account locking ability by Ubisoft.
While I personally loathe the general corporate subscriptionism, it does have its benefits and drawbacks which in most cases can be addressed by market forces. The ultimate pressure on video games publisher's subscriptionism may be to touch the grass.
The top-down influence is too strong to have nice things.
It’s only shitty, badly run stores like UPlay and Nintendo’s always-shutting down console-specific stores that make customers lack confidence.
Steam distributes 75% of all PC games. So obviously the DRM-free offline installer (which is nice and I appreciate) isn’t something that most people prioritize for their purchase decisions.
This isn't what happened at all.
People got used to streaming services which is a different product entirely.
Many people stopped buying movies and music altogether, and those that still do are rightfully outraged when, say, Sony deletes a movie from their library.
Bull.shit. I call bullshit. Will it exist after the company goes bankrupt?
What an idiotic thing to say to people. It's one thing to have a company do this, but to argue that an entire industry will make sure that their services will exist in perpetuity is madness.
You know what can exist for a long time though?
A disc with a game that you own.
While I cannot image C64 games in the cloud, I also cannot imagine modern games on a DVD.
Even with physical access to a device, there are hurdles. Who still owns a C64? A 386 with floppy drive?
It is tricky.
The publishers don’t have to provide physical media, just the ability to install it at any arbitrary point later. So an install file is fine (even if it’s 100GB) and backing that up can be up to the consumer.
In terms of your argument with older devices this exists even with physical media. Who still has reel to reel or laserdisc? The publishers don’t have to make it future proof, just make themselves only necessary at the purchase step.
"Needs to happen" is a pretty strong statement. Why does it "need" to happen? Are current customer behaviors/preferences some kind of existential threat to humanity? Nothing needs to happen. The company might want it to happen, but that's different. Companies talking about a mass [and profitable] shaping of population behavior as being "necessary" should alert our antennas a little.
I'm not super interested in if a game is rented or not, but the argument I've always heard was "online services shut down and unable to play - or requires internet connection" never whether or not the save progress would still be there
Thankfully Steam still provides them for those who have purchased it before they were pulled from the store. Though IIRC some have been fully removed (with refund).
It sounds like Ubisoft wants their streaming and subscription services to grow, but reality doesn't line up with their vision.
They are purchasing long term streaming rights from other companies like Activision Blizzard.
"Ubisoft recently announced the completion of the transaction with Activision Blizzard giving Ubisoft the perpetual cloud streaming rights for Call of Duty and all other existing Activision Blizzard Console and PC titles as well as those releasing over the next 15 years. These rights will further strengthen Ubisoft’s content offering through its subscription service Ubisoft+ as well as allowing Ubisoft to license them to third parties."
It seems they are betting on a speculative market. They assume people will treat owning games like owning DVDs in the past.
From what is said in the article, it sounds like they are probably worried about losing a lot of money on this bet.
They reported a net loss of nearly half a billion euros last year.
Even if the company earnestly believes, at this time, that they will continue to provide access forever, circumstances will inevitably change in the future and might cause a change of plans. Or the company might be acquired by another with different ideas, or bring in new management that decides to refocus on different business opportunities. Or the technology they use to lock down the product will fall out of support. Or they just go out of business. Something will inevitably happen, and users will lose access.
Even this framing makes no sense: You don't lose what you've built as long as the game is still available to you. Should you end the subscription or should Ubisoft at any moment decide to discontinue your game then your savegame file will help you exactly nothing.
Likewise before that when Ouya went under.
Even this month I’ve lost access to content on Audible (bookmarks, marginalia, etc) that I previously paid before because that particular book was optioned.
I understand the rationale for these companies to push for subscription models to pump their PE ratio and get that predictable revenue bump. Adobe famously went from a $15 billion to $400 billion market cap by switching to subscription/“own nothing be happy” services rather than selling CS licenses.
But as a counter-party? No thank you.
Two decades on (and particularly seeing this as a docent at the Media Archeology Lab in Boulder working with 50+ year old media) I think it’s rational to push for digital ownership enforced by a community and not a corporation because otherwise the outcome is predictable. I’m happy to see recent developments enabling ownership, despite the (surprising to me) HN criticism of those vehicles.
For Adobe it makes sense. Like, the full CS suite is 50-60€ a month... that was probably 10k worth of purchases before. Even as a student, you can usually afford a CS subscription, whereas you all but had to pirate it under the old model.
Personally I would prefer something like the IntelliJ license model - subscribe for 12 months, and you get the last version you had permanently if you cancel the subscription.
For games though? For the calculation to make sense even remotely, the monthly subscription game would need to be in the cents, maybe a dollar a month. Everything else is just a ripoff.
Nah - the big-box Creative Suite Master Collection was $2300 in 2012 (link below) and it's a perpetual license, and (as far as I've personally tested it) Adobe's main titles (Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat) dating back to version 7.0 (circa 2001) work perfectly fine on Windows 10 (obviously things like high-DPI support is lacking).
...wherewas my Creative Cloud sub is costing me $65/mo now ($780/yr), and I've been a paying subscriber for 10 years now, so Adobe has gotten at-least $6,000 USD from me, even though I only use the base functionality we've had since the late-1990s - so I'd be $3000+ better-off right-now if I had the foresight to buy a big-box of Master Collection right-before Adobe discontinued it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120112103643/http://www.amazon...
Photopea.com covers most of my needs
Does the cost of buying and reselling games for slightly less end up equaling out to the cost of a games subscription model? Maybe, but my concern is fragmentation. I definitely can't afford more than one game subscription so I don't like this trend.
Typing this reminds me: I should look into switching to GOG for such purchases.
I found that out a few years ago when I tested out virtualization graphics performance and wanted to avoid installing full Steam every time for my (legally purchased) games.
Epic is at the forefront of revoking ownership, not Ubisoft.
Now, I cannot think of a more creatively bankrupt game studio. (Maybe Naughty Dog? They've been releasing the same games for like 12 years) I don't understand how they can fall so low and also remain in business. Who buys/plays their games?!
Watch this and remember the glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOp_GM3ihrU
They see Assasins Creed and that’s good enough
It's never perfect, of course. But who else is even trying to offer the same experience? *
I also play lots of indie games (shout out to CrossCode, Soma, Signalis, and Tangledeep particularly) and lots of JRPGs and puzzle/detective games. Never bought any Call of Duty (I will admit to renting CoD4 on Wii once).
Sometimes people like things you don't like, and that's OK. You don't need to feel superior about it.
* While the question is intended as rhetorical, I would like to hear of other games in this particular space.
Some of my favorite gaming memories are from the AC series.
I get every Pokémon game even though they’ve been awful for a while now, but the fact that it’s Pokémon is enough for me.
OP was asking how ubisoft stays in business, and that’s how. People just really like AC and get each game.
I worked for Ubisoft for 6 years and theres a combination of:
* the business reality being harder than you think
* certain peoples ego. (notably Serge Hascoet, and his pressure to push games to be the same; towers to unlock the map etc)
* Good intentions being misconstrued (uplay is designed to give people cheaper games while staying within the letter of the law of valves distribution platform)
The majority of people are really doing their best for the players: even the people you think are doing stupid things.
I think AAA game development has to end to be honest, the risk is so high that most publishers play it so safe that in the end everything is milquetoast and overpriced
This may have been the official line but I don't buy that the reason that Uplay was created was to "give people cheaper games" or that it had to do anything with "good intentions". No player ever asked for yet another launcher.
> The majority of people are really doing their best for the players: even the people you think are doing stupid things.
The majority of individual developers, sure. They don't call the shots when it comes to deciding the anti-features put into the game though. And some individual developers end up implementing those anti-features.
> the business reality being harder than you think
> I think AAA game development has to end to be honest, the risk is so high that most publishers play it so safe that in the end everything is milquetoast and overpriced
The ever-increasing scope (especially graphics wise) is something that game development studios and/or their publishers decide on though. They could instead choose to have multiple more reasonably scoped but less risk adverse games though. For all its checkbox design in the main titles Ubisoft does do some of that though.
It's also hard to empathize iwth the business reality being harde when the leadership of these giant game companies rake in ungodly amounts of money. That's really the main problem with the AAA industry: the ones in charge generally only seem to care about increasing their own net worth rather than have any pride in the games they create.
Behold the Prince of Gosplan written in 1992 and inspired by the original Prince of Persia game published in 1989 by Broderbund. There was no Ubi back then and that the franchise is still being "owned" is an insult.
The computer industry is rapidly approaching a performance plateau, i.e. next year's model will soon not be a significant improvement over last year's model, and the planned obsolescence turnover will slow down - such that device lifetimes will become more like automobile lifetimes.
The industry is trying to fight this by making devices difficult or impossible to repair and moving software to a subscription model - because they don't want people spending their time with ten-year-old games running on ten-year-old consoles.
Essentially the games industry is no longer the fast moving new thing and now has to deal with it becoming harder and harder to top its own classics.
I can still play most of the games that I grew up with, and nostalgia is well-known to be an important form of emotional wellbeing. Where will we be when the youth of tomorrow can’t experience that nostalgia? Sure there’s books (if they’re bought physically), but what else? Music isn’t guaranteed either and I won’t be surprised if in 30 years it is extremely difficult to _buy_ (legally) music.
[0]: https://joshua.hu/files/GameLost.pdf spoiler: it’s not good
Talk about overstating the case. Any problems that the youth will have in the future, will not be because they cannot re-play a live service game they are playing today.
I don't think they are overstating games as the single biggest factor, just part of a possible trend, which could be undesirable when considered in its totality.
More of a question if we are heading towards a future where "you'll own nothing and be happy", and the downsides of that on psychological wellbeing.
"you'll own nothing and be happy" is a completely different topic but slightly related.
The original post was not just about video games, but ownership, nostalgia, and emotional development in general. I say this is obvious because they clearly discuss other media and property. They call out books and music as other parts of the trend.
When was ever feasible to legally buy music? I mean for the average Joe, not a record company or Michael Jackson.
It certainly hasn't been in my lifetime, and I'm old by Internet standards. The only thing that has meaningfully changed is that the license period terms have become shorter and shorter.
Early copyright law didn't explicitly cover music and audio recordings, because the technology did not exist or was not widely available at the time. However, I suspect that they may have been covered by early copyright laws.
Copyright Act of 1790 in the United States primarily focused on protecting written works, such as books, maps, and charts, while Early recordings were created in the 1870s.
Herbert v. Shanley Co., 242 U.S. 591 (1917), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held hotels and restaurants that perform music must compensate composers, even if the venue is not separately charging patrons to hear the music.
From this, I infer that music during this time was copyrightable, so commercial production of it via wax cylinder would also be infringement.
Even with CDs, you were never buying the "music". You were buying a durable physical copy of it and rights to use it within some defined contexts.
Buying a CD never entitled you to reproduction for sale, or most commercial use like soundtrack to a box-office movie.
When Steam first came out, people made a big bruhaha about how digital licensing (no right of first sale, etc.) isn't the same as owning the game. True, but so what? Steam completely changed the PC games industry on that model and created an indie explosion. People like to complain about the lack of ownership rights, but the convenience is what really matters, especially coupled with a generous refund policy that we never had in the physical media days. A subscription service is a logical continuation of this model.
Now, a couple decades later, games have become super commoditized, and frankly it's hard to tell apart one title from another, much less remember them years later. For every Baldur's Gate 3, there's a hundred no-name RPGs that are entirely adequate but ultimately forgettable. They're not very different from an average show on Netflix or a song on Spotify. Subscription services are a lot cheaper for most people than renting or buying individual titles, and is the only sane way to explore a marketplace that has more content than you could reasonably consume in a lifetime.
If Steam offered a subscription service I'd give up my whole library (hundreds of games, mostly bought on sale) overnight. It's not just Ubi, EA, Microsoft, Playstation all do it, along with Google and Apple on mobile, and it's wonderful. Now for $30 a month split between GeForce Now and PC Games Pass, you can play hundred of games on a 4080 on a Chromebook. Games have never been as affordable or accessible. This is a good thing for gamers, enabling fixed-cost gaming that's easy to budget for and much cheaper a month than games used to be. Even if you have two or three subscriptions from different companies (which can vary month to month).
There are more games coming out every day than a person can consume. It's not the 90s anymore, no reason to clutch on to treasured old titles when a similar game will be out in a few months anyway.
So long as there's always a choice to "buy" the game then I really don't see it as a problem. That's certainly Microsoft's approach with gamepass, I assume they and ubisoft both will happily let people give them $70 for a game if that's what the customer prefers.
These days only the indie studios are making the actually good titles. The AAA ones are just high production interactive movies with little actual gameplay. They fit the play once subscription model quite well.
That's the point lmao, for consumers to be allowed to choose between something like game pass, or to buy a copy. That's what we have now.
If we let them, they'll only offer games on something like game pass. That'll be our only choice; no choice.
BMW charging a subscription for seat warmers, etc, etc. It's not an individual battle at all, ha ha. It's a war.
Yes, and ownership provides many conveniences that limited and revocable licenses do not.
This isn't about the type of gamer we are, this is about corporations trying to make more $$$, still stop. It's not about the games themselves, making the games and services better for us, the consumers. It's about money. I'll clutch on to old titles because all new games coming out are shit shows, and because if I paid for a game 10 years ago and I want to play it again then I'm going to do so, as I please and without a fucking cloud subscription or online services.
They can allow people to own games, but then they'd make less money.
> It's not just Ubi, EA, Microsoft, Playstation all do it, along with Google and Apple on mobile
These two sentences are not compatible. Companies do not choose to push business models that make them less money from the average customer.
> There are more games coming out every day than a person can consume. It's not the 90s anymore, no reason to clutch on to treasured old titles when a similar game will be out in a few months anyway.
Whith all due respect, go fuck yourself. Games like kinds of art are not fungible.
Sure, if they can make it up in volume. A million people paying $10 a month is more money than them buying a $50 game twice a year.
> Whith all due respect, go fuck yourself. Games like kinds of art are not fungible.
Heh, okay then. You're entitled to your opinion.
Recently purchased an N64, Ocarina/Mask, Mario64 (&Kart), Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong, SmashBros, Conkers
This was hundreds of dollars that I won't be spending on your online platform, and it's all because you disabled Steam on Windows7. Happy 2024!
It's a vote against Ubisoft, but you might as well have pirated the games, it doesn't support the publisher/developer.
Huh, resale value supports higher sales prices. Nintendo was paid on the original sale.
[1] And more! There's translated Master Quest, fan-translated Sin & Punishment, and a bunch of fangames based on OoT, Goldeneye, etc.
Plus the creator is Ukrainian and has supported and updated them for a long time, it's 100% better to pay a little more so he gets paid than to buy a Chinese clone that rips off his hard work.
Love ya Krikzz! Keep doin those rad things!
Emulators aren't perfect, either, but each to their own yknow. Copies of older games are getting $$$ now.
It's both the simplicity [insert cartridge, toggle power on] and the nostalgia [©1996 Nintendo]; I even got an original expansionpak (+4.5MB RAM lol).
This conversation has led me to sell some of the less-social titles [e.g. Conkers] & then invest in an EverDrive64; I'm super-excited to play optimized Mario64 at 41fps [vs OEM 20].
Speaking of which, someone should revive that project now that Blizzard is owned by Microsoft. Watching the new "we love open source <3" Microsoft stumble around the IP issues would be mildly hilarious.
I am fine with renting multi player game server access. But I want to ensure that if I invest time and money in a game, the servers have an open source DIY end state when the company decides it doesn’t want to host the game anymore.
for the same reason, the hardware should be provided with the game...
FTFY
But a lot of scams can be setup with this "for as long as the publisher likes". Since this is a "Service", I guess it depends on the laws regulating the "services".
It looks like everything does favor the publisher, and the gamers get nearly only the right to shut up whatever happens. I wonder.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39021958
Now I'm collecting and playing og Xbox, ps1, Wii, xb360, psp, ds/3ds, gb/gbc/gba and I'm loving it.
I don't need you, Ubisoft. I don't need you Blizzard, Bethesda, Nintendo, Sony, etc.
TESVI is going to be a flop. GTA VI is gonna suck. Calling it, now. After Cyberpunk, Starfield, 76, new cods and bfs all sucking hard, I've completely lost faith.
Nintendo can't even talk either bc they Apple it up, nostalgia bait, no new IP, franchise only gets a new game once every 6~ years, long wait for new hardware; compare snes/gb era Nintendo, look how many fun and interesting games are on gb/gbc, so many wild franchises that might have never got a sequel but were fun nonetheless. Now Nintendo only goes for the big hitters bc like all other games companies now it's just purely about the $$$. So lame.
Is this really what "Ubisoft" said out loud? or are they using Ubisoft as a decoy?
Gamepass is exactly this, and it's Microsoft's strategy, not Ubisoft's
I can see the narrative being crafted, why am i alone?
I'm working on a shim for multiple older consoles that will allow running your own servers... So when Nintendo kills multiplayer, We can reenable it.
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-piracy-report-suppression-raises...
copyright infringement is a civil offence, unless done on commercial scale
> It would be interesting to know to what extent that’s been tested, here and elsewhere.
it would never even get that far in the UK court
I think it would be theft and I think a jury would agree.
correct, it's not theft because it doesn't meet the definition of theft under the Theft Act
this is not difficult to understand, it's spelt in crystal clear unambiguous language in the GPs post
> I think it would be theft and I think a jury would agree.
you can think whatever you want, but it would never reach the point of a jury because the police wouldn't charge for theft and the CPS wouldn't prosecute for it either
because it isn't theft
now if you compromised a computer system to get those chip designs they might try under the Computer Misuse Act, but that's a different offence and not theft
If i steal something its theft tautologically. If i break into the coca cola vault and take a the physical copy of the recipe that is theft. If i hack into the coca cola IT infrastructure and copy a file that contains the recipe without deleting it, then it is not necessarily theft depending on jurisdiction.
intellectually piracy is still not stealing
it's causing hypothetical financial damages
I say hypothetical because they are actually only there if you would have bought the game/sub/etc. if you couldn't have pirated the game. But in many case that's not the case (and in many others it is). Most commonly the actual damages are much smaller then whatever companies get away with claiming they are. And there had been studies showing that for some games piracy actually increased their sells long term. Through definitely not all games.
Anyway causing financial damages != stealing, mainly on a per-case basis financial damages from actual stealing tend to hugely outweighs the ones from piracy.
it's a huge difference when you consider how it will affect how people see and what people think is okay to prevent privacy (people including law makers and judges)
Software and digital content piracy does not deprive any other owner of anything else, this is isn't stealing in the legal sense. It may be financial harm or copyright abuse but those are both separate crimes from theft.
Piracy isn't legal, but it isn't theft either.
If consumers framed subscription services as literally rape that wouldn't be a side issue either.
I'm not saying that every piece of data should be free to sell and distribute always, but the current state of intellectual property and DRM is nothing sort of a disgrace.
But a major question is what is acceptable (practically, legally) to prevent piracy.
And by framing piracy as stealing it is much easier to convince law maker and the general public that very much not reasonable solutions are acceptable.
So that it's not technically stealing is really important for proper law making.
Piracy is a clear and self-evident moral good irrespective of how close or not it is to stealing. Justifying piracy based on wordplay opens you up to attack by people and organizations that like to destroy what is good through manipulative wordplay.
There is this thing called civil disobedience as a tool to keep fairness in check. This might a justification of piracy.
A corporation predicted huge increase in profits the next year, but didn't achieve it, so they blamed piracy for it and pressured governments to stricken punishment for piracy. A corporation felt entitled to money they didn't get and felt as a result vicitimised.
Is it legal to sneak into the movie after buying the ticket and being refused admittance without cause? Probably not.
Would a jury convict? Probably not.
If you consider that the state shouldn’t intervene, or shouldn’t intervene in this way, then it’s not immoral. For example, the state could say “DRM and if anyone can break the DRM, they’re free to use the game” or it could say “Any software becomes open-source after 20 years” (which, at least, would have the benefit of being useful). Same goes for songs or other artistic work, it will be much less monetizable but maybe it will restore the “art” part in “art”.
Let’s say you somehow find that you pirating does not matter in the grand scheme of things, or might indirectly increase sales. It still does not matter. You are a part of an agreement that you should honor, not break, they didn’t hire you to market the game or to improve their sales.
Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer. Now I can only sympathize for piracy if it’s for educational resources that uplifts you, kind of like Sci-hub. For games/ movies you need to think, do you deserve to consume years worth of effort that they put into it? Do you deserve to be entertained by their effort? In my eyes you only do if they willingly give it to you, which only ever happens if you buy or subscribe to a game.
The wording in the stores is 'buy' not 'rent'.
yes they have some clauses in the 20 pages long AGBs, which makes it legally ok, but imho it's still a break of the (social) contract.
So, if I 'buy' product A on platform Z and it gets removed without any money returned and they expect me to 'buy' it again on platform Y, I wouldn't have any issues pirating product A
Or if I bought product B v 3.0 with an unlimited licence and they suddently stop the licence server tell me I can't use B 3.0 anymore but I can get B 5.0 as a subscripton, I'd be mad as hell.
I personally have issues where the publishers suddenly alters the deal afterwards. (and tell you that you should be happy they don't alter it further...)
When you're in an unfair situation, you are willing to break the rules to your benefit. But when you have wealth, suddenly only the wealthy "deserve" to be entertained, and all the poors need to know their place and follow the rules which disadvantage them.
No one agreed to that any more than they agreed not to use marijuana. They were born into a world where others use violence to coerce them. As a software developer, I'd be quite happy if the law required all source to be put in escrow to receive copyright and then released into the public domain after 10-15 years, along with bans on technological measures to prevent people from modifying software. Likewise with putting masters in escrow for sound/video. Maybe even give them a full generation of protection (~25 years) since their work doesn't become obsolete and unusable like software. But the important thing is to receive a monopoly from society, you should need to give something as your part of the trade (e.g. source materials for the next generation to be able to use and add their own flavor to), and the goal should be to create cultural wealth for future generations, not to keep it from them. We can trade our rights to enable that, but not theirs; our children's rights are not ours to trade. Given that things are so one-sided, I can't imagine begrudging people at all for ignoring the "agreement".
If someone wants to lease a product to you, and you would rather they sell it, that doesn't give you the right to pirate it. When the only way to buy a thing is to "buy" a misleading lease, piracy becomes more "permissible", as in people will blame you less for pirating it, but that doesn't make it morally good.
It's obviously a bad thing for the publisher to make it seem like you're buying something, then pull the rug out from under you. It's extremely misleading, maybe it should be illegal. It's definitely a bad thing, even if it's all technically there in the fine print that nobody reads. Pirating the thing in response to this is a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. It's debatable, sure, but it's morally gray at best.
No matter how you slice it, you're still depriving the creators/publishers/etc of the money they ask for in return for the thing you want. Maybe you don't like the publisher, maybe you think the platform is evil, but you are still taking what doesn't belong to you.
A big reason it's bad is the plain ol' categorical imperative. If everyone did it, there would be no more music, movies, games, etc, because the people making them wouldn't get paid. That's true regardless of how the thing is sold.
If you don't like how they're selling it, boycott it. That's fine. It's not like we're talking about essential goods like shelter or food. Most of the time, the discussion is around entertainment.
TL;DR Pirating is morally gray at best, but it is not 100% morally good, and I wish people would be honest about that.
On the other hand, there are plenty of interesting creative works (e.g. mashups) that are illegal today, and obviously they're being made without monetization. With new tools we even have people making things like Plankton from Spongebob singing Tool songs[0]. There would still be plenty of creativity in the world without copyright.
It's not obvious that we should prioritize the ability to easily fund high budget works over the ability of people to freely share their remixes and mashups, for example.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-engineer-sentenced...
Of course if you just make a best effort to immitate the design of something, say a new Ferrari, you might get a lawsuit but won't go to prison. Just like immitating a piece of music, you won't go to jail, it'll be hashed out in the civil courts.
I was thinking more of patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
That's the direction games are headed—it's not going to be a subscription for a whole bunch of titles, it's going to be a subscription for a single studio's titles, with a different subscription needed for each studio.
The ability to enjoy films/games you have in the past is not guaranteed.
Tha ability to gift your films/games to someone else is not on offer here.
Spying on you is pretty much guaranteed
They are in the money making business, not in the make people happy and still able to play great memories with their kids 20y down the road, occupation.
They want to get used to getting paid more overall. It's about the same lately with most products at the grocery store. Big brands know they wouldn't be able to charge more for the same thing, so they charge about the same for less of the same thing. Your 180g 2 bucks chocolate biscuits box is now a 150g. Sometimes they push the envelopes and up the price just a bit. Because they feel they can. And they do.
I highly doubt their tactics will work much longer, people learn and are starting to see, and angered by the squeeze. Brands would have to invest even more effort to find new ways to successfully trickery, diminishing even further value put in the product itself.
Good on GoG. Games are loved when they are fun, AAA aren't all that fun anyway. GoG's great choice for your wallet.
Back to being able to play good old games with kids decades later, imo emulators will support, at least much more likely so that a console to still be found and boot so long later.
Of course, I bought it from the Nintendo Store, which means no refund (a charge back would get me banned from the Nintendo Store, nuking unrelated purchases).
They've definitely trained me to not buy their games. I'm strongly considering setting up a Switch emulator so I can play the title in question.
1. Your ISP, for blocking access to a game server 2. Ubisoft, for requiring a cloud connection to play a game 3. Nintendo, for not allowing refunds for digital goods.
Seems odd to focus your blame on just one of the three.
(Instead of blaming anyone, you should get your Switch to talk to a VPN and then enjoy your game.)
I'm guessing Nintendo is more worried about Switch emulators than Ubisoft, so I think my rage is directed appropriately. :-)
You could try doing that for your Ubisoft game and see if it works.
Although, the refund came in the form of store money; my card didn't get anything back.
That has a big negative impact on society because it moves us further and further way from whats good for the public when it comes to private ownership for individuals.
It's an ideological position that doesn't benefit you, but only benefits organizations that are hijacking free will and ownership. Anyone that considers this for a moment could understand that your decisions have an impact on the world. And I guess it comes down to the idea that maybe there are import things to consider outside of your own personal need for convenience.
A whole generation of gamers has been brought up to think that they're buying "Steam" games when they're really buying PC games that artificially have a middleman now where one never had to be before.
Microsoft used games to prop up their windows monopoly, but provided a terrible user experience.
Steam provides an excellent, OS-agnostic user experience. Instead of using it to prop up an unrelated monopoly, they take a cut of sales.
It's not great (middlemen rarely are), but it is an improvement.
The ubisoft vision is not compatible with that.