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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

It's worth going to the source here because this is being widely misinterpreted: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-ga...

"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.

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"One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. 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.

"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.

The difference here is that Game makers they want the video model - entirely DRM encumbered on DVD or BluRay (trivially broken, but still...) or streamed with an ongoing cost, as opposed to the audio model where you have the option of downloading DRM-free content from multiple sources (Bandcamp, Bleep, Qobuz, etc.) or buying it without DRM on CD.

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.

I see both arguments here. Games just aren’t the same as music or video - when an album or a movie is finished, what you get can be frozen in time and still work without the film or record company again.

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).

Even standalone games can have operating system and hardware dependencies. Not all of course. A few years ago, I went through a few months when I tried getting back into some older Windows games. They ran--mostly, often with patches--but it was all too flaky and crash-prone to be much fun and I mostly gave up.

Btw, if you are ever in that situation again, Linux + Wine/Proton is now often the better stack to run old games than newer versions of native Windows, both in terms of backward compatibility and performance. Not always, but often.

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.

> 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

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.

Well yes that’s what I was saying above. Selling you a product one time for a fixed fee isn’t going to fund keeping servers supported and online forever, and even if it did, the games company has no incentive to do so once you’ve already paid and they’ve met whatever legally mandated warranty periods exist in that country.

But why can't them let the players host it themselves? It isn't like hosting a game server is expensive, plenty of people have done so with unofficial servers for games.

There is no reason to host MP servers themselves. They can just release a dedicated server executable.

I mean, maybe, but if the game relies solely on matchmaking and doesn’t allow a server browser then it becomes way more complicated. The companies don’t want to be liable for what little Timmy might see or hear on a server they don’t control for a game they no longer support and have already moved on from.

Live service games are closer to social media, IMO - they're a version of Twitter/FB with better graphics and things to do, and as you say that can't be turned into a static product.

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.

When internet infrastructure was much less advanced, the server application used to be part of the delivered product so you could host it yourself at a LAN party.

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.

One issue here is that the game servers may be encumbered by 3rd party, proprietary licensed code.

The company can’t just give up functional source code if it’s built on top of some licensed tech.

GP did not mention source code at all.

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.

That's moving the goalposts. That may be true for a small fraction of games, e.g. MMOs, but for the vast majority of games, they could easily be frozen.

> 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.

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.

There is also a difference between games and movies/tv shows… if a streaming service removes a movie I like, I can either buy it or get it from a different streamer and I have lost nothing.

If a gaming service removes a game, will I be able to keep my save history when I buy it from somewhere else?

We should get away from using the term buy with respect to media. What you're actually doing is licensing in. Why not just say the latter, even if it sounds awkward? At the very least it will build awareness of the actual nature of the transaction.

No, we should continue to use the term "buy", and clarify in the law that copyright shenanigans don't trump purchase rights and consumer protection obligations. In the meantime, since the law is wrong and makes a mockery of its legitimacy, people should treat it as optional and follow it to the extent they personally feel fair and appropriate.

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.

The implied length of the service, and rights that ownership confers after it's terminated, could be a lot less murky.

"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.

And as tech folks, we all know how insane it would be in the B2B space to suggest that the service provider can end their service at any time, not refund you anything, and have no liability. We should have MSAs with defined SLAs and contract terms for consumer SaaS (like video games and streaming) as well.

Exactly, and equally critically -- the death provision.

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.

> They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection

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.

Discogs is a godsend for that. I end up getting a lot of CDs shipped from France/Germany/Japan - all for very reasonable prices.

Current consumer protection laws are lacking in the digital world. Purchase should mean ownership. Rent and lease should mean non-ownership.

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.

There is a misunderstanding among consumers, be it individuals or corporations, that by purchasing a physical medium you simultaneously purchase a perpetual license. While in gross majority of consumer cases that was true, or at least implied, it certainly was not true in the commercial space where plenty of software was licensed for term. The SaaS model only made that more apparent/transparent.

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.

It will likely take centuries to reinvent digital ownership.

The top-down influence is too strong to have nice things.

Considering that digital ownership is only a few decades old, I doubt it will take centuries to reinvent.

What’s weird about this statement is that gamers on platforms like Steam and PS Store already have that confidence. No Steam customer is worried about losing their library. PlayStation gamers see a PS3 store that is still functional and have confidence in buying PS5 games digitally. (Granted, Sony almost disabled purchases on the PS3 store, but came to a good compromise by moving payment processing off of the platform).

It’s only shitty, badly run stores like UPlay and Nintendo’s always-shutting down console-specific stores that make customers lack confidence.

I think GOG disproves this somewhat. A decent number of my coworkers who game buy their favorite games again on GOG to get the offline installers. Trust, but verify.

Well, that’s an anecdote among people working at a tech company right?

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.

Gabe can't live forever. Once Steam changes hands anything goes and if confidence gets harmed there goes a generation of gamers.

> "They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection."

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.

"The service will exist"

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.

You own the disc, you don't own the game.

I see your point. On the other hand, modern games usually max out any DVD or even Blu-ray.

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.

I don’t think any of that is relevant.

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.

> One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games].

"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.

Users will lose what they non-bought eventually if they don't own it. It's just a matter of time.

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.

Isn't the fear that the game will go away and unable to be played?

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

That would be my fear. My Steam library has over a dozen titles which can no longer be bought.

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).

While I definitely like (and mostly trust) Steam, there are some issues like songs being removed from GTA games due to licensing that make me want to hang onto pirated copies, just in case.

Yes, such as the Ubisoft game "The Crew" which will have its servers deleted on March 31st and can never be played again.

As much as I hate to defend Ubisoft on basically anything... Yeah reading that article it's very clear he's discussing this in the context of their subscription service. It's no crazier than someone wouldn't own their games through acquired via Ubisoft subscription than movies via Netflix or music via Spotify.

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...

I don’t mind steam, but it’s not like you really “own” your library even on that platform. So it has probably been a while since most of us actually owned a video game the way it was 30 years ago.

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.

As a practical matter, if I had a 30+ year old game still up in my attic, it would probably take more time/knowledge/money in many cases to get it running usefully than most people would reasonably put in.

That would be in the realm of Total Annihilation (middle 1990s). I installed that a few weeks ago from the CDs provided on archive.org

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.

> 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.

The phrase I use for that is "erecting toll-booths".

Not if you still had the original system as well. I imagine it is not the norm though.

Yes you do. You can backup and run (most[0]) games without steam.

[0] when you can't its because of publishers purposefully blocking it.

Yeah tons of games on Steam have zero DRM, many have trivially weak Steam DRM, and a handful have serious third-party DRM.

Whatever the specific license may say about your rights, it's usually easy to make a completely portable backup.

Honestly, as talking about "ownership" in terms of the law I find to be an argument that just goes round in circles. Like yes, you don't own the game because the EULA says so, but no EULA's aren't legally binding, but yes because they can revoke the game without recourse, etc etc.

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?"

You're really talking about digital possession not ownership.

Streaming does let you discover lots of new music which I like.

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)

> Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing?

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.

That is certainly a convenience that is gained by renting something, but (1) the significance of that convenience is minimal compared to the threat of the company taking away what you've bought, intentionally or not, and (2) paid backup services exist.

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.

> It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe.

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.

I'm confused. We're talking about video games and other digital media. You would put those on an external drive or similar. Why would the vulnerabilities of such a solution have any overlap with windows 2000-era servers used for infrastructure? What does infrastructure have in common with personal backups?

Except that I can control whether the server I run is up to date, or internet-connected, or has appropriate NACLs, whereas I know firsthand that most large companies do not meet patching SLAs, or have properly-configured security controls.

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

That's a false dichotomy. Bandcamp will sell me music I can download _and_ let me stream it.

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.

> It's no crazier than someone wouldn't own their games through acquired via Ubisoft subscription than movies via Netflix or music via Spotify.

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.

It's not a non-ownership tend. There never was ownership of the content. It was a dillusion. Content was licensed. The thing that's changing is the licensing model, from, arguably, perpetual to a short term with indefinite options for renewal.

If streaming were a better deal for consumers than ownership do you think streamers would push it so hard? Every time I try to buy an MP3 I hit a bunch of anti-patterns trying to get me to click on get this with a subscription.

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.

> this is being widely misinterpreted

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.

Thanks for pointing this out. I had only heard about this in passing and assumed there had to be more to it. It's always good to do your own research on these things, because sometimes you realize its not as bad as an out-of-context clip makes it sound. But then on the flip side, sometimes its Unity's Runtime Fee and it is as bad as it sounds.

I invested my money in ownership of the game.

Or it could be the usual self delusion inherent in corpospeak where he tries to frame the issue as one simply about progress files and not about control or ownership.

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.

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