Ubisoft is stripping people's licences for The Crew weeks after its shutdown

Eg, a game developer suing people who make patches or utilities to run old games on new hardware - or even to provide say, multiplayer support, for old hardware. Or whatever.

Like, Nintendo would love to sell you the same game over and over again every 5 years. Could they consider it "theft" if I decided I wanted to keep playing my NES copy of Mario instead of buying a Nintendo Switch and the Switch version? XD

We need laws that say "if your software can stop functioning if a company goes under, without a technical reason, you can't say 'buy', you can only say 'rent'".

(I do pay for it but only after I'm sure I can take it)

If you should ever bother too look into your end user license agreements (EULA), you'd know you never owned anything to begin with. Nothing was ever sold to you. You acquired a license to use the product under the specified terms set forth in the EULA. If the terms of this license agreement don't sit right with you, I suggest you don't take the deal.

It made good business sense (MBA or otherwise) to churn out safe mediocre games that have modest returns, like 250mil game would return 400mil. Although arguably the same game could have been made for 50mil in a smaller team with more exceptional talent, like in the 2000s where ROI on games was much higher on average. But the low ROI method was low-risk and repeatable. That is why around 2010, after the financial crisis when the world was showered in low interest rates, the games industry largely stopped innovating.

The "brute force" method for making games with very large teams where managing them has become almost impossible (most people in the AAA companies know what I'm talking about) is no longer sustainable now that money is no longer cheap. What is worse, executives in game companies have leaned into this model over the years, laying off expensive, very experienced talented staff and replacing each with 3-5 graduates. The 3-5 graduates can pump out more content for a mediocre game, the 1 experienced developer with decades of institutional knowledge could make a game that would perform exceptionally well, but not as reliably (this industry used to be called "hit-driven"). Layoffs did target the most expensive staff in many companies, by the way. This will come to light eventually.

So what can a game company that's all bought into this model do now? Many managers weren't even around in the 00s when the previous model worked. They don't know what to do. So they're panicking in various ways. Doing more layoffs, rushing games, upping the game prices, cutting support for old titles even if supporting them didn't cost that much.

But the industry has been over this once or twice. Notably in the 80s there was a shovelware games crash, then a lot of new small companies like Activision sprung up with small veteran teams and made great games in the 90s. This became the norm in the 00s, which saw the inception of many of the game titles we play today. The 10s paralleled the 80s, and we are heading towards a sort of crash or a soft crash now where the industry makes a lot of rushed shovelware. And those in games already know that many of their veteran colleagues are starting their own studios and working on very ambitious new projects that break the mould. None of this is new. Some of it is just new for people who haven't been around long enough.

But all in all, the MBA stuff is not seeing the forest for the trees. In the bigger picture, it's just a cycle. You can see it in all sorts of graphs, like ones that show average game quality over the last decades, and how the indie game sector is suddenly growing. Exactly like during and after the 80s crash.

> claiming that older content took up too much space on peoples drives or some other excuse.

Well which is it?

I've worked on games where we've stripped old content in a patch. Like code, content has a cost to maintain it. If we update an Uber shader do we need to keep a branch for ever for that one edge case of an asset that we know 11 people out of our 1 million players use?

The flip side is that when we don't strip content, we get accused of being lazy or incompetent - see any thread on patching or updating games here for what I'm talking about.

How things progressed to the point that they released it in that state, I don't know.

https://www.eurogamer.net/gog-pulls-hitman-from-its-own-stor...

The only real way around this is for the game to be free to play, or fully subscription based from the beginning. Then it is classified by this directive as a digital service. However, if they sell digital content like skins or other items then it again is covered as a digital good even if only used within the service (unless the purchase is actually declared time limited at the moment of purchase). In any case they would need to tell you the length of time for which you are purchasing service.

If you are in the EU, demand a refund under this directive or that they supply you with the content you purchased. If you don't get a refund, issue a chargeback if your credit card company is willing.

Lifetime being the life out minimum life of the lease. You shutdown the servers before a player got N years, full cash refund to those players.

What happened now is clearly deceptive practice.

It’s the perpetrators that are at fault, not the victims.