I for one appreciate that ubisoft chose the top down view of poop as their logo. it's the perfect symbol for everything they represent and they're incredibly brave for wearing it proudly on their chest.
Yup. Millions subscribe to MMOs and Game Pass. Live service games like Genshin Impact and Fate/Grand Order are incredibly popular. There are also games with crazy intrusive DRM like kernel level spyware and always online DRM that are still installed by millions. How can you look at these stats and not think people are fine with paying for temporary games? If the game is good enough, players don't care. Ubisoft's problem is their games aren't good enough.
UbiSoft will fail and get bought up by Microsoft, who will have learned the exact opposite lesson because their stock price went up.
Meanwhile, Larian will keep churning out bangers until someone eventually offers the owners a too-stupid-amount-of-money to turn down, and then it will be folded into the enshitificatio engine, too. Or they'll release a flop, lose access to low-interest loans, and collapse under their own weight. Thus proving good games aren't worth the risk to make.
Man, I really want to assume our lords and saviors will keep putting out perfect games, and yet we've been burned in our history.
CDPR put out a half-baked Cyberpunk after a year of hype. Valve put out "Artifact", the Dota card game. It feels like the really inventive studios sometimes get tired of the working formulas they're adored for and end up putting out things not many people like - possibly as a way of doing a personal passion project.
I'll be happy if that never happens for Larian, but it's a worrying possibility.
Of course I'm really not a fan of whatever they do and I would never buy an Ubisoft game for at least a decade now, but I still think that a lot of people should don't know what buying means and that they never, ever bought (and hence owned) a game or movie. Those are not material goods like a car, which you can physically transfer from one person to another. Those are intellectual goods, and ownership here means you own all rights for it, which usually only the publisher has. What you buy online or in a shop is mere a license to watch/play/use/whatever and a medium with the associated data (like a DVD).
Therefore "piracy" had never been theft (or robbery, as it is called so nicely on German news). It is a license violation. Just that doesn't sound as demonizing as the publisher want it to sound.
When it's for the benefit of the Owner class (in this specific case mainly Publishers) it's ownership hence people are told they're buying games (only to discover after paying that it's not so) and piracy is described and even in some countries treated as Theft.
When it's for the benefit of citizens in general it's intellectual property and it's not really owned by them when they buy it (only licensed, often in such a way that they can lose access to what they were told they were buying) and if they do happen to created intellectual property themselves it can easily be taken away from the by the Owner class who "curiously" even in those countries which treat Piracy the same as Theft won't be criminally held responsible for it.
It's the good old "one rule for thee another for me" so popular with authoritarians, especially Fascists (which probably explains why Germany is one of a few countries in Europe that criminalizes piracy, but de facto only treats it as such when it's the little people doing it).
Cars have copyright too you know, you can't make another car that's exactly like a Civic and not get sued, and we still own them, so what are you even on about?
That is a patent, not a copyright. If you sell you car, you don't have it anymore. If somebody steals your car, you don't have it anymore. What I'm on about is the difference between material and intellectual goods. You can read it up, if your school didn't cover it.
The announcement of the game left an extremely bad impression too, because the game was $60 or $70 but didn't include all the content, there were three other tiers or "editions" you could buy, the last option being the $8 subscription service that had a shiny blue border around it and included all the content.
The greed goes deep. It's funny that micro transactions hardly ever were micro. If it's was a few cents for a pure cosmetic item I might even do that from time to time, but take the discord cosmetics 50ct I might buy sth blinky, but they want 5-10€ for that shit
I call this "The curse of Might and Magic". This franchise was established by Jon Van Caneghem who founded New World Computing. The company later got into financial trouble and was absorbed by 3DO. Over time (mainly due to the commercial failure of its console, which came after the acquisition of the M&M property), 3DO started slipping into the hole. It dissolved, and in its fire sale, Ubi purchased the rights to Might and Magic. The rest, as they say, is history...
BTW what do we have to pay an entry fee to The Smithsonian, and The British Museum is free to anyone that can make it there? Seems like something our taxes should be taking care of.....
World of Xeen? Such a fun concept, combining the two games. I've been trying to run the mod that lets you play 6, 7 and 8 within the same game, but my current PC can't handle it.
I was a huge fan of Ubisoft. I basically stopped playing any of their games after Assassins Creed 3, with the exception of AC: Black Flag, which I got from the high seas, ironically.
I haven't played AC. My experience lies mostly in Far Cry. I got a free copy of Far Cry 3 with my Radeon HD 7770. Little did I know that's where the series would peak. It's one of the games I wish I could play for the first time again. Vaas is easily one of the best written and (and especially) acted bosses in a game ever. He's such a pain in your ass until you kill him, then the final boss sucks so much, you miss him.
the boss characters are great and the girl that uses the powder to attack you is the greatest part in the game. Sad that she isnt one of the end game bosses because that part was rad.
My favorite easter egg is also, if you don't arrest the dude at the very beginning of the game, the game ends and you see the credits like you beat it
I prefer to buy from Steam because they allow me to play my games easily and invest time and money in Linux which results in more freedom for all gamers. I've been very disappointed with GoG's record on Linux.
Sadly no, your Steam account can be closed at any time and you have no recourse to access your purchased content if that happens. Likewise, Steam can suspend service and you lose access to your content as well.
But that's not just a Steam thing, it's digital media as a whole. Even a physical disc is not ownership, it's just a license to access the content it contains.
No, it’s not. If Valve goes belly up you can kiss your games and the infrastructure they need goodbye. Also you don’t get to resell games you already own or give them away and selling accounts is against ToS. If you die your games are gone, you can’t give your account away legally.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Not trying to be a smart ass, I just keep seeing things like this for Ubisoft and other companies and people just crap on them, but then Steam is almost never criticised for the same issue (or I am not seeing those memes). I guess Valve makes enough other things right so people are more happy to overlook this?
May be an unpopular opinion but I don't care what happens to my games when I die because I will be dead. If I want to pass something on to any kids I have it will be memories.
So in other words, no, since it's impossible for a Steam game to be DRM-free. Some have less DRM than others, but unless they let you download an installer that you can use without connecting to their servers then there's still DRM.
I think in the context of why he said this was something like an interviewer asking "what would have to happen for cloud gaming to take off and see bigger numbers"
There is enough to get mad about to waste time getting mad at imaginary things.
I think a lot of clickbaitiness comes from asking a radical question and then running around with the answer. I think take 2 was asked if gta 6 would come to GamePass and they said no it won't, which somehow became a big news lol
So, saying people should "get used to cloud gaming and subscription only" in the future gets a free pass, even if the people that said it are the one trying to create cloud gaming and suscription only games?
Could also be that their latest game on ps5 looks worse than a 5 year old PS4 game.
Also despite the repetitive nature of those games, I still always stuck by games like assassin's Creed, but I didn't even give the new one an hour before I just got sick of it
No worries, at no point in recent years have I been feeling I "owned" a ubisoft game. Not even played them. I'm that committed to follow thge instructions of some dipshit.
If you view the statement as a cause itself instead of a symptom, sure. Ubisoft has a shitty corporate mindset and that is directly reflected in the quality of the games they publish.
If there’s a reason Star Wars Outlaws is mediocre, for example, it doesn’t have much to do with microtransactions or game renting.
And the quote that was offered was between investors when asking why Ubisoft+, their subscription service that lets you cheaply rent games, wasn’t doing well.
Might be a point of obviousness, but: Most of us own most of our games. Those of us not owning games via subscription rental are choosing to do that, because we don’t care about completionism or playing a title once a year for nostalgia.
Ubisoft is low on creativity and their games don’t interest me, but I’m sometimes weirded out by the illogical way they’re painted as evil, or the way this stupid quote suggests they’re “Cumin’ for muh game discs”.
Ubisoft removed Assassin's Creed 1 and 2 from their online game library, claiming some BS like they want to focus their attention on newer games. The original games had no online services; it shouldn't take any effort to provide access to them online.
Everyone who owns them through Steam or Ubisoft Connect can't play them anymore, unless they still have a physical disc for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 consoles. If you bought a digital copy, you paid for a game that you can no longer play.
THAT is why this quote is especially evil. Not because of some choice of subscription vs. buying, but because Ubisoft has the ability to make our fully-paid for games unplayable.
The closest thing I could find when I searched for this topic is that the multiplayer and online services related to those games were being taken offline. Given you can still play Counter-Strike 1.6, I can see some frustration on that, but I also didn't think many people knew AC1 had any multiplayer features.
Anyone reading can go and take a look at current reviews on Steam for Assassin's Creed 1 and 2. The newest reviews come from the last few weeks, and no one is highlighting "Ubisoft STOLE this game from me, CANNOT BE PLAYED" etc.
Which makes it hard for me to respect memes like this one when the reactions, at least in part, seem to be driven by constant misinformation. Ubisoft games are absolutely mediocre, I can agree with that, but there is absolutely no need to lie about them.
I am aware of the game preservation movement, focused on The Crew, and I'm in favor of that. I still don't think it had anything to do with the quote. No one in game publishing makes a business around taking away games people were already playing.