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.
For all the shit people give gaming studios, we get a lot of genuinely good games. We also have an enormous back catalog of good games - more than any sane person could reasonably play through in a lifetime. The idea that we're simply running out of quality content is myopic.
What we're getting is diamonds in the rough. A handful of beautiful pearls in a river of shit. Even if Larian fails, there will be other studios that release other games that will be the "Good Games" of their era. The question is whether we'll be able to see them in the Tsunami of AI generated diarrhea that saturates every tool we use to interact with developers.
The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.
I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I'd say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I've watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it's not a fantastic game and I don't plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the "Ubisoft = shit" bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.
Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade's Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were "Ubisoft Southern Northland" and "ubisoft = shit".
The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.
Its easy to forget that a lot of these overarching publishing houses have a bunch of smaller shops underneath. Larian could just as easily have been a small house operating under the Ubisoft or Activision or Sony mega-publishing brand. The problem with these small studios is how the parent company routinely shoves them into crunch mode and guts their staff between launches. Ubisoft Zurich, for instance, was spun up to develop MMOs for the German/Swiss market, but shuttered two years later when the parent company decided it wasn't worth the effort. Wolfpack Studios, started in 1999, was bought up by Ubisoft in 2004 and shut down two years later, with the founders having abandoned the project to start a new studio.
Mario + Rabbids looked fun, without a doubt. But who knows what's going to happen to Ubisoft Milan and Paris in another five years, if the gaming market continues its downturn? When all the talented developers are laid off and the remains of the studio become a bunch of poorly paid prompt engineers, what is a sequel going to look like?
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).
There are way too many of the "old ways" still around in Germany, from a surveillance culture and a very propagandistic Press activelly indoctrinating people to them continuing to support an ethno-Fascist state committing a Genocide with weapons very overtly because of their race and German courts convicting people for "anti-semitism" when they say the "from the Land to the Sea" saying (which is about Israel, not the Jewish Religion) but not doing the same for actual overt racist statements and behaviors against other ethnic groups.
The rise of the AfD has happened in a field well plowed by mainstream German politicians with the idea that people's worth depends on race, with some races being deemed good (ubermenschen) and others bad (untermensched) - they might not use the same words anymore, but they certainly share that same view of Mankind.
The apparatus of the State and even the Justice System in Germany is riddled with the very same ideas about people - the racist idea that people's value is determined by their race and some races are better than others - that served as the foundation of Nazism.
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.
I may be. I don't care though. Every shit move they make will make more people like me and eventually the message will be heard. When their stock tanks like this, there will be changes.
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
Have to respectfully disagree, but I'll give that FC5 was consistently pretty good throughout. FC3 started off the first half on the highest of notes and finished somewhere in the middle before sending you to horny jail for being bad boy. FC5 was a solid B+ game. Not one for the ages, but definitely a fun way to kill a few hours. FC5 does have really good co-op. My wife and I each have 100+ hours in FC5 specifically because we played through it together several times.
I thought Faith was a pretty good character. Especially as you dive a little more into her lore. Her dudes that pop out of nowhere can be annoying though lol
When you want to run it, you go to the folder and double-click the .exe of the game.
If you want, you can drop a shortcut to that exe somewhere convenient.
"Installing" is just putting files in a folder somewhere, and maybe adding a shortcut to the start menu so the user can find and run whatever got installed. There's nothing special about it.
Unless the .exe needs some other program to be installed, or some files that need to be available somewhere else (which these DRM free games don't), you can just move the folder the game is in wherever you like, another PC even, and it'll still run just fine.
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
Edit: it does indeed. Lists available platforms and whether or not they have DRM, and/or what kind.
Spread that site around, cause I only came across it fairly recently and it has never showed up in web searches for me without me specifically looking for the site.
Steam has no built-in tool to filter them. You can try running them without steam, but the easiest way is likely to check the PCGamingWiki page for a given game. The "availability" section should list what kind of DRM the game has, if any.
Any dev can decide to just not code their game in a way that requires steam. Valve doesn't modify whatever the studio decides to ship in any way that would change that.
Wait... Half Life 2 is the game that forced me to install steam, create an account and wasn't playable without it is "now" in this list and is DRM free?
Interesting... I got the retail version back then and it was bundled with Steam and did check your account on every start (or required a steam client running with the title in the library). It even had a warning label on the box stating that it needed a steam account and that the CD key would be linked to your account. But I do not remember it using Securom. Which checks out, as I vaguely remember buying I after Christmas.
Maybe it got removed later? I can find some discussions in the steam forums arguing about the drm from about 10 years ago, and other more recent discussion where people are wondering why it has no more drm - e.g. this comment describing the same procedure as I did above
Fun fact: My Steam accounts lists that it was created in July 31st 2004, although Steam was released on September 12th 2004. I guess they just added a random date on old accounts that didn't have a date registered?
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.
They don't have to provide a way to install the games in perpetuity, but I'm pretty sure the ToS don't provide a way for them to stop you from keeping or running a DRM free copy you've downloaded.
So sure, the ToS says you don't own the game, but unlike ubisoft that puts that non-ownership into practice, GOG goes out of their way to make that legal non-ownership utterly meaningless. If you have a copy of the game, then you have a copy of the game.
Back them up on a hard drive and their ToS doesn’t mean squat anymore. I guess that takes a little more effort and investment but if you want to own the game without DRM that will do it.
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?
Valve has stated that if their store was ever to be discontinued they would remove all DRM they have in place to allow for the games to be played without it. This was a long long time ago though.
And it is only really a promise they can keep for their own games. Like I said in another comment, lots of game studios already ship their games without DRM.
If Valve goes under, the games that are gonna be a problem are the ones from the likes of Ubisoft and EA.
They wouldn't lift a finger to make sure people who bought their games on steam could keep playing them if steam disappeared
In fact they've been taking their games back even while steam is still around. Lots of people own unplayable games on steam because the publisher screwed the servers or something.
Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren't great. I wouldn't hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.
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.
For those games, you can literally just make a copy of the game directory after downloading it, and back it up somewhere. Just run the game EXE (or equivalent on Linux) to run it, even on a system that doesn't have Steam installed. Everything you need is in there. That's all Steam is doing when you 'install' a game - downloading its files and extracting them. It also installs any required runtimes like MSVC or .NET, but you can do that yourself too.
Of course, the best idea is still to buy games on GOG instead.
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.
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.
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
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.
There was a big deal about Ubisoft removing Assassin's Creed 1 and 2 last year, and I remember it because I was in the middle of a replay of the first game, and I quit as soon as they announced they were pulling it. Honestly, I haven't checked to see if they actually removed them; they may have reneged on that decision over the backlash. I'll try to reinstall it tonight and see if I can still access it.
But that announcement was when people really started to hate on Ubisoft for their poor business practices, which led to the comment mentioned in this meme. It started because they talked about removing access to paid-for games.
I can't speak towards whatever you might be misinformed about. The only other close thing I can think of is when a support staff told a user that their account was going to be deleted, which prompted a huge backlash. But, one of the determinations seemed to be that they only do so for inactive accounts that have never purchased anything; and was in fact a GDPR requirement. So, it was another nothing article based on rumors.
Which makes sense if you think about it - actually put some kind of motivation behind the "evil schemes" you're reading. Greed is very much expected, but removing people's old games doesn't gain Ubisoft anything but poor press. If you told me they were selling cheat codes for old games for $30 each, I'd believe it. There's no profit in what people are actually suggesting though.
“Shareholders need to get comfortable not owning their yacht”
The truly rich people own the banks. Its their world, we just rent some space in it.
Companies need to get comfortable not owning my money!
Shit I'm getting confortable not having any money and I don't like it
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.
I thought it was symbolizing them circling the drain, at least when it comes to quality...
He means like the stylized anime or emoji one ya dullard. 💩
Looks like gamers got comfortable with not owning Ubisoft games, just like he wanted.
They could have got away still if they actually make good games
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.
Making good games is probably not as easy as it seems though.
you seem to be 300x more knowledgeable than the suits that run these companies
So is spending hard earned salary on a Ubisoft game
Shareholders need to get confortable not owning the value of their share.
Seriously, it in the name: they hold shares not their value.
CEO's need to get comfortable not owning anything anymore
CEOs need to get comfortable with not existing.
CEO at my job can’t even do the most menial task in the warehouse. Companies will be fine without their posh little darlings
Shitty companies need to get used to loosing money
The 5 year price graph is much nicer to view.
I originally used the 5 year one but I thought it wouldn't be as "accurate" to their most recent disasters
Ubisoft will look up and shout “save us!”
And we will whisper
Why'd you post a picture of my parents arguing about me under the word no?
Ali I see is a "pretty butterfly"
Pretty sure it's a hip bone X-ray of someone without a spine
I think you're right but you missed the Pawn piece stuck up their ass.
What are you talking about? Those are two rabbits sharing a cup of tea.
Two bears high fiving.
Wrong. It’s Turian bone structure.
Clearly two bears high fiving
Two skulls kissing
Hate to say it but I think you have schizophrenia
That's not what's in that picture.
I want to be optimistic that the industry will learn from these failures but they only ever seem to learn the wrong lessons
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.
For all the shit people give gaming studios, we get a lot of genuinely good games. We also have an enormous back catalog of good games - more than any sane person could reasonably play through in a lifetime. The idea that we're simply running out of quality content is myopic.
What we're getting is diamonds in the rough. A handful of beautiful pearls in a river of shit. Even if Larian fails, there will be other studios that release other games that will be the "Good Games" of their era. The question is whether we'll be able to see them in the Tsunami of AI generated diarrhea that saturates every tool we use to interact with developers.
The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.
I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I'd say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I've watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it's not a fantastic game and I don't plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the "Ubisoft = shit" bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.
Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade's Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were "Ubisoft Southern Northland" and "ubisoft = shit".
Its easy to forget that a lot of these overarching publishing houses have a bunch of smaller shops underneath. Larian could just as easily have been a small house operating under the Ubisoft or Activision or Sony mega-publishing brand. The problem with these small studios is how the parent company routinely shoves them into crunch mode and guts their staff between launches. Ubisoft Zurich, for instance, was spun up to develop MMOs for the German/Swiss market, but shuttered two years later when the parent company decided it wasn't worth the effort. Wolfpack Studios, started in 1999, was bought up by Ubisoft in 2004 and shut down two years later, with the founders having abandoned the project to start a new studio.
Mario + Rabbids looked fun, without a doubt. But who knows what's going to happen to Ubisoft Milan and Paris in another five years, if the gaming market continues its downturn? When all the talented developers are laid off and the remains of the studio become a bunch of poorly paid prompt engineers, what is a sequel going to look like?
The fact that so many people use Steam mean that gamers haven't really learnt either. Some games are DRM-free on Steam, but a lot aren't.
Yep, after the bombing of Suicide Squad's game, and Hogwarts selling 24 million units, Warner's exec said they would still try to push live services.
Investors: You didn't do it sneaky enough! Shhhh
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.
It's really very simple:
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).
Are you calling the Federal Republic of Germany fascist?
There are way too many of the "old ways" still around in Germany, from a surveillance culture and a very propagandistic Press activelly indoctrinating people to them continuing to support an ethno-Fascist state committing a Genocide with weapons very overtly because of their race and German courts convicting people for "anti-semitism" when they say the "from the Land to the Sea" saying (which is about Israel, not the Jewish Religion) but not doing the same for actual overt racist statements and behaviors against other ethnic groups.
The rise of the AfD has happened in a field well plowed by mainstream German politicians with the idea that people's worth depends on race, with some races being deemed good (ubermenschen) and others bad (untermensched) - they might not use the same words anymore, but they certainly share that same view of Mankind.
The apparatus of the State and even the Justice System in Germany is riddled with the very same ideas about people - the racist idea that people's value is determined by their race and some races are better than others - that served as the foundation of Nazism.
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.
And if I sell my disc I don't have my game anymore, what's so different about it?
Pretty sure their recent stock drop has more to do with them releasing a bad game based on a dying IP than on what an exec said months ago.
I wouldn't know it's a bad game since I won't buy it because of what an exec said months ago.
Given how often we see games selling extremely well even after the companies behind them do awful stuff you're in a very small minority.
I may be. I don't care though. Every shit move they make will make more people like me and eventually the message will be heard. When their stock tanks like this, there will be changes.
Cool? Who else do you kick for doing the right thing?
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.
Wow, I had no idea they pulled that bullshit too. Fuck that.
Isn’t Ubisoft infamously known for this subscription model on all of their products?
I thought Ubisoft was known for their shitty launchers.
Why not both?
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
you mean to tell me you don't want to spend $12.99 to be patrick star in discord?? whats wrong with you man
It's crazy
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...
So, it's the Hope Diamond of Computer Game IPs?
They better sell that IP to The Smithsonian.
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.....
Unless they changed something in the last year or so, all the Smithsonian buildings in DC have free admission.
Oh good! I just remember the last time I was in DC, I had to pay admission. That was in the mid '90s so, I'm guessing they managed to fix that later.
Generally The Smithsonian locations are free to enter. Some parts cost extra like the butterfly room at the natural History one.
A quick Google says the only one that does cost anything is the Cooper Hewitt in New York.
Ok. I haven't been in ages. I just remembered having to pay admission for something.
At least we have that fanmade expansion for Heroes 3.
And before that, Swords of Xeen, as MM 5.5. But other unofficial spinoffs, in particular the King's Bounty series, weren't half bad, either.
man, do I miss might and magic. I think imma play through Xeen again soon.
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.
hold the phone, i need that in my life!
Shareholders need to get comfortable not buying a new yacht
Ubisoft stopped priacy by making games so bland their not worth the effort to download.
Being a pirate is alright with me!
https://youtu.be/dWEm6oIYeHk
Yar!
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.
Far Cry 5 is the best story IMO
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
Have to respectfully disagree, but I'll give that FC5 was consistently pretty good throughout. FC3 started off the first half on the highest of notes and finished somewhere in the middle before sending you to horny jail for being bad boy. FC5 was a solid B+ game. Not one for the ages, but definitely a fun way to kill a few hours. FC5 does have really good co-op. My wife and I each have 100+ hours in FC5 specifically because we played through it together several times.
I thought Faith was a pretty good character. Especially as you dive a little more into her lore. Her dudes that pop out of nowhere can be annoying though lol
We also did the easter egg ending.
"You will own nothing and you will be happy"
My depression make me immune to that
Question, is buying games on Steam "owning"?
Depends on the game.
There's a surprisingly large amount of games on steam that are DRM free, meaning once downloaded, running the game doesn't actually require steam.
They should all be like this.
That is the main selling point of GOG
But then, how do you keep the game for later, like reinstalling it on a system that does not run steam, that won't work right?
It's just a folder. You keep the folder.
When you want to run it, you go to the folder and double-click the .exe of the game.
If you want, you can drop a shortcut to that exe somewhere convenient.
"Installing" is just putting files in a folder somewhere, and maybe adding a shortcut to the start menu so the user can find and run whatever got installed. There's nothing special about it.
Unless the .exe needs some other program to be installed, or some files that need to be available somewhere else (which these DRM free games don't), you can just move the folder the game is in wherever you like, another PC even, and it'll still run just fine.
This. I used to have a bunch of the games backed up on a hard drive because copying the files over & patching was faster than redownloading it.
Pirate magic, me boy!
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
Sure, you can do that. It's obviously on you to figure out how you want to do it, but that's exactly what no DRM means
And I don't mean it's technically possible, you can backup the game files through steam and put them on a flash drive, and there you go
Is there an easy way to check which games in my library are DRM free?
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
Edit: it does indeed. Lists available platforms and whether or not they have DRM, and/or what kind.
Spread that site around, cause I only came across it fairly recently and it has never showed up in web searches for me without me specifically looking for the site.
Steam has no built-in tool to filter them. You can try running them without steam, but the easiest way is likely to check the PCGamingWiki page for a given game. The "availability" section should list what kind of DRM the game has, if any.
I imagine it would be for older games though?
Why do you assume that?
Any dev can decide to just not code their game in a way that requires steam. Valve doesn't modify whatever the studio decides to ship in any way that would change that.
Wait... Half Life 2 is the game that forced me to install steam, create an account and wasn't playable without it is "now" in this list and is DRM free?
Removed back in 2004, seems like.
Interesting... I got the retail version back then and it was bundled with Steam and did check your account on every start (or required a steam client running with the title in the library). It even had a warning label on the box stating that it needed a steam account and that the CD key would be linked to your account. But I do not remember it using Securom. Which checks out, as I vaguely remember buying I after Christmas.
Maybe it got removed later? I can find some discussions in the steam forums arguing about the drm from about 10 years ago, and other more recent discussion where people are wondering why it has no more drm - e.g. this comment describing the same procedure as I did above
Fun fact: My Steam accounts lists that it was created in July 31st 2004, although Steam was released on September 12th 2004. I guess they just added a random date on old accounts that didn't have a date registered?
Buy games on GoG when you can
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.
You still don't own them. Read their ToS.
They don't have to provide a way to install the games in perpetuity, but I'm pretty sure the ToS don't provide a way for them to stop you from keeping or running a DRM free copy you've downloaded.
So sure, the ToS says you don't own the game, but unlike ubisoft that puts that non-ownership into practice, GOG goes out of their way to make that legal non-ownership utterly meaningless. If you have a copy of the game, then you have a copy of the game.
Back them up on a hard drive and their ToS doesn’t mean squat anymore. I guess that takes a little more effort and investment but if you want to own the game without DRM that will do it.
ToS doesn't mean squat here if the law says otherwise. It's insane to me that US has this the reverse.
It's not just the US. You don't buy games from GOG, only licences which they can revoke at any time. This is not illegal.
Which doesn't matter, because you can download the DRM-free game and back it up.
Yeah, on GoG itself, it's licenses, there you are right.
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?
Steam is not a publicly traded company, so they don't pull this kind of skullduggery in service of the shareholders.
They're a company full of people who, gasp, like video games: unlike the average navel gazing, brainless, Harvard Business School CEO.
Given their track record they've been more consistently "pro gamer" than other companies and are given a lot of leeway for that.
Valve has stated that if their store was ever to be discontinued they would remove all DRM they have in place to allow for the games to be played without it. This was a long long time ago though.
Yeah, promises change over time. Hope they can keep their promise on that but not sure how that would even be feasible with a catalogue that large.
And it is only really a promise they can keep for their own games. Like I said in another comment, lots of game studios already ship their games without DRM.
If Valve goes under, the games that are gonna be a problem are the ones from the likes of Ubisoft and EA.
They wouldn't lift a finger to make sure people who bought their games on steam could keep playing them if steam disappeared
In fact they've been taking their games back even while steam is still around. Lots of people own unplayable games on steam because the publisher screwed the servers or something.
I fear for valve when Gaben dies. I hope he picks someone good.
Steam gets a pass because their business practices are consumer friendly.
Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren't great. I wouldn't hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.
But you can, write your ID and Password on a paper under your keyboard and "forget" it before death.
It’s possible, sure, but if pressed Valve will ban the account.
Just don't let them be pressed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can run them only a limited time without Valve giving their ok. I do say "no".
No. Do you prefer subscription services?
Not unless it's DRM-free. You don't own games that have DRM. You just have a license to use them, which can be revoked at any time.
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.
It's definitely possible for Steam games to be DRM-free, especially older ones. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
For those games, you can literally just make a copy of the game directory after downloading it, and back it up somewhere. Just run the game EXE (or equivalent on Linux) to run it, even on a system that doesn't have Steam installed. Everything you need is in there. That's all Steam is doing when you 'install' a game - downloading its files and extracting them. It also installs any required runtimes like MSVC or .NET, but you can do that yourself too.
Of course, the best idea is still to buy games on GOG instead.
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.
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.
Word. I stopped after the second game wouldn't play because their shit drm/servers... Luckily lesson 2 was a gift.
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.
you're acting like ubisoft doesn't actively try to incentive this and push subscription services with overpriced game "editions"
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?
Who said that?
Be specific, include the word “only” as you quoted, and very important: Don’t lie.
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
I think this is correlation without causation. Or at least not exclusively, or even mostly. Don't get me wrong he's still a dick.
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.
Gamers are comfortable with that already. It's the default.
I love how G*mers decontextualised this just to circlejerk.
When Valve has made G*mers comfortable not owning their games.
It’s talking about “for subscription services to work” not licenses
You're allowed to say gay.
You're allowed to say gamer
Are you allowed to say gaymer?
Only if you're 10 years old.
Hard R…
You can be arrested just for saying you’re a gamer.
I wish that was true.
Still confused about this one.
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.
Wait... WHAT?! I can't play my copies of AC 1&2 on Steam anymore?
Is this at all accurate?
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.
There was a big deal about Ubisoft removing Assassin's Creed 1 and 2 last year, and I remember it because I was in the middle of a replay of the first game, and I quit as soon as they announced they were pulling it. Honestly, I haven't checked to see if they actually removed them; they may have reneged on that decision over the backlash. I'll try to reinstall it tonight and see if I can still access it.
But that announcement was when people really started to hate on Ubisoft for their poor business practices, which led to the comment mentioned in this meme. It started because they talked about removing access to paid-for games.
I can't speak towards whatever you might be misinformed about. The only other close thing I can think of is when a support staff told a user that their account was going to be deleted, which prompted a huge backlash. But, one of the determinations seemed to be that they only do so for inactive accounts that have never purchased anything; and was in fact a GDPR requirement. So, it was another nothing article based on rumors.
Which makes sense if you think about it - actually put some kind of motivation behind the "evil schemes" you're reading. Greed is very much expected, but removing people's old games doesn't gain Ubisoft anything but poor press. If you told me they were selling cheat codes for old games for $30 each, I'd believe it. There's no profit in what people are actually suggesting though.