Fully agree with it, but they're still extremely popular, and people will gladly keep handing over their money.
For me, I say "Ok" to them wanting us to get used to not owning our content - followed with "Then I'll pay rental prices. Which means I'm not buying at $60+ dollars, if all I get to do is rent it then I'll pay <$15 going forward."
The really awful part is that there's not really any regulation that can stop this. If you ban taking away games people bought then they'll just switch to a subscription which is even worse
If you had reasonable copyright terms like 5 years and a requirement to release code/digital artifacts for library archival once it becomes public commons?
Except that’s not a problem in many countries so I don’t know why it has to be this way. US media ownership laws are among the worst in the world in that they are basically non-existent. It’s always been like this because we lack imagination and the companies are greedy as hell.
Like people act like this is a new problem with digital media, but it is actually the case with physical media too - there are all sorts of restrictions about what you can and can’t do with it. We basically don’t own anything media-wise, we never have. The difference is now they can enforce it more strategically and effectively with digital downloads.
Well, they aren't alone. Blizzard and Activision is on my blacklist. As well as pretty much any studio own by Microsoft at this point... Oh, and Sony! Can't forget about them.
I purchased Rayman Legends on a big Steam sale because it is a great game and I wanted to play it again. I installed it. I hit play. It tried to install the Ubisoft launcher. I uninstalled it and refunded.
Open source is too far, but as part of a shutdown of a game and it's servers there should be a year long period where the publisher is required to release the game without DRM, including the server software, to all customers.
I could see it going through Steam, you get a message "Delistment notification: The Crew is being delisted, get your permanent copy now!"
Worse solution, but I would accept if publishers were forced to clearly display the exact date when the game will stop functioning at the point of purchase and all advertising materials.
I see what you're getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.
A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.
That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I'm sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.
If they can't keep their committed date (or fold entirely), then the source goes open. If every copy happens to get deleted during the bankruptcy, treat it as criminal fraud by the top levels of the company and go after everyone that could have decided to improve backups and other IT methods of avoiding that but didn't. That's assuming it was accidental, higher penalties if it can be proven to be deliberate.
In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.
Jail time isn't a likely outcome. It just isn't the world we live in, unfortunately.
Yeah golden parachutes are such a joke in this society that likes to pretend to be a meritocracy.
Though on that note, I'd love to see a law that limits golden parachutes to the lowest paid position in the company. Hell, I'd be ok with that being scaled to full time. Not because disgraced executives deserve even that much but because it would give some incentive to increase pay rates across the company. I've also long thought that executive compensation should also be limited by some multiple of the lowest pay. And yeah, I'd include stock options and grants in that (for both employee and executive compensation).
Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.
I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.
Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.
It's a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won't have politicians that can be bought. That's a different discussion altogether.
I think the company should also be required to clearly state the amount of time they'll keep supporting the game and will operate the servers for. If they decide to shut them down early, everybody should be given the choice to either receive a full refund or the non DRMd version of the game + the server software like you suggested.
In general I think all paid games should be required to clearly state the amount of time they'll keep providing feature updates for, as well as support for new hardware, major bug fixes, and minor bug fixes. Although games that aren't online and just reach EoL are still playable for quite some time, eventually there'll be some breaking operating system or hardware change that will force the use of a virtual machine, compatibility software, or other types of emulation to keep playing. That might not happen for 50 years, at which point you probably don't care, but still. I'd give more leniency to indie Devs and games made as passion projects, though.
Although obvious once you think about it, I don't think most people realise or even think of the fact they will eventually not be able to play the game they're buying. And these mega companies need to stop making games they dump 6 months after launch.
I get what you mean but that is not feasable, however, if we look back at the old multiplayer experience like in Unreal Tournament 2004, the company runs a master server, and the community runs the game servers.
The master server just lists the game servers and allows for a server browser. That is WAY less resource intensive and can be run almost indeffinately.
The master server for UT2004 ran continously for almost 20 years, and when Epic announce it was shutting down, a fan server was created and after a quick edit of the config file you can play UT2004 multiplayer exactly like it was in the past.
So let's go back to that model of multiplayer, it requires a bit of skill to set up your own server securely, but you'll have way more choice and less commitment of resources from the publisher making it available for longer at less cost.
eventually there'll be some breaking operating system or hardware change that will force the use of a virtual machine, compatibility software, or other types of emulation to keep playing.
I still can play Unreal from 1998 on modern Linux. Faust bless Torvalds and his "never break userspace".
Dude there's literally an entire article about them saying that gamers should 'get comfortable with not owning their games', a lot of Ubisoft Connect accounts that had 'The Crew' have had their licenses revoked, and the game has been shut down since April 1st.
Okay but my question was specifically if Ubisoft was asking that question at the same time they are making these decisions. That last panel would be funnier if it were true.
It's better than what Bungie did with Destiny 2... just gutted 1/2 the content from the game, including all the story missions and the first several paid expansions.
They wanted to attract new players with a smaller download size, but the new players come in and go "WTF is going on?"
That's the most baffling MMO decision I've seen, tbh. WoW has plenty of issues but at least they aren't just deleting the continent of Northrend to save on install space or anything
I would've been fine with that if that's how they launched it. It wasn't. I stopped when they sunset a bunch of shit the first time in the first game. I figured the second would be more of the same, but sunsetting entire DLCs is nuts.
Whoa, wtf? How did I miss that drama, haha holy shit. I definitely remember downloading it a few years ago and being aghast at its absurd size (think it was around 120GB? which nowadays that's pretty par for the course because fuck optimization). But gutting half your content just to save space... have they not heard of compression? Like what the hell were they thinking haha
Man I was so sad when Ubisoft bought Blue Byte. I always held out hope that they'd switch publishers eventually but they never did and then they got bought. Now I know I'll always have to put up with Ubisoft bullshit to play Anno, one of my all time favourite franchises.
They've had some shoddy shit, but they also have some solid titles in their backlog. The Rayman series, P.O.D, Gex, Splinter Cell, the original Rainbow Six titles, Beyond Good and Evil.
The recent Prince of Persia game was actually pretty good. I definitely acquired it on my Switch thru alternate methods, but I almost felt bad because I do wish for them to return to that kind of game design on the regular versus a one-off with that title.
There's a great initiative going on right now trying to hold Ubisoft and other game publishers accountable for shitty practices like this by trying to petition governments from a few different nations to create legal protections for people to continue to have access to their games they purchased after the publisher decides to abandon a game. If you live in an EU country especially, you might be able to help sign a petition still: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
There's a bunch of petitions and actions possible on various parts of the world. It's not just one meaningless online petition but a comprehensive plan to bring this to attention of various governments worldwide. Keep an eye out, there might be something you can help with in the future depending on where you live.
