This statement was made by Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions, Phillipe Tremblay, who recently spoke to Gamesindustry.biz about the digital future and Ubisoft Plus specifically. Tremblay states that people eventually “got comfortable” with not owning their CD or DVD collections, and that a similar shift in attitude “needs to happen” in gamers.
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They need to get used to not being paid for their games
The push to live services, online DRM, microtransactions, DLC and other such things is because they have identified that there is more money to be made as a ‘server operator’ than a ‘game developer.’
They don’t really care about getting paid for the game, they’d rather give it away for free if they can make more money off controlling the servers.
Exactly. This is only about finding the most effective way to suck the most amount of money from the gaming market.
Hah. Ubisoft execs think they should be paid whenever someone produces a Let’s Play with one of their games. They’re the horniest of the publishers with respect to game streaming.
They are beyond adament that they own your experiences. If they never see a piece of physical media again, they’ll still be upset that their old games are still playable without their say so.
If I don’t own it, I am not paying for it.
Wut?
If you don’t own it when you buy, it’s not stealing when you take it.
Well, that’s not really true isn’t it? I’m not against stealing games from corporate devs, but imagine you decide to get a kick ass printer, those they use in companies. Those printers are usually leased, not bought, and the printer leasing company usually updates and upgrades it every X time. The company pays for the use of the printer, but they don’t own it. The leasing company is very clear in what they are selling you, they are selling you a service. You still need to have a place to store the printer, you still need to pay for the ink used, you still need to have paper, just as a game needs storage space, a gpu and all the periferals.
Imagine if taking a printer from the leasing company makes them lose 0 money in material costs, since this is what happens with digital goods, they still lose money from you being able to use the printer without paying the lease, when you would originally not be able to use it if they didn’t develop it. In that sense, what you stole is their revenue from the lease.
All of this to say that pirating IS stealing, and I still do it proudly. All of this to say, either they let me own it or I’m stealing it.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it is what the comment OP was referring to.
That’s fine. I don’t really claim to own the things I pirate.
If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
If buying is owning, piracy is still not stealing. Theft involves a tangible loss for someone else.
Which is a shame, because if I could create tangible loss for Ubisoft by downloading their games, I would do nothing else until they went under.
According to their logic, you can set up a shellscript that repeatedly copies an ISO of theirs to /dev/null. That should bankrupt them after a week or so.
Where’s that greentext with the guy who takes over a company by pirating their game 100k times?
If we have to be comfortable not owning games, then they have to be comfortable us pirating them.
He better get used to not making money…
But who am I kidding gamers have 0 impulse control.
Either way I have enough retro games to last me a lifetime.
Either way I have enough retro games to last me a lifetime.
same tbh, there is a reason !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works is up in the lemmy explorer
I still don’t understand how people can look at the Ubisoft logo and not throw up in their mouths a little. Like, how is AC still huge after 15 years of putting out the same game copy and paste style?
Because they copy paste the gameplay, in different environments. Like “travelling to the past”. I recall AC being praised for the accurate portrayal of the environments they presented. Idk if that has persisted.
I have never played the game and never will because playing a game where your dude gets into a machine to watch the memories of an antecesor of you who was a kick ass assassin and then playing as the assassin doesn’t really call me, but it did to plenty people.
If I can’t expect to own it, then you’d better not expect me to buy it.
Thats fine, the normies will, and then it will become normal just like everything else awful that is their fault for going along with it.
That’s ok for them though, you and me will sail the seas finding adventure and friendship and shit while they sit on their doodoo drm islands
Remember how the ps4 mocked the Xbox one for not being able to lend games, then the PS5 launches with a digital edition, and then a slimmer version launches with only digital and you have to buy a separate disc drive?
It’s nice that he’s being honest about the bullshittery but all the same he can shove it. Glad I haven’t bought a Ubi game in years and it doesn’t look like that’s going to be changing any time soon.
Every single time Ubisoft opens their stupid mouths, it reinforces my decade old decision to boycott them.
That’s cool. I’ve not played Far Cry since Primal, and have not played any Ubisoft games since Far Cry 4. So, I’m very used to not paying for or playing Ubisoft games.
Even if I pay for a Ubisoft game through a place like Steam I still download it elsewhere because I hate going through their launcher.
“needs to happen” …for what?
It needs to happen in order to increase profits.
Similar to what happened to Netflix, competing services will harm this process. Currently the most comparable to old Netflix is the Xbox Game Pass; which if companies like EA and Ubisoft pulled their games from; it would be way less prefered.
As the profits that come to these companies decrease, they’ll be more tempted to focus more on their own subsctiption platforms. Game industry has this trick up its sleeve that some games can be played 1000s of hours, but even adding games of this nature; satisfying every player with a single subscription service is impossible.
I’ve never gotten comfortable with not owning CDs or DVDs. In fact, if I really really like a movie or album, I obtain a physical copy. If it’s an independent artist, I’ll even buy it directly from the record label.
And so far, I’ve been able to stream everything else when I just want to get my entertainment fix ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m in the same boat. I like having physical copies of my favorite games, music, movies, and shows. I also like supporting the artists/productions, so it’s a win-win that i can buy their products. I’ve always struggled to understand why someone would pay the same price (or nearly as much) for a strictly-digital copy.
Making everything fully digital has its advantages but i never once thought it would act as a complete replacement for physical media.
I’ve always struggled to understand why someone would pay the same price (or nearly as much) for a strictly-digital copy
Convenience. I’ve been in situations where it seemed easier at the time to just buy a movie on Amazon. For example, if I’m on vacation or a work trip and I really want to see something.
But that was before I learned about which sites were safe to use for streaming and had high quality content.
Also, I’ve learned that my library still has a large DVD collection, so I apprise myself of that.
That makes sense. Carrying a library is a whole different thing from having access to a library…
I Rather pay more once. And actual own my games. Than get nickeld and dimed. And own noting…
Ubisoft directors might need to become comfortable hiding quietly in dark attics when the revolution comes.
Somewhere they don’t own, apparently.
Sadly this “own nothing and be happy” world only exists for those who don’t make hundreds of thousands for the great gift of destroying the world for everybody else.
points a tall bookshelf in his house
Those are board game I got to quit playing video games. Bonus points here…drumroll…I own all of them.
DRMs your board games
Sooo, over 10 years ago, somebody came up with the idea for a hybrid board game: Golem Arcana. It’s a board game…that requires an app to play.
Of course, the app was proprietary, and it’s no longer supported, so now the game is dead, because the app won’t run on modern phones.
Let’s not give them any ideas. My brother actually has a board game (can’t remember the name) where in order to get the story/scenarios/etcetera for each playthrough/mission/whatever, you actually need the official board game app.
Which will lose updates soon
They did that in the LOTR Journeys in Middle-Earth game and in the new editions of Descent. The scenarios, spawns and enemy movement are all managed by the app, which is fine, but they don’t have an alternative way to play without it, which is crappy. But I’m sure that if they stop support someone will reverse engineer it and make a ruleset to admin these things.
Shit. You’re right. Fucking Werewords.
I’m playing an Ubisoft game right now; if a game is cheap enough on Steam I don’t care who the publisher is. So I got Immortals Fenyx Rising in exchange for dirt.
It bears all the signs of a great creative team getting fucked over by exactly the sort of idiot who runs his mouth like that guy. There’s even a demo level, explicitly called such in the game, for the now-cancelled sequel, how sad is that? The control scheme isn’t completely ironed out and has some screwy behaviour in niche situations. There’s a huge wait as you load the game while it checks the server for updates which will never come, duration of nearly a minute and sometimes longer, the sort of thing that a responsible company would remove when updates are no longer forthcoming (surely it’s at most a few lines of code, and circumventable by one); and I haven’t finished the game yet but it seems right now that the main story-giving NPC who hangs out at your base is just selling fuckin macrotransaction cosmetics. Tacky, and you can taste the dev team’s resentment in being forced to include it.
