No one could have predicted this, no one.
Gaming
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Logo uses joystick by liftarn
they MBA'd themselves into extinction
edit; everyone with an mba is only qualified to be a farm laborer
Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.
They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.
Get rid of uplay. I might buy ubisoft games if they weren't tied to that horrible service
Not just Uplay, but also their activation servers. Their games make calls to their endpoints to authenticate if you own/access the game and DLC. If those activation servers are decommissioned without a replacement, your game won’t activate and you’ll lose access to DLC.
They announced they would do this for legacy games several years ago, and I was going to lose access to all the DLC I paid for with my Splinter Cell Blacklist game that I physically owned on a Wii U disc way back in 2013. Bought all the DLC because I loved the game. After enough gamer backlash, Ubisoft backpedaled and the activation servers remain for now. However, the concern is still there that I’ll lose the stuff I paid for when they decide they can’t serve it anymore or if they go bankrupt. Without them updating the game code or open sourcing it, I lose updates, DLC, etc.
We need digital ownership reform, or else it’s piracy time again. This will especially be critical when Gabe steps down from Steam and new owners are appointed, or if Steam goes public.
My god I dread that day.
Ubisoft just needs to get comfortable with no longer owning their games. 😈
A shame; the way they make their open worlds with lots of little things to collect and do are oddly pleasant to play for that. Definitely something only I really enjoy, I realize, of course.
Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla scratched an itch that few other open world action RPGs have been able to for me (of course, they were copying Witcher III, which did it far better). Despite everyone saying all their games are the same, I haven't enjoyed any of their other ones like I did those three (oh, except for Watch Dogs 2). If Shadows is the same thing again but in Japan, I'll be satisfied.
I mean that’s a whole genre. The same could be said for Stardew Valley and that has a huge fan base.
More games should have the “lots of little things to collect and do” mechanic.
Agreed. One reason I loved Majora's Mask was that the game was dense. Every square inch of the game was used for something and in a lot of different ways. I also appreciated a checklist for my collectables so I could pinpoint what I was missing, but that's rather off topic. I lean way away from open world games now both for excessive time commitment and most of it is just empty space.
It's because they're not AAA anymore. They went AAAA so I guess they've had a financial rating overflow and now they've gone negative.
I guess shareholders got used to not owning their stock?
What kind of bankruptcy?
The kind that turns into into an other of microsofts pet toys.
Hehe, BoobiSoft ...
G*mers have already grown used to not owning their games. It's called Steam.
That's not what they meant. The person who said it was "director of subscriptions." They meant gamers need to get used to all games being SaaS because they are of the opinion that that's what's going to happen. SaaS is capable of generating magnitudes more money than any other paradigm, so this is of course the wet dream of the bean counters.
The problem with the statement, of course, is threefold:
- People don't like being told things that sound a lot like "just hand over your money and like it, dumbasses"
- SaaS is also capable of failing spectacularly
- (most important) In no conceivable world would it be possible to have every single game be a subscription service
Shit, the world can't even support half a dozen streaming video subscription services, but they think everybody's going to gladly pay monthly fees for every game they play?
You've never owned your games. It's always been a license to play the games. It's just that now they have the ability to enforce it.
It was not like this back in the '90s. Games you purchased were on disk/disks.
You installed the game and played the fully completed game that did not require an online connection. You owned that game.
After the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 things changed. So it has not always been like this.
You were still buying a license to play the games.
But you could trade them with your friends, so single license meant nothing. You owned the game.
But without a way to enforce it, it was (and still is) functionally identical to owning them outright. What it's legally called is irrelevant.
I guess I personally don't really care about the legal aspect, I'll make my own moral assessments on what I find reasonable to pirate etc. regardless of legality. Law only occasionally overlaps with ethics.
But on a philosophical level, a rethorical question I ask myself is; what does it really mean to "own" anything digital? I have to ponder on that for a while.
Oh that's easy. For me at least. In my analysis, the law is wrong.
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Where are the assets stored. On local storage? Then I own a copy of the assets.
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Where is the game logic executed? Locally? Then I own a copy of that game logic. A server? Then I own non of that logic. A hybrid of the two? Then I own a copy of what my hardware processes.
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Where is the game save data stored? Locally? Again, that a copy I own. On a server? I'm licensing it.
Here's a good analogy: Monster Hunter: Processing, assets, and saves are all on individual machines. I can be cut off from the internet, and still play. I own a copy.
Diablo IV: the assets are local, processing my inputs is local, but my saves and the game logic are all processed on a server. I own a copy of the assets and input logic. Blizzard owns the rest as they process the rest.
If they want to do the whole "resources=expense" then I get to consider MY resources as expense too.
Before the internet, the concept of game ownership was much easier. Whatever the seller chose to call it, as long as I had complete control over when and where I could play the game, I owned it. I would consider any game where the ability to play it cannot be willfully taken from me by digital means to be owned by me. Nowadays, that mostly applies to cracked games or systems only. No game that requires an online connection to play would apply.
This is rather pedantic and obfuscates the reality and consumer rights. Don't shill for big corp with that narrative, you could argue you don't "own" a book either if we're just doing silly talk in here.
You don't, though. Or rather, you don't own its contents. It's not being pedantic, it's simply correct.
This isn't a perspective shilling for big corp. If anything, understanding that society has already sleepwalked into a post-ownership era long ago, and that technology has only just now appeared to let the logical conclusion of that come home to roost, should only increase one's unease of mass unchecked corporate ownership.
You can't buy a book, copy it, and profit from those copies because you don't own the IP. But you own the book for your personal use (and you can lend or sell it) in perpetuity, without any dependence in whoever sold it to you. That last part is no longer possible in the digital world with games that are architected specifically so that core functionality is server-side only.
Devil's advocate: you obviously own the physical media that constitutes the book, but do you really "own" the contents of the book if you're not allowed by law to make a million copies of it and sell them?
Who gives a fucking shit about this nonsense? I just want games I paid for to work after the developer stops supporting them.
Maybe you don't, because you're a moron.