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.
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.
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.
Ubisoft execs need to “get comfortable” with eating shit.
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.
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.
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?
Every single time Ubisoft opens their stupid mouths, it reinforces my decade old decision to boycott them.
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.
Digital can be just as good as physical, I buy just as many mp3s as I do CDs, but most industries are too greedy to offer good digital options
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.
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.
Even buying a game digitally from most storefronts doesn’t mean you actually own it. You simply buy a license to play it. Look what happens if your Steam account gets permanently banned for violating their ToS, you’ll lose access to any game you paid for on that account. Same thing with Microsoft or Sony. I think GOG might be an exception to this, where they will never revoke access to the games you previously bought, but I am not 100% sure of their policies.
Regardless, all gamers will never fully embrace subscription purity. There are so many games that require a lot of time to complete, especially so if you’re an adult with lots of responsibilities who can only game here and there. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is massive and I’ve owned it since launch. I’ve only gotten to Act 2 with like 60 hours clocked in and I still want to play it to finish. However, if it was on a subscription service, I’d be constantly stressed that it’d be leaving the subscription any day.
And what about classic games (includes new games that become instant classics) I’ll know I’ll always treasure and want to be able to play whenever I’m in the mood? To this day, my wife will randomly bust out Mario 64 or even a more niche game like Fable 2 and just have them be her comfort food for a lazy weekend. Hell, just a few months ago we got our our original Xbox to play some Fuzion Frenzy for nostalgia sake. Can’t do that with subscription models.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent. I just absolutely loathe this crushing pressure by corporations to force our entire economy into being rent based. Every expert economist has been warning us about the dangers of this for at least the last 10+ years, and yet consumers keep blindly marching towards it because it’s “convenient,” totally ignoring the long-term consequences.
I think GOG might be an exception to this, where they will never revoke access to the games you previously bought, but I am not 100% sure of their policies.
They are, when you buy a game from gog they send you the installation files. You install and run it with your own hardware whereas with Steam and other digital gaming companies you are just getting access to the game on their servers. By sending you the installers and letting you play independently from their servers gog gives up the ability to lock you out. It’s the primary reason that they should be the first choice for where to buy a digital version of a game. The upside is that it’s the closest you can get to actually owning a digital copy of a game; the downside is that playing on another device requires that you transfer files and reinstall rather than just logging into a remote server.
even more niche games like Fable 2
Ouch 😂 I remember playing the shit outta Fable 2; it’s a great game and holds up pretty well even today, easily one of my favourites. I always thought that Peter Molyneux got treated too harshly for overpromising, and I stand by that to this day. Dude made good games, just not as good as he said they were gonna be.
Ill wager it was just Molyneaux was a bad dev in a better age, before all games were released unfinished and had an online component, and dlc was truly dlc, like horse armor, not a part of the game deliberately withheld during development.
Games were expected to be finished products that lasted as long as you didn’t break the install disk.
We’ve gone a long way down since I’ve been gaming
If you’re old enough to remember horse armour then that reference has to be tongue-in-cheek. Nobody thought it was a good idea at the time I got weeks of mockery of Bethesda out of that nonsense 😂
I don’t think Molyneux was a bad developer, he just overhyped his games to a level nobody else has managed before or since. Like I said, the Fable games do actually hold up pretty well, and Black And White is iconic. I don’t recall encountering any bugs in Lionshead games, nobody T-posed randomly, and nothing that broke the game for me. But, I’m just one dude of course and the nostalgia is strong.
Im not being super serious but its true, molyneauxs promises became a punchline but i loved the games he made. Black & White was buggy, even had a game breaking bug (wolves or something, it happened to me too) but i still lived the shit out of it, fable i played 2 times thru back to back (super, super fun but not what he promised)
That’s what i mean. A broken promise back then was a game that wasn’t as great. Not a game that didn’t even run like that Batman fiasco, or many online only games that don’t even run stable at launch, etc.
He was a simple “problem” in a better age of gaming
and yet consumers keep blindly marching towards it
Consumers are being frog-marched friend, we have absolutely no control over market forces. Voting with your wallet only works in highly competitive markets
AAAAAA FUCK COPYRIGHT, FUCK INTELELCTUAL PROPERTY, FUCK CORPORATIONS
While i would sate that in a slightly different way i do agree with you, also i recommend you to remove word these, it would enhance quality of this statement.
THANK YOOU!
I Rather pay more once. And actual own my games. Than get nickeld and dimed. And own noting…
comfortable? tell that to my 24tb nas.
I’ve felt very comfortable not buying a single ubisoft game since rayman legends, a great game that i use my pirated copy to play because it works better than the DRMriddled version i paid for.
Generally i don’t even bother to steal ubisoft games since i haven’t played a good one (imo) since early early far cry or asscreed2
