Well, Ubisoft, you should be comfortable not owning my money then. Lead by example.
If you haven’t done so yet, please consider supporting the effort against making old games unplayable: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
It’s like I’ve told a number of my bosses in the past: you have to treat the people making your money for you well, or they just fuck off. They never listen, and everyone always just fucks off. I’m a soothsayer!
They figured out that that statement isn’t true when they control the entire market through insider fixing and oligopolistic practices. They also figured out that the average person’s tolerance for eating shit is much higher than previously thought.
Pirating a ubisoft game is pretty obviously morally wrong.
Not because of the piracy, but because then you’re wasting your time playing a ubisoft game.
My SSD complains about feeling disgusting and dirty after i installed a Ubisoft game to it last time.
It won’t happen again, it needs some time to recover from that.
DO WHAT YOU WANT CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE.
YOU. ARE. A. PIRATE
I generally agree with the idea that some amount of piracy is, will always, and should exist as motivation to improve the market, but I don’t like that everybody is taking this quote out of context for outrage bait. The context is incredibly important. When asked about whether subscription based gaming could be successful, he said that it couldn’t be successful until people became comfortable with not owning their games. He’s effectively on your side with that statement. He is saying that you guys want to own your games, therefore that model cannot succeed unless your ideals change.
I am not trying to persuade anybody one way or the other, but I personally don’t need to own my games. Most of the time, I buy a game, play it through once (if I even finish it), and then it collects dust. Digital games skip the manufacturing process and the dust collection step, but there’s no resale possibility. Ever since upgrading PS+ like 2 years ago, I’m pretty sure I haven’t bought a game. I’m actually happier to see a catalog of games that has good enough quality titles, gets updated frequently enough, and is cheap enough vs shelling out $70 on a game I might not even like. I don’t feel obligated to get my money’s worth out of something on the catalog, just my time’s worth. So I delete games before finishing them more often than I finish, mostly because most games today overstay their welcome. I don’t want to mindlessly grind for xp or gear or consumables just to get to the next road block. I don’t want 100+ hour adventures on a 40+ square mile plot of land full of padding. I want Celeste. I want The Forgotten City. I want Portal and Portal 2. I want Uncharted Lost Legacy. These games are shorter and finite and satisfying. I got to the last parts of Elden Ring and Ghost of Tsushima and realized that I just wasn’t really having fun anymore. They became a slog. Ghost of Tsushima was pretty easy to just delete and not really look back on because it was part of that subscription, but I felt some guilt deleting Elden Ring because I paid full price for it. That made me realize that the subscription gaming isn’t just paying for the games available, but it’s paying for the ability to play games with no real stakes. It’s cheap enough that as long as I enjoy 2 or 3 games per year, it’s worth it, and I probably enjoy 10+. I’m not gaming because I want to own a game; I want to experience the feelings that these games were artistically designed to elicit. I’m more interested in memories and experiences than material goods. I have enough (or too much) stuff as it is. As I get older, my time is becoming more valuable to me because I’m terribly, morbidly aware that it is a nonrenewable, real resource that is trickling away through my fingers and becoming more scarce with every second that passes. I enjoy a game more if I feel free to quit before wasting time not enjoying it. That freedom is what I’m really paying for. And it probably isn’t the popular opinion here, but that’s my perspective for anybody wondering why in the fuck anybody would ever pay for something and not even own it.
Also, fuck ubisoft, fuck sony, fuck every AAA company, this is not a bullshit astroturf ad. I just wanted to disrupt the circlejerk long enough for reality to permeate through. There’s obviously a market for this or it wouldn’t be offered, and it wouldn’t be offered unless it were popular enough and profitable enough. One day, it might be more popular than buying games, but as I look at the hundred shitty movie/TV streaming services, maybe now is the best this could ever be. Soon it could be subscriptions for publishers or even just individual franchises. That is the logical future step that will either vastly increase piracy or kill the popularity of gaming altogether. That and/or intrusive ads. I fucking hate capitalism.
Technically you don’t own your Steam games too. As far as game platforms go, it’s just GOG and Itch.io where you actually own the copy, right?
No. As a general rule with all software, you purchase a license to use the software, not the actual software itself. That being said, GOG and Itch.io can’t yank games that you’ve already downloaded. I don’t know if Steam does or not, but it probably can.
https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
But steam some track record for keeping game. Game removed from store (like rocket league) still in library.
Yes but if Valve goes bankrupt (unlikely today but the winds may change), imagine the amount of backlash caused by people not being able to download “their” games since the servers would have been sold.
No need imagine. Look at wii store down, 3ds store down. People hate it. Also backlash to who? Steam? They dead. Industry? Maybe do impact a little.
Really hope steam at least patch out steam server require to play if they die.
“You should be comfortable”. Is that a common phrase of these people?
They probably have to use something like that a lot, like telling female employees: “You should be comfortable with this type of behavior at the office”
This is Ubisoft, after all.
The mere existence of that phrase is sad.
