...Then Piracy Isn't Theft. Makes Sense.
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Way ahead of them. I've been comfortable with not owning any Ubisoft games for more than a decade now.
He'll, I gave them a shot, but their client always fucking BSODs my system, so even they don't want me playing their shit.
Their client doesn't even run on a steam deck so ubisoft is on my "avoid like it is super aids" list
i think the last ubi game i played was watch dogs, and i pirated that.
yeah i enjoyed it but it ran like total shit so i stopped playing.
it was actually pretty immersive to not be able to use cars, restricted to walking around and the trains.
I made the mistake of buying the last Ghost Recon. Single player game with an always online service, ubi servers are shit and can't always maintain a connection rendering it unplayable. Still under steams 2 hour limit when I asked for a refund, "thats not a game breaking issue, no refunds" Never buying another Ubi game.
Yep, this attitude from devs is really pushing me toward actively endorsing piracy.
Except queers like that director mean SaaS and always online DRM.
Yes. As much as I agree with the OP's sentiment (which has been trending since that article) I also agree with Ross Scott when he complains that it's not a real solution. A lot of these games tied to a central service can't be pirated. That's the point. When Ubisoft pulls the plug, the game is gone forever. Many games can be cracked or have their server code reverse engineered by dedicated hobbyists to restore most functionality, but some never are. I'm actually optimistic for The Crew. It's encrypted but it does seem to have a simple "offline mode" switch that could eventually be found.
Very few of those games are even worth playing. I just opt out of any gaas faggotry - once they start down the road of letting psychologists design games for maximum addiction / wealth extraction, the game is poison.
Yes usually the games that are harder to crack aren't worth the effort to actually break them.
Good to know but that's a subjective statement. Whether or not I would miss them is irrelevant to disturbing market trends and the theft of a product that someone has paid for. (and it's not always made clear that you paid for a temporary service instead of a product, especially when someone was gifted the game on a physical disc)
Thank god my Steam queue backlog will last me until I'm dead
The same with Adobe. You just subscribe and pay into perpetuity. The only reason car makers don't do this is the maintenance cost otherwise they'd pull the same stunt.
Some of them are trying, with premium DLC add-ons from some companies and Tesla forcing you to pay them for maintenance.
Yeah I heard BMW wants to charge for ass warmers.
I will laugh if their new pirate game is the most pirated game in 2024...
I said it more for the joke
If I remember right the last Ubisoft game I bought was Assassin's Creed black flag (ironically) which I enjoyed the campaign but hated how they kept the ruined AC3 multiplayer design.
Just naturally stopped getting their games like EA after BF1
I hear that, it just saddens me more that my PERFECT multiplayer game with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Revelations to just ruin it.
It's like getting 5 star dining for years to only be replaced by bargain bin freezer food.
Damn do I miss AC multi-player.
Favorite multi-player experience after Halo 3. And the only one I got good at. I think I was top 1500 ranked or something at one point.
Completely unique. Stupid fun.
Honestly, it doesn't even look worth the time it would take to pirate. It just looks like a dumpster fire
Calling it theft assumes that the pirate will buy the game if it isn't available to pirate but that is often not true
You can go further and say piracy has the opposite of the claimed effect, the overwhelming majority of the time.
When the RIAA and BPI tried to construct their anti-napster/etc narratives about this in the 2000s, they invariably found that the groups which pirated the most also bought the most, according to surveys. This is reflected in how the BPI celebrated all-time high album sales in the winmx/soulseek/suprnova/kazaa era (2001 to 2005-ish), sometimes year on year. There was a sales blip in 2002, which they used for scaremongering propaganda, but that was because 2001 had been a year of historical high sales. They broke 2001's record in 2003 - and then 2003's record in 2004, and I think the same happened in 2005 (not sure, then I stopped tracking after that) - all at the height of the biggest normie acceptance of piracy.
I recall an anecdote of some label PR goon trying to make a failed point by telling a student group to raise their hands if they had recently pirated something, then raise their hand if they had recently purchased something, and all the same hands went up.
I'm sure there are people around who do nothing but pirate and never buy anything, and moreso with gaming which is a bit different to music, but there's nothing to suggest they're anything more than a fat unicorn. Remember the notorious analysis from an indie dev which found they had to prevent 1000 illegal downloads to create 1 sale:
Such a round, vague ratio of piracy to lost sales, on an obscure indie game, coming from a dev whose focus was fighting piracy and not arguing for it, suggests such a weak relationship that I think it was merely the best thing he could pull out of his ass. For all he knows, reducing piracy decreased his sales. Denuvo, etc. are total industrial snake oil for retarded corpos.
They somehow still believe they’re going to make streaming video games take off the way it did with music and TV shows. All they see is the billions they’ll save on manufacturing and distribution costs. But then they also want to shove all these arbitrary and ever-changing rules and regulations and “terms of service” into everything, as well as the power to just switch it off whenever they want. Woke corporatism sucking every drop of joy out of everything as always.
And they think this appeals to us somehow? They think those of us who’ve been gaming since the anti-establishment 90’s are going to like being pushed around in exchange for the chance to play buggy, overpriced homosexual communist crap?
Clearly they have a poor understanding of both their product AND their customer base. I’m tired of being TOLD what I want. Stick your subscription model up your asshole sideways. I WILL OWN THINGS 🖕
They think you won't have a choice. "You will own nothing and your happiness is a nonfactor" is a more truthful version of that line. Whether idiot consumers will finally wake up or not is the real question, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Wall Street bankers see customers as nothing more than pay pigs. So they want that recurring revenue stream more than anything.
It doesn't need to appeal to you if it saturates the market and becomes unavoidable.
This is what their end goal is.
We have a whole lot of digital idiots. Yesterday I read a thread of people complaining that Amazon was inserting ads into Max.
...
Max has its own AD FREE app, but people arent aching it with ads?! I never understood why people put their login credentials into Amazon. But, that just blew my mind.
They tried so hard last time, they even had somewhat legit tech reporters paid off and acting like shills for that shit pile Stadia.
Hoist them pricks on their own petards
Get comfortable with indie devs kicking your ass even more.
This might be the most Québécois name to ever Quebec.
Remember the “You wouldn’t download a car” advertisements? It’s come for circle. I would trust a downloaded car over a “civilian utility navigation tractor” that the government let us have if “You will own nothing and love it” is more concrete than it is now.
the only good thing Ubisoft has right now is Trackmania, and that game is only good because all the content is community created and the community is very dedicated.
Ubisoft being dumb
:: Ubisoft
Ubisoft offers a subscription price to play games without buying them. They say the newest ones will be offered day one. Expect that to not happen if a game sells well. The price is $18, which is what I pay for a used Ubisoft game. I guess this means the company views their games at that price as well.
https://archive.ph/Ex0p9
Ubisoft reworking and renaming online service
https://archive.ph/Sm4rS
Ubisoft says you don't actually own the game you paid for
https://archive.ph/mzlLS
You need to get comfortable not owning your games
https://archive.ph/DrBOV
The bleak part of this is not so much us. We're adults (physically at least) who've been gaming for many years. Future generations will never know of gaming as anything other than this kind of scamming. I can already see the "they took this from you" memes of 2044.
well, i guess they can get used to indie devs and romhackers eating their lunch. once they loose enough money from this venture i bet they will start trying to sue their way to victory.