- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
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I am very comfortable with never owning a ubisoft game ever again.
They added DRM to a more than ten Year old game I had bought. I’ll never purchase another ubisoft product without then heading to the high sea to get a uncrippled copy. Odds are, I’ll just not bother.
I for one am quite comfortable not giving them any more of my money either.
So long as they are comfortable with me never buying them.
Companies claiming you don’t own your games are admitting that piracy isn’t stealing
For most games, I’m fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher’s discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin’s Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.
I’m with you. It’s hip to hate on Ubisoft, but I’m of the impression that subscription based gaming has already gained traction with Game Pass. The article is spot on though when the author remarks that Ubisoft offering their library at 18$ a month is a hard bargain. Especially considering Game Pass is currently at 10$ a month… and includes Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Origins & Odyssey.
For this to work it would have to be like, hourly or minutely billing. This takes care of the multiple games issue as you’ll likely never play more than one at a time and don’t pay for the time you don’t play it that month. You can try a game for a few days or a week and stop playing and also stop paying. You can try some indie games because you’d only be spending $0.05/hr or something.
Or you just have to include a whole library of games like Game Pass or access to all of Steam or something which would allow you to hop games yet not own them.
I’d still want to be able buy games I intend on playing for years (like Skyrim or Civ or City Skylines). So maybe a “rent to own” scheme would be cool.
So you’ve had the game for 3 years and you’ve now payed more than the retail price. Are you going to keep paying for it, or do you expect it to be “yours”. Also, as with most things digital, let’s say you invest a hundred hours, almost get to the end and…. They decide to yank the game from their service. No ending for you. Thoughts on that? Both are very real scenarios by “renting” the game.
To be fair nobody plays *JUST one single game for 3 years. Economically speaking it is more affordable to pay the subscription than to buy it. That said there are no guarantees they won’t raise prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually decide to include ads and add limits eventually. There’s not even an expectation of control by the users.
But we have seen enough of how streaming libraries change and split. Losing access to your favorite game is an almost inevitable eventuality.
Skyrim, Fallout 4, RDR2, Witcher 3, The Sims, Dark Souls, Civilization, Borderlands 1/2, Stardew Valley, Persona…
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean there aren’t people that come back again and again between games to dust off an old favorite. While I personally never touched Fallout 4 again after beating it, I’ll break out my XBox 360 and give New Vegas a whirl to see what character concept I’ll try this time.
You are confusing my argument. You listed me 10+ games. If you paid $2/mo for 3 years and got to own a game for it, that would be enough for a couple of them at most. I’m not saying old games are not worth playing. I’m saying that if you had to pick between buying all the games you like or paying for a subscription, most likely the subscription would be more affordable. Because ultimately you played more than a single game.
To be fair nobody plays just one single game for 3 years.
Where’s the confusion?
The confusion is that the implied conclusion is
To be fair nobody plays just one single game for 3 years (they play multiple)
rather than
To be fair nobody plays one game for 3 years (they are too old)
The former complements the following argument regarding how costly buying vs subscribing would be. The latter doesn’t work with the following paragraph that lists the unreliability of subscription libraries as a downside.
I never mentioned age. I mentioned games that are played for thousands of hours. Meaning that the value of those games far exceeds the value of the subscription. Furthermore, then the subscription ends (including when pulling games that are too old) and you are left without the game you have been sinking an incredible amount of time into just because some suits determined that not enough people play X game to warrant providing server space.
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In your example, you are not playing only one game for 3 years without playing any other games.
Yes. I am explaining that the opposite value of that statement doesn’t go far enough.
Got numerous friends that prove you wrong.
I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I’m okay with renting and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won’t ever own the game). I’m also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.
What I’m not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it’s only “licensed” to you and the license can be revoked at any time. It’s all the disadvantages you describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that’s what I had in mind with my comment: I’d be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest terms of service and a fair price, instead of the bullshit they’re pulling right now.
If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn’t need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.
I’ve said before that being a PS Plus subscriber has changed the types of games I play by making indie games more accessible to try, with low stakes. Prior, I usually reserved my funds for what I assumed was the biggest bang with AAA titles.
There’s value there with having a library of games to just try out. That being said, the trajectory of subscription services generally and “digital ownership” (see Playstation’s recent Discovery kerfuffle) is really concerning.
I think Ubisoft’s mindset here is on the wrong track (surprise…). Luckily, as others have said, there’s not a lot of temptation here for Ubisoft’s modern library (Prince of Persia being an admitted exception).
I have stopped giving even the slightest fuck about Ubisoft games. There are way more games than I have time. It’s just another filter for what to play next.
Most digital gaming stores are, except GOG and ItchIO. Even consoles are trying to push things that way. XBox has Game Pass and Playstation released a version of their console with no disc reader. Subscriptions may seem more fleeting that digital purchases but in actuality we’ve seen how companies can take down purchased media and entire digital storefronts.
I have purchased more Steam games than it would be sensible but as companies lose any qualm to take purchases away from customers, if anyone wants any any guarantee of ownership they really need to buy DRM-free and back them up independently.
Games using Steam’s DRM, have the benefit that if Steam ever goes down, there would be a massive amount of people interested in breaking it to free all the games at once.
It actually happens all the time, but Steam can roll out new “patched” versions of the DRM as long as it stays in business.
They are also aware of this, and even have promised to release a DRM bypass if they’re ever about to close shop… but in practice it wouldn’t really matter; whatever last version of the DRM they ever release, will get broken in record time.
I think more likely than Valve going under is Valve getting bought or going public. Both would result in the new owner (a megacorp in their own right, or greedy shareholders, respectively) turning the system into shit to squeeze more money out of it. And new DRM would be foisted onto the system regardless.
That’s a possibility. Then again, Steam games are getting stripped of DRM right now (and possibly enhanced with some malware), so the moment the value proposition of just installing Steam and not having to do anything else goes down, it’s likely for generic DRM strippers to appear, at least for older versions.
I own all my plunder, yarr
I could see myself not playing with a subscription service. I can only play games only so many hours a week as I have a lot more commitments now. I’m not gonna spend money on a monthly subscription for a handful of games that I might play. I’ll just go back to pirating games.
Imagine a company telling you that you should get used to not owning the things you buy when arguably the most popular game in their most popular franchise is about being a literal fucking pirate.
