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I want to be optimistic that the industry will learn from these failures but they only ever seem to learn the wrong lessons
The fact that so many people use Steam mean that gamers haven’t really learnt either.
Yep, after the bombing of Suicide Squad’s game, and Hogwarts selling 24 million units, Warner’s exec said they would still try to push live services.
UbiSoft will fail and get bought up by Microsoft, who will have learned the exact opposite lesson because their stock price went up.
Meanwhile, Larian will keep churning out bangers until someone eventually offers the owners a too-stupid-amount-of-money to turn down, and then it will be folded into the enshitificatio engine, too. Or they’ll release a flop, lose access to low-interest loans, and collapse under their own weight. Thus proving good games aren’t worth the risk to make.
Man, I really want to assume our lords and saviors will keep putting out perfect games, and yet we’ve been burned in our history.
CDPR put out a half-baked Cyberpunk after a year of hype. Valve put out “Artifact”, the Dota card game. It feels like the really inventive studios sometimes get tired of the working formulas they’re adored for and end up putting out things not many people like - possibly as a way of doing a personal passion project.
I’ll be happy if that never happens for Larian, but it’s a worrying possibility.
For all the shit people give gaming studios, we get a lot of genuinely good games. We also have an enormous back catalog of good games - more than any sane person could reasonably play through in a lifetime. The idea that we’re simply running out of quality content is myopic.
What we’re getting is diamonds in the rough. A handful of beautiful pearls in a river of shit. Even if Larian fails, there will be other studios that release other games that will be the “Good Games” of their era. The question is whether we’ll be able to see them in the Tsunami of AI generated diarrhea that saturates every tool we use to interact with developers.
The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.
I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I’d say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I’ve watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it’s not a fantastic game and I don’t plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.
Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade’s Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were “Ubisoft Southern Northland” and “ubisoft = shit”.
The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.
Its easy to forget that a lot of these overarching publishing houses have a bunch of smaller shops underneath. Larian could just as easily have been a small house operating under the Ubisoft or Activision or Sony mega-publishing brand. The problem with these small studios is how the parent company routinely shoves them into crunch mode and guts their staff between launches. Ubisoft Zurich, for instance, was spun up to develop MMOs for the German/Swiss market, but shuttered two years later when the parent company decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Wolfpack Studios, started in 1999, was bought up by Ubisoft in 2004 and shut down two years later, with the founders having abandoned the project to start a new studio.
Mario + Rabbids looked fun, without a doubt. But who knows what’s going to happen to Ubisoft Milan and Paris in another five years, if the gaming market continues its downturn? When all the talented developers are laid off and the remains of the studio become a bunch of poorly paid prompt engineers, what is a sequel going to look like?
Ubisoft will look up and shout “save us!”
And we will whisper
Why’d you post a picture of my parents arguing about me under the word no?
Ali I see is a “pretty butterfly”
Pretty sure it’s a hip bone X-ray of someone without a spine
I think you’re right but you missed the Pawn piece stuck up their ass.
What are you talking about? Those are two rabbits sharing a cup of tea.
Wrong. It’s Turian bone structure.
Clearly two bears high fiving
Two skulls kissing
Two bears high fiving.
Hate to say it but I think you have schizophrenia
Looks like gamers got comfortable with not owning Ubisoft games, just like he wanted.
I think in the context of why he said this was something like an interviewer asking “what would have to happen for cloud gaming to take off and see bigger numbers”
There is enough to get mad about to waste time getting mad at imaginary things.
you’re acting like ubisoft doesn’t actively try to incentive this and push subscription services with overpriced game “editions”
So, saying people should “get used to cloud gaming and subscription only” in the future gets a free pass, even if the people that said it are the one trying to create cloud gaming and suscription only games?
Who said that?
Be specific, include the word “only” as you quoted, and very important: Don’t lie.
I think a lot of clickbaitiness comes from asking a radical question and then running around with the answer. I think take 2 was asked if gta 6 would come to GamePass and they said no it won’t, which somehow became a big news lol
I was a huge fan of Ubisoft. I basically stopped playing any of their games after Assassins Creed 3. With the exception of AC: Black Flag, which I got from the high seas, ironically.
I haven’t played AC. My experience lies mostly in Far Cry. I got a free copy of Far Cry 3 with my Radeon HD 7770. Little did I know that’s where the series would peak. It’s one of the games I wish I could play for the first time again. Vaas is easily one of the best written and (and especially) acted bosses in a game ever. He’s such a pain in your ass until you kill him, then the final boss sucks so much, you miss him.
I stopped playing after Vaas died lol
Far Cry 5 is the best story IMO
the boss characters are great and the girl that uses the powder to attack you is the greatest part in the game. Sad that she isnt one of the end game bosses because that part was rad.
My favorite easter egg is also, if you don’t arrest the dude at the very beginning of the game, the game ends and you see the credits like you beat it
Have to respectfully disagree, but I’ll give that FC5 was consistently pretty good throughout. FC3 started off the first half on the highest of notes and finished somewhere in the middle before sending you to horny jail for being bad boy. FC5 was a solid B+ game. Not one for the ages, but definitely a fun way to kill a few hours. FC5 does have really good co-op. My wife and I each have 100+ hours in FC5 specifically because we played through it together several times.
I thought Faith was a pretty good character. Especially as you dive a little more into her lore. Her dudes that pop out of nowhere can be annoying though lol
We also did the easter egg ending.
Of course I’m really not a fan of whatever they do and I would never buy an Ubisoft game for at least a decade now, but I still think that a lot of people should don’t know what buying means and that they never, ever bought (and hence owned) a game or movie. Those are not material goods like a car, which you can physically transfer from one person to another. Those are intellectual goods, and ownership here means you own all rights for it, which usually only the publisher has. What you buy online or in a shop is mere a license to watch/play/use/whatever and a medium with the associated data (like a DVD).
Therefore “piracy” had never been theft (or robbery, as it is called so nicely on German news). It is a license violation. Just that doesn’t sound as demonizing as the publisher want it to sound.
Cars have copyright too you know, you can’t make another car that’s exactly like a Civic and not get sued, and we still own them, so what are you even on about?
That is a patent, not a copyright. If you sell you car, you don’t have it anymore. If somebody steals your car, you don’t have it anymore. What I’m on about is the difference between material and intellectual goods. You can read it up, if your school didn’t cover it.
It’s really very simple:
- When it’s for the benefit of the Owner class (in this specific case mainly Publishers) it’s ownership hence people are told they’re buying games (only to discover after paying that it’s not so) and piracy is described and even in some countries treated as Theft.
- When it’s for the benefit of citizens in general it’s intellectual property and it’s not really owned by them when they buy it (only licensed, often in such a way that they can lose access to what they were told they were buying) and if they do happen to created intellectual property themselves it can easily be taken away from the by the Owner class who “curiously” even in those countries which treat Piracy the same as Theft won’t be criminally held responsible for it.
It’s the good old “one rule for thee another for me” so popular with authoritarians, especially Fascists (which probably explains why Germany is one of a few countries in Europe that criminalizes piracy, but de facto only treats it as such when it’s the little people doing it).
Are you calling the Federal Republic of Germany fascist?
There are way too many of the “old ways” still around in Germany, from a surveillance culture and a very propagandistic Press activelly indoctrinating people to them continuing to support an ethno-Fascist state committing a Genocide with weapons very overtly because of their race and German courts convicting people for “anti-semitism” when they say the “from the Land to the Sea” saying (which is about Israel, not the Jewish Religion) but not doing the same for actual overt racist statements and behaviors against other ethnic groups.
The rise of the AfD has happened in a field well plowed by mainstream German politicians with the idea that people’s worth depends on race, with some races being deemed good (ubermenschen) and others bad (untermensched) - they might not use the same words anymore, but they certainly share that same view of Mankind.
The apparatus of the State and even the Justice System in Germany is riddled with the very same ideas about people - the racist idea that people’s value is determined by their race and some races are better than others - that served as the foundation of Nazism.
Investors: You didn’t do it sneaky enough! Shhhh
They could have got away still if they actually make good games
Making good games is probably not as easy as it seems though.
you seem to be 300x more knowledgeable than the suits that run these companies
So is spending hard earned salary on a Ubisoft game
Yup. Millions subscribe to MMOs and Game Pass. Live service games like Genshin Impact and Fate/Grand Order are incredibly popular. There are also games with crazy intrusive DRM like kernel level spyware and always online DRM that are still installed by millions. How can you look at these stats and not think people are fine with paying for temporary games? If the game is good enough, players don’t care. Ubisoft’s problem is their games aren’t good enough.
“Shareholders need to get comfortable not owning their yacht”
The very rich already don’t own most of their things. Banks or the companies they work for/with do
The truly rich people own the banks. Its their world, we just rent some space in it.
No worries, at no point in recent years have I been feeling I “owned” a ubisoft game. Not even played them. I’m that committed to follow thge instructions of some dipshit.
Word. I stopped after the second game wouldn’t play because their shit drm/servers… Luckily lesson 2 was a gift.
I for one appreciate that ubisoft chose the top down view of poop as their logo. it’s the perfect symbol for everything they represent and they’re incredibly brave for wearing it proudly on their chest.
I thought it was symbolizing them circling the drain, at least when it comes to quality…
Not that I don’t otherwise agree, but if you think that’s what poop is supposed to look like, you should probably consult a gastroenterologist or a proctologist 🤔
He means like the stylized anime or emoji one ya dullard. 💩
Shareholders need to get confortable not owning the value of their share.
Seriously, it in the name: they hold shares not their value.They should also get comfortable paying taxes when the of their shares increases. (If only that were true…)
Yarr harr fiddle dee dee
Being a pirate is alright with me!
Ubisoft stopped priacy by making games so bland their not worth the effort to download.
Question, is buying games on Steam “owning”?
Sadly no, your Steam account can be closed at any time and you have no recourse to access your purchased content if that happens. Likewise, Steam can suspend service and you lose access to your content as well.
But that’s not just a Steam thing, it’s digital media as a whole. Even a physical disc is not ownership, it’s just a license to access the content it contains.
Not unless it’s DRM-free. You don’t own games that have DRM. You just have a license to use them, which can be revoked at any time.
So in other words, no, since it’s impossible for a Steam game to be DRM-free. Some have less DRM than others, but unless they let you download an installer that you can use without connecting to their servers then there’s still DRM.
It’s definitely possible for Steam games to be DRM-free, especially older ones. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
For those games, you can literally just make a copy of the game directory after downloading it, and back it up somewhere. Just run the game EXE (or equivalent on Linux) to run it, even on a system that doesn’t have Steam installed. Everything you need is in there. That’s all Steam is doing when you ‘install’ a game - downloading its files and extracting them. It also installs any required runtimes like MSVC or .NET, but you can do that yourself too.
Of course, the best idea is still to buy games on GOG instead.
Buy games on GoG when you can
You still don’t own them. Read their ToS.
ToS doesn’t mean squat here if the law says otherwise. It’s insane to me that US has this the reverse.
It’s not just the US. You don’t buy games from GOG, only licences which they can revoke at any time. This is not illegal.
Which doesn’t matter, because you can download the DRM-free game and back it up.
Yeah, on GoG itself, it’s licenses, there you are right.
Back them up on a hard drive and their ToS doesn’t mean squat anymore. I guess that takes a little more effort and investment but if you want to own the game without DRM that will do it.
They don’t have to provide a way to install the games in perpetuity, but I’m pretty sure the ToS don’t provide a way for them to stop you from keeping a DRM free copy you’ve downloaded.
So sure, the ToS says you don’t own the game, but unlike ubisoft that puts that non-ownership into practice, GOG makes that legal non-ownership utterly meaningless. If you have a copy of the game, then you have a copy of the game.
I prefer to buy from Steam because they allow me to play my games easily and invest time and money in Linux which results in more freedom for all gamers. I’ve been very disappointed with GoG’s record on Linux.
May be an unpopular opinion but I don’t care what happens to my games when I die because I will be dead. If I want to pass something on to any kids I have it will be memories.
You can run them only a limited time without Valve giving their ok. I do say “no”.
Depends on the game.
There’s a surprisingly large amount of games on steam that are DRM free, meaning once downloaded, running the game doesn’t actually require steam.
I imagine it would be for older games though?
Any dev can decide to just not code their game in a way that requires steam. Valve doesn’t modify whatever the studio decides to ship in any that would change that.
Wait… Half Life 2 is the game that forced me to install steam, create an account and wasn’t playable without it is “now” in this list and is DRM free?
Removed back in 2004, seems like.
Is there an easy way to check which games in my library are DRM free?
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
Edit: it does indeed. Lists available platforms and whether or not they have DRM, and/or what kind.
Spread that site around, cause I only came across it fairly recently and it has never showed up in web searches for me without me specifically looking for the site.
But then, how do you keep the game for later, like reinstalling it on a system that does not run steam, that won’t work right?
It’s just a folder. You keep the folder.
When you want to run it, you go to the folder and double-click the .exe of the game.
If you want, you can drop a shortcut to that exe somewhere convenient.
“Installing” is just putting files in a folder somewhere, and maybe adding a shortcut to the start menu so the user can find and run whatever got installed. There’s nothing special about it.
Unless the .exe needs some other program to be installed, or some files that need to be available somewhere else (which these DRM free games don’t), you can just move the folder the game is in wherever you like, another PC even, and it’ll still run just fine.
This. I used to have a bunch of the games backed up on a hard drive because copying the files over & patching was faster than redownloading it.
Pirate magic, me boy!
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
They should all be like this.
GOG
No. Do you prefer subscription services?
No, it’s not. If Valve goes belly up you can kiss your games and the infrastructure they need goodbye. Also you don’t get to resell games you already own or give them away and selling accounts is against ToS. If you die your games are gone, you can’t give your account away legally.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Not trying to be a smart ass, I just keep seeing things like this for Ubisoft and other companies and people just crap on them, but then Steam is almost never criticised for the same issue (or I am not seeing those memes). I guess Valve makes enough other things right so people are more happy to overlook this?
Steam is not a publicly traded company, so they don’t pull this kind of skullduggery in service of the shareholders.
They’re a company full of people who, gasp, like video games: unlike the average navel gazing, brainless, Harvard Business School CEO.
Given their track record they’ve been more consistently “pro gamer” than other companies and are given a lot of leeway for that.
Steam gets a pass because their business practices are consumer friendly.
Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren’t great. I wouldn’t hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.
Valve has stated that if their store was ever to be discontinued they would remove all DRM they have in place to allow for the games to be played without it. This was a long long time ago though.
Yeah, promises change over time. Hope they can keep their promise on that but not sure how that would even be feasible with a catalogue that large.
I fear for valve when Gaben dies. I hope he picks someone good.
And it is only really a promise they can keep for their own games. Like I said in another comment, lots of game studios already ship their games without DRM.
If Valve goes under, the games that are gonna be a problem are the ones from the likes of Ubisoft and EA.
They wouldn’t lift a finger to make sure people who bought their games on steam could keep playing them if steam disappeared
In fact they’ve been taking their games back even while steam is still around. Lots of people own unplayable games on steam because the publisher screwed the servers or something.
But you can, write your ID and Password on a paper under your keyboard and “forget” it before death.
It’s possible, sure, but if pressed Valve will ban the account.
Just don’t let them be pressed ¯\(ツ)/¯
Could also be that their latest game on ps5 looks worse than a 5 year old PS4 game.
Also despite the repetitive nature of those games, I still always stuck by games like assassin’s Creed, but I didn’t even give the new one an hour before I just got sick of it
