GamesIndustry.biz recently spoke to Ubisoft, and something said during the interview seems to have created some sparks across the industry about game ownership.
What was said is not all that surprising really. Ubisoft, like multiple others, run subscription services with theirs being Ubisoft+ that just had a bit of a change into multiple tiers. These services are everywhere now like Xbox Game Pass, EA Play and others. That, and GI.biz spoke to Philippe Tremblay, director of subscriptions at Ubisoft so obviously they're going to be somewhat biased on what they think — it's their job.
From the interview, the bit in question:
One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
The GOG team certainly took notice, mentioning on X (formerly Twitter): "You should feel extremely comfortable with owning your games on GOG (they're DRM-free) :)".
It's worth noting that clearly it's going well for Ubisoft, as Tremblay mentioned October 2023 was their biggest month in Ubisoft+ history. So people are clearly buying into game subscriptions more and more. And related, Microsoft said back in 2022 that Xbox Game Pass had 25 million subscribers. Subscriptions are clearly here to stay.
Also worth noting, to be clear, Ubisoft don't plan to force you into one way or another noting:
"The point is not to force users to go down one route or another," he explains. "We offer purchase, we offer subscription, and it's the gamer's preference that is important here. We are seeing some people who buy choosing to subscribe now, but it all works."
Given how services can just entirely remove your paid-for content, this whole issue of ownership is a concerning one. Like how Sony were going to just remove previously purchased Discovery content from users, although they've since backtracked on that after public outcry.
The thing is, you have to remember, you don't actually own your games on Steam either. This has been well-known for a long time now. As per Steam's Subscriber Agreement under the "A. General Content and Services License" section:
[…] 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.
I'll admit, it's not entirely the same. Valve won't take away your games if you don't pay them every month, it's not a subscription in the same way, and plenty of games on Steam are actually entirely DRM-free and can be run outside of Steam. But still, it's something to remember, ownership has been on the decline for a long time.
A lot of it simply comes down to convenience though right? Plenty of us pay for Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and so on and so on — so we can just quickly jump into a show or a movie they have available. But then the problem there is, again, everyone wants their own service. There's more popping up all the time, and rights on various shows end up split between them and you end up paying more and more (look at the mess of Pokémon streaming) and never owning a damn thing.
Over to you in the comments: what are your thoughts?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
fenglengshun Jan 18
Quoting: TightRopeWhere is all the love for streaming services??? Clearly this site has all the haters and everyone else just loves them.I just pirate, not even gonna lie. They just aren't worth it for me - it's simpler to just pirate, get what I want, however long I want, and potentially archive them if I want.
And also, there's a reason why the SEA gang label is so apt for us SE Asian people. It's just in our blood. We pirate, some of us pay, but it's very much a goodwill kind of thing and piracy is always an option in our mind.
Quoting: hell0[I've never replayed an old game and as such they do not really have value to me.
I'm on a similar boat, but got two problems with it: I just want to be able to revisit all my games even if I most probably never do it. And, lately, I started revisiting games with my little ones.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThen couldn't it just display the ads and then paint over them with the background colour? I don't care if they're there, I just care if I see them.
The trouble is, this isn't just about not seeing ads. Personally, I don't care about ads too much. What I care about is the privacy invasion that comes from centralised ad networks. This is why I use ad block and consequently, your solutions wouldn't work.
If Google and FB stopped trying to track me across the whole damn internet then I'd give them they ad impressions. As it is, they are so invasive that, they just get blocked.
ObsidianBlk Jan 18
Quoting: elmapulyou said discs, dont forget the switch still uses catridges.
its not rocket science once some one figured it out, or to figure it yourself?
anyway, people who are purchasing something do so because they want to support the developers and dont want to go into the extra trouble of pirate it, i dont understand why people think the proprietary catridges and discs count as "preservation" despite the fact that it can rot and its hard to copy, while completely ignore gog.
i dont know about you, but i dont want to purchase something physical, expect that someone else will figure out how to dump it and distribute online, only for, years later realize no one did and just realize that after my copy is rotten.
digital is the way to go.
unless we count delisted games... speaking of it, how many games got delisted from gog?
Are carts more complex than discs? Sure. Not overwhelmingly difficult, though. Pretty much the entire NES, SNES, Gameboy ( Color ), Gameboy Advanced, DS, PSP, PS Vita, Atari (2600, 7800, etc), etc, etc, libraries have been pulled, and, as there are switch emulators in existence, that means people do, indeed, know how to pull Switch games off their carts, so, their library will be pulled too.
Buying physical media still supports the developers, and, arguably, they're not pirating the game by ripping or downloading an existing rip, as they have the physical disc (in the US, I believe it is legal to make and have a backup copy of media you physically own).
You're not wanting to buy physically is totally your choice! You do what's convenient for yourself!
In regards to physical media decay... All storage decays, but, I feel optical disc media decay rates are highly overblown. I have DVDs that I have purchased well over 20 years ago (back when DVDs were first being released) that still work just fine. My PS1 and PS2 discs still work fine (at least so far as I can rip them and the rips work... I no longer have an actual PS1 or PS2 to test with). Even my older CDs still work without issue.
Buying from GOG is *great*! I have quite the GOG library myself, and DRM-Free is what draws me to them... but, unless you download and store all of your purchased GOG games yourself onto your own local storage for backup, you still run the risk of GOG pulling that media from your online library. Have they done that in the past? Not completely. That said, I bought the Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 games from them very early on. About a year or so later, there was some legal issue with GOG selling the Fallout 1 and 2 games and they were delisted from the GOG store. The games *remained* in my library during this, so I did not loose them, but, when Fallout 1 and 2 returned to the GOG store, they were technically considered different products from what I had purchased. So, as it stands, I have Fallout 1 and 2 in my GOG library, but their store does *not* identify that those games are in my library. Any future IP/legal dispute between GOG and Bethesda (who, I believe own the whole of the Fallout IP) could lead to me loosing those games from my library completely. Extending that, the same can be said for any game in my GOG library. Unless I back them up myself...
... and in regards to backing up a GOG library, that just turns them into physical media (hard drive) at this point, which brings it all back to the worry about physical media decay. Now, a decent hard drive can last you years, but, in my experience, hard drives tend to have a greater failure rate than optical discs... so, again, spread the love. Have your media on disc, and a few hard drives (one local, one remote), then you should be more covered than most.
Quoting: elmapulQuoting: finaldestThe only exception being PC gaming as its simply impossible to buy games physically so I am sticking with Steam and maybe GOG in future if they ever give linux 1st class support.gog is actually better than physical, you can have as many backups as you want, good luck riping your games that you have on physical media for other platforms, few people have the know how / tools to do that.
Yup, infact old pc games on disc always had drm themselves
GOG has all the pros of digital media with less of the downsides like DRM, with some downsides to GOG being things like regular updates, a native linux version or so forth
Quoting: EikeQuoting: hell0[I've never replayed an old game and as such they do not really have value to me.
I'm on a similar boat, but got two problems with it: I just want to be able to revisit all my games even if I most probably never do it. And, lately, I started revisiting games with my little ones.
I still have the 4(!) original Baldur's Gate II CDs somewhere. Even so, I'd probably just "rent" the game on steam if I wanted to play again. It would probably be a hundred times easier than trying to get the game running from multiple old windows CDs (starting with the fact I don't even own a CD reader any more).
I agree that archiving old games is important, but I think that it's not mutually exclusive with a fair and well thought out subscription model.
https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/ubisoft-executive-suggests-you-become:d
Nearest of giving right to owning games are GOG. You can download offline installer and rip into CD. That's great! There's a way to connect modernity and tradition. You need to play game - you download, install, remove installer and play. Need to preserve game - you download installer and write to CD (or keep on hard drive). There is still big issue: you cannot sell/rent/etc, since GOG disallow this, that's the biggest reason, even GOG do not sell games.
But, where this removing user/client rights will bring us? I've read talk of some EU female parliament member. She told, that in future you do not own anything and you will be happy. She told, it will be great case for all of us. Do you even imagine, where this bring us? Every piece of our world, in future, will have integrated programmable circuit. Maybe every part of our world will be connected to internet. And yet, European Commission is trying to made internet non-anonymous. That's bring one think to us. Imagine, non-anonymous internet user will blame one's(?) car vendor or director of company producing cars. Next day, he/she would not go to work, because car vendor could lock one's car and order him/hes to remove his talk/post from internet. He would not go to job. This person could lost job and everything by one, single post on internet. In this case, most wealth people could control information on internet. Your shoes will have electrical circuit and was connected to internet, you say: Mark of X (Shoe's vendor manager) is stupid person. You do not even known, where mark work, but on next day, you would not even tie your (?) shoes, so you do not go walk, to shop, to work, to school, church, etc. You better own (?) many shoes of different vendor, or you will starve or will go to shop without shoes.
If companies will control our internet routers/modems, operating systems on PC, they even can analyze, what we wrote and turn off our devices needed to write post on internet.
So, if we would still allow companies to not sell their software to us, we could wake up in reality worse than communism regime! But many people would not known that, because people will be enslaved by vendors of things they own and companies will force them to write false information or remove truth from internet. What you could do to be able to walk around, go to shop, church, school, work, chemistry, hospital, use your internet connection, play games, turn on you computer, etc.?
So: promote free software and force parliaments to give more rights to device/software users (I am not write owners by indention), or we will be slavers.
Quoting: LachuWhen we own games? Even, when we bought CD/DVD, we do not own content of it. We only buy rights to use content of CD/DVD in way vendor allow us. Do you read ever license text, of any non-free game?A lot of that stuff ain't legal. They can say what they want and hope it sticks, but in most countries courts won't back them up on quite a bit of it.
Quoting: ObsidianBlkYou're not wanting to buy physically is totally your choice! You do what's convenient for yourself!
its not that i dont like physical media, if they were DRM free and i could afford, i would totally buy all my games in physical, and i dont see a big difference from having physical media or an steam key in terms of DRM (aside from all the conveniences that steam offer)
i just dont like the discourse arround it, as if physical was synonymous with preservation while digital was automagically bad, gog is a good exception to this rule!
the only downsides is that they can delist, ban your account, you cant resell (but you often pay less to accommodate for that) and... in cases where they sold something they dint really had the rights to sell, they may remove it... ok its quite inconvenient when you think about those issues.
but physical is not an guarantee either, with things like games that dont have the full content (or in some cases any) in the disk, they just act as an key to download the rest of the game (or even the entire game).
every "digital" game is being distributed to an physical media, and the content of every physical media is digital anyway (aside from things like superFX chips, you cant download then nor store hardware, at best you can emulate with an powerfull enough hardware)
the fact that people have being able to dump content and break DRM does not mean they will be able to do so forever, the same can be said about hacking servers to download content (take nintendo giga leak for example and compare to an cloud exclusive game, sure in theory we can hack the server and download the game to preserve it, in pratice we have no guarantee that we will be able to do that before it got deleted, so why risk it ?)
sure i hade a lot of problems with HDD in the past, not that i use an cd as often as i use an HDD, but im pretty sure optical media is better, the issue is that i can make as many copies as i want, so its not a big deal.
in theory breaking the DRM we can too, but there have been a few cases of multiple layers of DRM that hackers think they broke then all, only for the players to realize later on that they havent and end up losing progress and stuff like that, at least on gog i have the right to ask for an refund (or maybe even sue then) if i realize my game have any form of drm.
anyway, gog isnt perfect either.
i support steam for convenience, price and because they support linux gaming (and in my opinion we should win the battle on OS before we atempt to win the DRM battle)
i support gog because they have DRM Free games..
but both stores dont support things like 18+ anime games (or at least ecchi without censorship), i still have to find out an store that is "perfect" but it dont seems to exist...
oh i forgot to notice, if flash memory is safer than HDD then you can store your gog games on flash memory, if its not you can store in HDD, if SSD are safer you can store it there, if CD,DVD, Bluray is safer do an backup of it on it, so regardless of what is the safer option in your opinion, you still have it (unless some company make an tech that only then can produce copies of the game and distribute in such format, and it turns out to be safer than opitical media and everything else an consumer have access to, but still, making more copies and new copies from time to time seems like an more trusth worth option).
Last edited by elmapul on 19 January 2024 at 8:57 pm UTC
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