If there’s a reason Star Wars Outlaws is mediocre, for example, it doesn’t have much to do with microtransactions or game renting.
And the quote that was offered was between investors when asking why Ubisoft+, their subscription service that lets you cheaply rent games, wasn’t doing well.
Might be a point of obviousness, but: Most of us own most of our games. Those of us not owning games via subscription rental are choosing to do that, because we don’t care about completionism or playing a title once a year for nostalgia.
Ubisoft is low on creativity and their games don’t interest me, but I’m sometimes weirded out by the illogical way they’re painted as evil, or the way this stupid quote suggests they’re “Cumin’ for muh game discs”.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 way that would change that.
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 or running 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 goes out of their way to make that legal non-ownership utterly meaningless. If you have a copy of the game, then you have a copy of the game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤔