this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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I'm comfortable not owning Ubisoft games. ;)
These people are like an adversarial neural network being trained to find the most efficient ways to piss of their own customer base.
I think it's important to note that the entertainment landscape as a whole has been changing, and those changes have mixed with the shitty investor culture that already existed to create a terrible set of incentives that are wildly misaligned with consumer sentiment. I say this because I think that if we want things to change, we need to look at root causes.
The entertainment industry is feeling very threatened. It's hard to make money. That's a reality. And all the solutions to the problem are fucked up attempts to find ways to get players to give more money for things they don't want.
I think we need a better patronage model.
A quality game for a good price that provides hours of entertainment is a good start.
I don't find it hard to believe that the cost of making AAA games no longer matches the standard game price nowadays, because the typical $60 price hasn't changed in at least 20 years. Publishers have used a lot of alternatives to recoup that like launch day DLC, deluxe editions, and microtransactions.
I honestly don't mind deluxe editions with cosmetics for that reason, if someone wants to pay $100 for some extra outfits that's probably the ideal scenario for everyone.
But I agree that Ubisoft's insane DRM practices and subscriptions aren't the right solution to that problem.
Well then maybe they should make less expensive games even if I think they’re still making a lot of money
I think we forget how removed these people are from reality.
What's funny is that they're not detached from the gaming industry. The average person, if you asked them "Do you think players like live service games?" they'd say, "I don't know what you're talking about."
These people have a lot of really nuanced, heavily informed opinions on the history, present, and future of gaming. They're just all highly unpopular opinions outside of people who demand to get a check in the mail immediately if not sooner because they just bought a share in a company they know little or nothing about.
Ever since they started the Epic/Uplay exclusivity stuff, it's made it easier than ever to avoid buying their games.
If it’s not on Steam it doesn’t exist
possessing a copy of them, sure. ownership is a legal construct that doesn't really matter that much to me.
If buying something doesn't mean you own it, then pirating something doesn't mean you stole it! As long as there is a subscription fee, take the justifiable torrent option to choose to pay ZERO. The only way is not to pay!
Legally speaking, piracy is not theft. It’s copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement with NO monetary loss—the very definition of a victimless crime.
There's the thing... Data is infinite. Piracy isn't great - it does nothing to support creators - but existing structures siphon off most of the money before it ever gets to them anyways. We don't have a working system.
Donations rarely can support a single person these days, and frankly it seems to require being a public social media figure of some kind... And that's a skill unrelated to art or building things
I don't see an answer aside from ubi - some of us live to create things, and we'll do it whether we're paid or not, whether we even release it or not. Take away the unnecessary coercion to make what other people want to survive, and you remove the stress from all of us. There's no longer this requirement to monetize everything - we'll make weird and beautiful things that makes everyone's life better
Writing this, I had this idea for gaming in particular... What if you had a service where you paid whatever the creator demanded for a game (as we do now), but then your monthly spending was distributed based on your play time? Realistically, only steam or an app store could do something like this, but it seems like an interesting way to incentivize quality and lowering prices