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Companies need to get comfortable not owning my money!
Shit I’m getting confortable not having any money and I don’t like it
“Shareholders need to get comfortable not owning their yacht”
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The truly rich people own the banks. Its their world, we just rent some space in it.
I call this “The curse of Might and Magic”. This franchise was established by Jon Van Caneghem who founded New World Computing. The company later got into financial trouble and was absorbed by 3DO. Over time (mainly due to the commercial failure of its console, which came after the acquisition of the M&M property), 3DO started slipping into the hole. It dissolved, and in its fire sale, Ubi purchased the rights to Might and Magic. The rest, as they say, is history…
At least we have that fanmade expansion for Heroes 3.
And before that, Swords of Xeen, as MM 5.5. But other unofficial spinoffs, in particular the King’s Bounty series, weren’t half bad, either.
man, do I miss might and magic. I think imma play through Xeen again soon.
World of Xeen? Such a fun concept, combining the two games. I’ve been trying to run the mod that lets you play 6, 7 and 8 within the same game, but my current PC can’t handle it.
hold the phone, i need that in my life!
So, it’s the Hope Diamond of Computer Game IPs?
They better sell that IP to The Smithsonian.
BTW what do we have to pay an entry fee to The Smithsonian, and The British Museum is free to anyone that can make it there? Seems like something our taxes should be taking care of…
Unless they changed something in the last year or so, all the Smithsonian buildings in DC have free admission.
Oh good! I just remember the last time I was in DC, I had to pay admission. That was in the mid '90s so, I’m guessing they managed to fix that later.
Generally The Smithsonian locations are free to enter. Some parts cost extra like the butterfly room at the natural History one.
A quick Google says the only one that does cost anything is the Cooper Hewitt in New York.
Ok. I haven’t been in ages. I just remembered having to pay admission for something.
I think this is correlation without causation. Or at least not exclusively, or even mostly. Don’t get me wrong he’s still a dick.
If you view the statement as a cause itself instead of a symptom, sure. Ubisoft has a shitty corporate mindset and that is directly reflected in the quality of the games they publish.
Still confused about this one.
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”.
Ubisoft removed Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 from their online game library, claiming some BS like they want to focus their attention on newer games. The original games had no online services; it shouldn’t take any effort to provide access to them online.
Everyone who owns them through Steam or Ubisoft Connect can’t play them anymore, unless they still have a physical disc for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 consoles. If you bought a digital copy, you paid for a game that you can no longer play.
THAT is why this quote is especially evil. Not because of some choice of subscription vs. buying, but because Ubisoft has the ability to make our fully-paid for games unplayable.
Is this at all accurate?
The closest thing I could find when I searched for this topic is that the multiplayer and online services related to those games were being taken offline. Given you can still play Counter-Strike 1.6, I can see some frustration on that, but I also didn’t think many people knew AC1 had any multiplayer features.
Anyone reading can go and take a look at current reviews on Steam for Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2. The newest reviews come from the last few weeks, and no one is highlighting “Ubisoft STOLE this game from me, CANNOT BE PLAYED” etc.
Which makes it hard for me to respect memes like this one when the reactions, at least in part, seem to be driven by constant misinformation. Ubisoft games are absolutely mediocre, I can agree with that, but there is absolutely no need to lie about them.
I am aware of the game preservation movement, focused on The Crew, and I’m in favor of that. I still don’t think it had anything to do with the quote. No one in game publishing makes a business around taking away games people were already playing.
There was a big deal about Ubisoft removing Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 last year, and I remember it because I was in the middle of a replay of the first game, and I quit as soon as they announced they were pulling it. Honestly, I haven’t checked to see if they actually removed them; they may have reneged on that decision over the backlash. I’ll try to reinstall it tonight and see if I can still access it.
But that announcement was when people really started to hate on Ubisoft for their poor business practices, which led to the comment mentioned in this meme. It started because they talked about removing access to paid-for games.
I can’t speak towards whatever you might be misinformed about. The only other close thing I can think of is when a support staff told a user that their account was going to be deleted, which prompted a huge backlash. But, one of the determinations seemed to be that they only do so for inactive accounts that have never purchased anything; and was in fact a GDPR requirement. So, it was another nothing article based on rumors.
Which makes sense if you think about it - actually put some kind of motivation behind the “evil schemes” you’re reading. Greed is very much expected, but removing people’s old games doesn’t gain Ubisoft anything but poor press. If you told me they were selling cheat codes for old games for $30 each, I’d believe it. There’s no profit in what people are actually suggesting though.
Wait… WHAT?! I can’t play my copies of AC 1&2 on Steam anymore?
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Pretty sure their recent stock drop has more to do with them releasing a bad game based on a dying IP than on what an exec said months ago.
The announcement of the game left an extremely bad impression too, because the game was $60 or $70 but didn’t include all the content, there were three other tiers or “editions” you could buy, the last option being the $8 subscription service that had a shiny blue border around it and included all the content.
Isn’t Ubisoft infamously known for this subscription model on all of their products?
I thought Ubisoft was known for their shitty launchers.
Why not both?
The greed goes deep. It’s funny that micro transactions hardly ever were micro. If it’s was a few cents for a pure cosmetic item I might even do that from time to time, but take the discord cosmetics 50ct I might buy sth blinky, but they want 5-10€ for that shit
you mean to tell me you don’t want to spend $12.99 to be patrick star in discord?? whats wrong with you man
It’s crazy
Wow, I had no idea they pulled that bullshit too. Fuck that.
I wouldn’t know it’s a bad game since I won’t buy it because of what an exec said months ago.
Given how often we see games selling extremely well even after the companies behind them do awful stuff you’re in a very small minority.
Cool? Who else do you kick for doing the right thing?
I may be. I don’t care though. Every shit move they make will make more people like me and eventually the message will be heard. When their stock tanks like this, there will be changes.
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. Some games are DRM-free on Steam, but a lot aren’t.
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?
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.
Investors: You didn’t do it sneaky enough! Shhhh
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
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
I love how G*mers decontextualised this just to circlejerk.
When Valve has made G*mers comfortable not owning their games.
It’s talking about “for subscription services to work” not licenses
You’re allowed to say gay.
You’re allowed to say gamer
Are you allowed to say gaymer?
Only if you’re 10 years old.
Hard R…
You can be arrested just for saying you’re a gamer.
I wish that was true.
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.
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He means like the stylized anime or emoji one ya dullard. 💩
I thought it was symbolizing them circling the drain, at least when it comes to quality…
Gamers are comfortable with that already. It’s the default.
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.
Shitty companies need to get used to loosing money
