- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
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I’ve been quite comfortable with not owning any new Ubisoft games for a few years now
@ylai fuck ubisoft. They haven’t made a decent game since black flag.
If your games are on steam, you’re already not owning them. The only difference seems to be that steam doesn’t demand a monthly subscription cost, yet
We already have game pass so it’s not like this is something completely new either.
If this makes money, other big publishers will join and in 10 years it’s the norm.
Personally, I’ll try my best to keep buying on GOG and itch.io where I get to actually own my games.
Agree, I own a lot of games in Steam but most come from bundles or were not bought a full price. I do buy full price games on GOG because I can have a backup offline. hack score match 2023
This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.
GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.
Piracy is a very noble endeavor to keep alive. Thank you Ubisoft for keeping us on our toes instead of being complacent with trusting digital platforms. Piracy is the true preservation and ownership.
If paying full price and obtaining a digital copy isn’t ownership, then taking that digital copy without paying can’t be stealing can it?
I’m not sure how you drew this conclusion, since most people I know consider paying full price to obtain a digital copy to be extremely close to ownership.
I liked Telltale’s Law and Order series. They can’t sell it anymore, but I can still download my digital copy because I bought it full price.
The whole argument in the article is about monthly subscription rentals.
When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.
Audible is open about it. Well, if you dig through the fine print. Easy enough to rip copies but I’d say most people only realise they need to when they loose access. Maybe not, but $30 for an audiobook seems like pretty shity value if you’re only renting it untill you cancel your subscription.
E: I might be misinformed/ outdated.
If buying isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t theft.
Buying a CD/DVD was never ownership of the media that’s on it. It’s ownership of a piece of plastic and a license to play to the content on the plastic within certain limitations. If it was ownership, you would be allowed to project the DVD on a wall and charge patrons to view it, but legally you can’t, because you don’t own anything but the plastic. Buying a CD/DVD was always just a more convenient version of buying a ticket to a concert/theater to see the same thing. You’re paying for the experience of viewing their artwork.
So, as long as you also agree that sneaking into a concert/theater to view a show without paying also isn’t theft in any way, then I can’t argue.
So how many plays do I get with the media license that comes with a CD?
Worried they’ll revoke my license on my blues traveler CD that’s been stuck in my car since '99.
Yep, this is a valid point. The volatility of access seems to be a convenient side effect of modern streaming technology. I agree that there needs to be regulation around this as it’s currently too easy for a company to suddenly say “we’re pulling access to the thing you paid for right now, sorrynotsorry”.
It’s not reasonable to expect that they have to have servers available serving the content 24/7 indefinitely, but either govts need to force companies to clearly label access to digital media as some sort of “rental agreement” similarly to how renting a video on youtube or amazon works, and making it clear that the user will only be able to access the stream for a minimum of some specified amount of time, and/or they should be required to offer a download of the media for a certain amount of time.
“volatility of access” implies a lack of intent.
This isn’t a side effect of streaming technology, they could let me download content on my NAS and burn my own discs but they don’t because their goal is profiteering and NOT serving the best content in an open technological environments.
“Corporate enshittification and commodity fraud” is a more apt term.
“Fraud” would imply a crime. I’m always happy when some european country has a law on the book that enables people to hold a company accountable for their shitty behavior, but in the US, we have some work to do there.
“Enshittification” is a…surface-level description of what is happening. I’m more interested in the “how we got here” and “what needs to happen to prevent it”. Because no company has “make the experience objectively shittier” on their list of new features. Blaming “enshittification” holds as much weight to me as blaming “the deep state”. It’s not a real thing, it’s just how you perceive the emergent result of a system with certain rules and incentives. The real question is, which rules and incentives should we prioritize, and how can those changes most effectively be implemented.
I’m not blaming “enshittification”. This IS enshittification.
I blame shareholders and greedy C level executives. You know, the ones who make these types of decisions to milk customers for the bottom line.
Just move on if you want to debate, these are facts and I don’t have time to defend reality from your contrarian garbage.
I think we agree and could learn from each other, but I agree, I don’t think that’s in the cards here. Have a good one.
Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.
If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.
Just want to highlight how unnecessarily antagonistic your response was. Not sure if that was your intention, but I don’t care to engage with it. Cheers.
The irony is immense.
If you think I’ve been antagonistic, please let me know how. I’m here to have a productive discussion, but so far I’m here by myself.
You could start by actually making an attempt at good faith discussion, instead of pedantic attempts to hide from the point.
But we both know you dont want to do that, because youre not actually here for productive discussion.
I respectfully disagreed with the top level post, and stated facts about why. If that was interpreted as not in good faith, I’m sorry, and I’m open to any counter arguments. So far, two people have pointed out that physical media can’t remotely have their licenses revoked, and I agree, that is relevant to the discussion. If you have anything relevant you’d like to contribute, I’m all ears.
I think his point in this case is you own the physical item but not the information on it. If not then I could buy some musician’s cd then I could say “Now I own their music” and start selling copies of their cd, publishing it, stealing their rights to it, etc. I think we can all agree that would be bad.
Yes, you own the information on it. You don’t own the rights to distribute it to others, but you bought the information and the right to personally use it. When you buy a painting, do you only have a licence to view it?
When you buy a painting, do you only have a license to view it?
That’s a good question. My guess is that the rights to create prints of the painting usually remain with the artist. You own that painting, you probably even own the right to display it for an entry fee, but unless the artist has granted you a license to the artwork, I don’t think you can freely create copies.
Indeed, the right to make copies are often licenced (although you can also sell that right) because it is explicitly written in some conventions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention?useskin=vector) that the copyright resides with the creator to begin with. I don’t think the Berne Convention deals with the option of transferring intellectual property and the copyright to them, but I’m assuming it’s mostly defined well enough in some contract law or other.
They should get comfortable with me downloading cracked versions of their games.
They actually used cracked versions of their games years ago. Rockstar were also caught red-handed using cracked EXEs.
Why not?
I don’t protest it, it’s just funny to see the companies act hypocritical.
One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.
I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:
2021 - 23 million
2022 - 25 million
2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.
If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?
It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.
All my friends have it. They just want to play the game once and move on
It’s rather amusing how everything people fear happening under communism comes to pass under capitalism in one way or another. Turns out that it is the capitalists who aim to strip individuals of their personal property by transforming everything into a rental service. You see, you no longer possess your media, books, computer, phone, or any other device; they’ve all been transformed into internet-connected subscriptions. The moment you cease paying or when the company decides to discontinue its services, you find yourself in quite an unfortunate predicament.
