My dream is an “internet archive” for all video games, modded to run offline. If the game becomes unavailable for purchase, the archive opens that game and makes it available for all.
The next step is for this kind of release to become law, and supported by manufacturers.
Do this with books too. How much we’ve lost.
That sounds like a great plan for all types of media. We would better document our history and make so much human creativity accessible to those who cannot afford to indulge in what’s currently for sale.
Why do we not do this? Oh wait, it’s MONEY? Pfft, it will never happen.
Libraries are communist or something and ESA fights hard for games to stay out of them.
There’s a great initiative going on right now trying to hold Ubisoft and other game publishers accountable for shitty practices like this by trying to petition governments from a few different nations to create legal protections for people to continue to have access to their games they purchased after the publisher decides to abandon a game. If you live in an EU country especially, you might be able to help sign a petition still: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
And lots of gamers praise Microsoft for GamePass, because it’s cheap. When Microsoft’s goal with GamePass is the same as Ubisoft’s. Ms would love that you rent your games from them indefinitely. Wouldn’t surprise me that in 10-15 years you can’t buy the games made by Microsoft anymore only rent through GamePass and the subscription fee would be five times higher than now
The single most problematic thing where you should start to notice how bad gamepass can be is when you unsubscribe and decide to buy one of the games you’ve played only to have your savegames in gamepass gulag.
Is that true? PC, Xbox, or both?
It was on PC. See my other reply for the specifics. Very shitty experience and the dealbreaker around game pass since I’ve managed not finish multiple games before they dropped out of the service.
Edit: Sorry, mixed it up, it was on PC
You are really making a mountain of a mole hill, to get my save from Outer Worlds gamepass to use on steam’s version was as easy as just copy pasting the files in another folder
Well it might depend on specific games, but for like a dragon it did not work out in the end.
I legit haven’t bought a game anywhere but steam in over a decade. I simply do not trust the motives or responsibility of any other publisher. And at this point, I’m too afraid of them yoinking their game after I’ve paid for it that I’ll likely never change.
GOG is good too.
We all should be hitting GOG up more often if we want the legit ONLY good competition for steam to not die out one day. They are as good as steam in many ways.
I’ve also been avoiding playing games that involve some third party launcher or login. I’m not perfectly consistent with this and have bought some games before realizing they had this, but even steam games can be subject to a company deciding they don’t want to support their game anymore (which IMO is fair) and just killing the game off entirely, which isn’t fair. I’d like to see a requirement that other steps be taken to keep it going without their active support. Like opening the source and relinquishing all copyrights on that code. If they want to keep parts of it, then pull it out into a library that they continue to maintain.
Ubisoft has been trash for a long time now. It’s a shame that they control some good IP, but the company’s too far gone to ever be trustworthy. Save your time and money and just play something else imo.
It’s better than what Bungie did with Destiny 2… just gutted 1/2 the content from the game, including all the story missions and the first several paid expansions.
They wanted to attract new players with a smaller download size, but the new players come in and go “WTF is going on?”
Whoa, wtf? How did I miss that drama, haha holy shit. I definitely remember downloading it a few years ago and being aghast at its absurd size (think it was around 120GB? which nowadays that’s pretty par for the course because fuck optimization). But gutting half your content just to save space… have they not heard of compression? Like what the hell were they thinking haha
They didn’t just remove story missions and quests and things, they removed entire PLANETS from the game. It was crazy!
That’s the most baffling MMO decision I’ve seen, tbh. WoW has plenty of issues but at least they aren’t just deleting the continent of Northrend to save on install space or anything
Bungie’s problem is they don’t really want to make a story based looter shooter, they want a free to play PvP gacha engine.
Both of those things are shitty; it’s just one of them is worse.
I wish more people would buy stuff on GOG, although some games there still have some sort of DRM, Kalypso published games come to mind.
Still, way, way better in terms of ownership than what other platforms offer.
Meanwhile someone somewhere is having issues with steam taking too much profit. Do note that even if a game is DELISTED from steam, you still can download the game on steam. Of course it is a different story with license revocation and that is a whole different can of worms. I don’t even know if steam allows the publisher to revoke a license for a game that the player already paid for just because the game is not supported anymore (a different case with breaking ToS/EULA).
I wish people were THAT passionate about REAL life/world problems/ injustices and make fun of the real people in power, who allow Ubisoft to do such things…
The really awful part is that there’s not really any regulation that can stop this. If you ban taking away games people bought then they’ll just switch to a subscription which is even worse
If you had reasonable copyright terms like 5 years and a requirement to release code/digital artifacts for library archival once it becomes public commons?
i hate them because they remove anything that makes their games unique and make all their games have the same features until they’re all completely interchangable gray sludge.
The depressing thing is that this grey sludge is exactly what most people want. It’s the same for any form of entertainment. Pandering to the lowest common denominator is what’s most profitable.
Ubisoft is the CBS of the game industry.
Yeah, the problem is that game publishers are trying to reach the broadest audience possible, which means niche games with unique features and gameplay are dying out. Why bother spending millions of dollars on developing a unique game which might not sell well, when you can churn out another open world lite-RPG with grassy stealth spots and counter/parry based combat which you know will sell well.
They just need to come out and “lease” the game.
“Buy” should no longer be on any selection as far as live service games go, or any game dependent on developer servers to operate.
They know people are making a private server so revoked everyone’s license so that even when they finish it, everyone will have to pirate their own game to play it.
Thats exactly why i only buy from gog now, and steam only when it comes to multiplayer games.
I bought mass effect collection on the ea store 'cause it have 45% discount when it came out, only for me to find out a year later a silent notification about a game which has being revoked from my library. Reason? Ur guess is as good as mine. Tried to contact ea support, the answer? take it or lose all ur other games too (bf1, bf5 worse purchase ever, and plants vs zombies because they gift it to me). So i told them to go f themselfs and now i can’t play neither mass effect nor bf1.
So yeah, fuck that shit about they “lending” us a license, its either mine or it belongs to those who navigate the sea.
