Hey there. We just wanted to chime in that you can avoid the account closure by logging into your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email. We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account so if you have any difficulties logging in then please create a support case with us. >> ubisoft.com/help
have some dlc there. had. no big deal, came with Assassin’s Creed on PS3 I think. gave it to kids years ago. $20 maybe. got too old for games. can barely type
If a game you own on steam also requires you to sign into an Ubi account it might? Maybe you’d need to create a new Ubisoft account again? Idk im just guessing a possible answer to that. It’s a good question.
Ubisoft might tell you that the game is already registered and won’t let you register it again, even with a new Ubi account. I would assume the scenario where the customer gets screwed is the default.
I don’t even see how greed motivates this. I can’t think of anyone that would go back to Ubisoft games after being locked out. Even assuming they were the scummiest of publishers, how does this give them anything other than bad press and sworn-off customers?
They’re hoping this will actually entice people to come back. Following that “get people in the door first and then worry about what you’ll sell them” business model, it’s the same logical reason that Costco has super cheap hot dogs that they lose money on, and Epic Games has free games every week. It’s just to get you to into a position where you can be marketed to.
That’s the more “amicable” business strategy though. The more sinister possibility is, well, a constantly running app (the Ubisoft launcher is configured to start on boot by default, and even if you turn that off it spawns a background process as soon as you click on it at least till you reboot), always online with full user permissions and filesystem access is a very powerful thing, you’ve gotten yourself a pretty capable Trojan virus that people are willingly installing and granting whatever permissions you need! Plenty of Windows users are also in the habit of using the admin user with system access for literally everything, which makes it even easier for them to exploit.
My uplay launcher closes when i tell it to and I don’t remember changing that setting, which makes it close easier than common programs like steam, epic and discord. I remember gog also not truly closing but I may have done that intentionally.
The triple admin request on update is fucking stupid though, and idk how a company as big as ubisoft can have that be the experience.
They can’t even show me the store on a language I want to see it in. They just arbitrarily decide I should be looking at it in french. Despite having my profile specify English. Despite having my entire launcher on English. French is the only language I’m allowed to see the store in.
And they wonder why i never buy shit from their store…
Getting people to come inside and have a look is a good strategy if they can make sense of what you’re selling and under which conditions. Entering a shop with shiny pictures and everything explained in Arabic means I won’t be spending money there as I can’t figure out under which conditions I’m buying anything.
I get this all the time in Switzerland, with just about every online portal / service.
It’s pot-luck if I actually can get something in ENGLISH that the UI is set to.
SAMSUNG - Always in German
Microsoft - Always in German
EA - Always in French
UBI - Always in French
Netflix - Getting better, but most of the older content only has German subs / localisation.
Geolocalisation needs to fuck off, just as these corporate tosspots need to.
It’s not like you, the end user, know which language you prefer.
I can get behind them doing an estimated guess based on location, but I’d rather have it as a pop up when I enter the site.
" Hey, we see you’re coming from Switzerland so we’ve set the language to German. Click continue to proceed in the German or click one or the other languages to switch!
Thanks for visiting".
I honestly don’t understand why they make it so hard. And every time it looks like they fixed it. A few months after somebody decided it’s working a little too well and reverts it back. Because screw the minorities ( multi lingual countries ) where it doesn’t work.
Ironically I’ve heard that in Brussels they get everything in Flemish by default, and in flanders we get everything in French. It’s like they’re deliberately getting it wrong.
Nah, the hotdogs work like that, but it’s more about the experience
I mean, Costco will take your money and do all sorts of organizational psych to entice you to buy more, but they always had certain morals, as companies go. They always try to give you a lot for what you buy, and they had public good initiatives - like you can get great prices on prescription eyewear and pretty good vision appointments without a membership. It’s not like they were losing out, but they’re willing to miss out on some profits when it comes to health needs.
It’s the way businesses used to be - not that long ago they’d give you all sorts of free stuff and even sell stuff at a loss to gain customer loyalty.
… Sorry I meant you could do that. They cut that program, and are cracking down on people sharing cards. The hotdogs getting jacked up in price might not be far behind
At this point, just getting what you’re promised in reasonable quality is about the best it gets, and you really can’t take that for granted anymore…
It did entice me to actually log into my Ubisoft account because I couldn’t actually remember if I had any games from them or even why I had an account with them in the first place. I didn’t purchase anything through their store front, so I don’t particularly care. Unless they’re wiping your Steam games, I don’t really see the point, like who buys games off the Ubisoft storefront anyways? Hopefully they at least have some process for reinstating accounts if somebody still has an email receipt at least.
Ha! I deleted my own account before they could, jokes on you Ubi!!
Jokes aside, fuck ubisoft. I primarily buy games from GOG. Recommended everyone to do the same 🐖
I’m mostly asking out of curiosity, but also maybe for anyone here that’d like to know. But if you buy Ubisoft games from GOG, like Prince of Persia, they won’t need the shitty Ubisoft launcher, right?
I just had a horrible experience with Assassins game purchased through Steam. I had bought the game few years back. Played some and stopped. And deleted my Ubisoft account. This week I downloaded the game again hoping to play it. I created a new Ubisoft account but the game wouldn’t launch.
Hours spent with the support got me nowhere. In summary, their response is that since the original Ubisoft account was linked to the purchase, they cannot now link the game to the new account.
I provided the Steam proof of purchase but that didn’t help.
But that’s the neat part! You don’t actually own your games. You own the right to play a copy of the game, but if they don’t wanna provide a working copy, then you can’t play anymore. It’s all in the terms and agreements we click “I agree” on
New law: every time they lock someone out of a game they paid for, either for lack of Internet or any other reason, they have to give a 1,000% refund and the contents of the CEO’s phone get uploaded to their store to be downloaded for free.
Makes me wonder, how much data does it take to hold every users account info and library details? Not the games themselves, no profile pictures or anything, just the data that they must have in order too know who owns what. That has to be a huge consideration when you build an online store, right?
Did they run out of space? Are they deleting “old” accounts to free up servers for the absolute flood of new Ubisoft accounts that they’re massively inundated with every day?
But seriously, what would an actual real world reason be for needing to delete accounts after X amount of time?
It certainly adds up, and it makes maintaining the databases more complex and costly as a whole.
Imo this is just lazy, they could at the very least “archive” old accounts and move the bare minimum data out of the main DB, as to make it possible to reactivate the account later on. Why can virtually every platform keep old account arround, but not Ubisoft?
Totally negligible. All you need to keep is a line in a database with the person’s email, hashed and salted password, and a unique identifier for each game they own - that’s an amount of space that won’t even register on any service nowadays. There might be other optional stuff that takes more space, like display pics, cloud saves etc but you can delete those without deleting the whole account.
Napkin maths to illustrate the point: Steam’s game IDs are short numbers, typically close to 5 digits long. ASCII characters are one byte each, so let’s assume 5 bytes plus one more for a separator character per game. If you wanted to store 8 billion accounts with 50 games each then the IDs would be about 2.4 TB, so a consumer hard drive worth ~$100 would do the job at least in the raw terms of data capacity
Your sums are right, but a ‘hard disk somewhere’ is not a robust, always on-line database. Running a 3TB Postgres instance on Amazon RDS will set you back something more like $1k/mo. Still absolute pocket change for Ubi, though.
Totally fair, too. I used to “own” Resident Evil 4 on Xbox 360, but it didn’t count the same once the Xbox One released. Suddenly the license was revoked, and I was expected to repurchase the game.
Yeah, was just thinking I should log in sometime. If it’s gone, I got it free off epic anyway, so no big loss, but also a better reason to sail them digital season.
I will say, it could be someone hit a wrong button. My account isn’t available because I’ve got 2fa apparently, but it’s still there. I doubt even a big game company would be so stupid as to automatically delete a paying customer’s account.
As if I give a fuck about anything on Ubisoft’s platform. Honestly it’s an annoyance that makes me never want to pay for their games again. I bought Assassins Creed Origins on Steam and somehow I still have to fucking use Ubisoft’s launcher. Fuck them. Great game, but fuck them anyway.
Yeah that’s how I felt about EA after buying Jedi Fallen Order on Steam. The bastards require not only the information from your PC at all times, but the information Steam has about you also.
Fair enough I suppose. It’s been so long since I played whatever it is, I can’t even remember what game it even is. All I know is the Ubisoft launcher is taking up space.
Why do so many people, usually children, think digital games are a good idea? Absolute scam, and it’s only going to get worse. Next gen of consoles will probably be all digital. You will lose access to games for seemingly no reason, everything will be $70, no trading, no selling, and no one but the big guys making a dime from the sale.
Please shop at your local game stores, don’t buy digital. You are not only ripping yourself off, but helping to enable a future where you don’t even really own the games you buy. Look at ubisoft right now. You bought those games. You own them. They’re literally stealing games just to try and force you to buy another copy.
I haven’t even had a disc drive in the last 7 years, I’d need an external one because high end laptops tend to not have space for that shit when there’s stuff that actually matters to consider, like performance and cooling.
I miss the days of CD keys and multiple disks, oh and owning a cd drive within the last decade. Oh wait, nah I like my expansive day 1 regged steam account with everything in it, ever and cheap keys.
Although I do miss manuals. A good manual in the pre-smartphone world was epic toilet reading. Or a good bradygames strat guide. The GTA:SA one was soooo good.
If it was source code on a disk then I might agree, but as it is, your idea is juvenile and dead. Only rarely grabbing an old game release on physical media and just playing it is what you want or what you get. It may signify ownership, but so may a digital receipt.
People in discord tell me “it’s convenient” and to “shut up, it’s the way of the future” because they are children who grew up in a permissive environment that did not condition them to question that kind of rule. They question governments and lawmakers, but not game creation.
Because everything is digital these days, most people are getting their music, films, TV, books, comics, etc digitally already. Why wouldn’t they do the same with games. Especially if you’re not the kind of person who cares about trading games back in or having them all up on a shelf.
The reason digital games took off is because it was a hundred times better in every possible way. In 2006 if you didn’t live in a capital of a country in Europe. (Which is most people), buying games was a fucking pain in the ass.
First of all games had a short shelf life. Like insanely short. 3-6 months MAYBE. After that go fuck yourself. If it sold superb well maybe it got a platinum rerelease, but honestly most games that platinum-d, you probably had already, because they were the must have-s for the console, and those were basically the games you could buy in your tiny video game store / supermarket(s). (What I mean is they had a very narrow selection of the most popular games, and budget games). The idea that your budget games were older bigger titles didn’t exist. You had awful budget games instead. Notice those are all but gone? Thank digital distribution. Makes no sense to stop selling a game. Also owning a more obscure console like the Saturn, was pretty much out of question, because there were even less stuff for it. Also in these stores no game, unless it was LITERALLY unplayable was marked down much. There was a very real cost associated with a physical game. It was perfectly possible to lose money on a real copy, unlike a digital one.
Also more experimental games were a huge risk for a publisher. Especially lower budget ones. Distribution and cartridge printing was awfully expensive. This did get better with CD based consoles a little.
Also the way games are distributed since the 90-s is optical media. Optical media is a huge PITA. The disks get damaged real easy, often without noticeable damage to the surface, they take up a lot a of space, and the optical drive is the single biggest point of failure on any period device. Laptops consoles, desktops. The first thing that always broke was the ODD. This resulted in a costly difficult and with more exotic devices impossible repair. I have a stack of like 20 PS2-s (I know I know), that I got for effectively free, because they were useless to their owners, because they don’t read disks anymore.
So this is why digital distribution took off as hard as it did. Because people remember when games were an expensive pain in the ass, and dd made it incomparably cheaper, more convenient, and let’s be real here, more long lasting.
Don’t feel bad about pirating AAA titles. See, the creatives and people that actually put work into the game have already been paid - usually at least. There are cases like Bethesda, who stole work from their composer - and so you’re not taking any profits from the people that matter.
Any money you’d pay to license a game would mostly just go to shareholders and greedy execs.
Yeah so their studio gets downsized, closed or merged. The big companies don’t care about the people. Tech lost 10k dev jobs last year, plenty of talent out there desperate.
And with the advent of AI tools and such much more work will be expected from fewer people. It’s a cutthroat industry that chews up passionate workers and spits them out when it’s done abusing them. The big companies definitely deserve to crash, and if a little bit of piracy can help induce that then I’m even more for it.
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Yet another reason I won’t buy their games. Hurray.
have some dlc there. had. no big deal, came with Assassin’s Creed on PS3 I think. gave it to kids years ago. $20 maybe. got too old for games. can barely type
It’s like they want people to pirate their games.
But I don’t want to pirate same old reskins of bloated games
Me neither, but a whole lot of other people do.
Y’ARRR MATEYS!
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Does this apply to games purchased on steam as well? Bs
There’s a post below that says you can’t launch the game when the associated Ubisoft account is deleted. You can’t associate a new Ubisoft account.
If a game you own on steam also requires you to sign into an Ubi account it might? Maybe you’d need to create a new Ubisoft account again? Idk im just guessing a possible answer to that. It’s a good question.
Ubisoft might tell you that the game is already registered and won’t let you register it again, even with a new Ubi account. I would assume the scenario where the customer gets screwed is the default.
Oh absolutely that would happen.
Let’s throw in some surprise missing DLCs for good measure.
Purchased games on Steam fall under Steam’s TOS.
“We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account”
So why do this? Corporate greed.
I don’t even see how greed motivates this. I can’t think of anyone that would go back to Ubisoft games after being locked out. Even assuming they were the scummiest of publishers, how does this give them anything other than bad press and sworn-off customers?
They’re hoping this will actually entice people to come back. Following that “get people in the door first and then worry about what you’ll sell them” business model, it’s the same logical reason that Costco has super cheap hot dogs that they lose money on, and Epic Games has free games every week. It’s just to get you to into a position where you can be marketed to.
That’s the more “amicable” business strategy though. The more sinister possibility is, well, a constantly running app (the Ubisoft launcher is configured to start on boot by default, and even if you turn that off it spawns a background process as soon as you click on it at least till you reboot), always online with full user permissions and filesystem access is a very powerful thing, you’ve gotten yourself a pretty capable Trojan virus that people are willingly installing and granting whatever permissions you need! Plenty of Windows users are also in the habit of using the admin user with system access for literally everything, which makes it even easier for them to exploit.
My uplay launcher closes when i tell it to and I don’t remember changing that setting, which makes it close easier than common programs like steam, epic and discord. I remember gog also not truly closing but I may have done that intentionally.
The triple admin request on update is fucking stupid though, and idk how a company as big as ubisoft can have that be the experience.
They can’t even show me the store on a language I want to see it in. They just arbitrarily decide I should be looking at it in french. Despite having my profile specify English. Despite having my entire launcher on English. French is the only language I’m allowed to see the store in.
And they wonder why i never buy shit from their store…
Getting people to come inside and have a look is a good strategy if they can make sense of what you’re selling and under which conditions. Entering a shop with shiny pictures and everything explained in Arabic means I won’t be spending money there as I can’t figure out under which conditions I’m buying anything.
I get this all the time in Switzerland, with just about every online portal / service.
It’s pot-luck if I actually can get something in ENGLISH that the UI is set to.
SAMSUNG - Always in German Microsoft - Always in German EA - Always in French UBI - Always in French Netflix - Getting better, but most of the older content only has German subs / localisation.
Geolocalisation needs to fuck off, just as these corporate tosspots need to.
It’s not like you, the end user, know which language you prefer.
I can get behind them doing an estimated guess based on location, but I’d rather have it as a pop up when I enter the site.
" Hey, we see you’re coming from Switzerland so we’ve set the language to German. Click continue to proceed in the German or click one or the other languages to switch!
Thanks for visiting".
I honestly don’t understand why they make it so hard. And every time it looks like they fixed it. A few months after somebody decided it’s working a little too well and reverts it back. Because screw the minorities ( multi lingual countries ) where it doesn’t work.
Ironically I’ve heard that in Brussels they get everything in Flemish by default, and in flanders we get everything in French. It’s like they’re deliberately getting it wrong.
Nah, the hotdogs work like that, but it’s more about the experience
I mean, Costco will take your money and do all sorts of organizational psych to entice you to buy more, but they always had certain morals, as companies go. They always try to give you a lot for what you buy, and they had public good initiatives - like you can get great prices on prescription eyewear and pretty good vision appointments without a membership. It’s not like they were losing out, but they’re willing to miss out on some profits when it comes to health needs.
It’s the way businesses used to be - not that long ago they’d give you all sorts of free stuff and even sell stuff at a loss to gain customer loyalty.
… Sorry I meant you could do that. They cut that program, and are cracking down on people sharing cards. The hotdogs getting jacked up in price might not be far behind
At this point, just getting what you’re promised in reasonable quality is about the best it gets, and you really can’t take that for granted anymore…
It did entice me to actually log into my Ubisoft account because I couldn’t actually remember if I had any games from them or even why I had an account with them in the first place. I didn’t purchase anything through their store front, so I don’t particularly care. Unless they’re wiping your Steam games, I don’t really see the point, like who buys games off the Ubisoft storefront anyways? Hopefully they at least have some process for reinstating accounts if somebody still has an email receipt at least.
Ha! I deleted my own account before they could, jokes on you Ubi!! Jokes aside, fuck ubisoft. I primarily buy games from GOG. Recommended everyone to do the same 🐖
The only thing thats stopping me from going fully to GOG is the fact that galaxy doesnt support linux right now.
What do you need Galaxy for?
Heroic Launcher on Linux supports GOG, from what ive heard.
I know GOG has a launcher, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. The links on my desktop just go straight to the game executables.
I’m mostly asking out of curiosity, but also maybe for anyone here that’d like to know. But if you buy Ubisoft games from GOG, like Prince of Persia, they won’t need the shitty Ubisoft launcher, right?
That is correct!
No sub-launchers on GOG. I think that would violate their no DRM stance.
Didn’t know that, thanks. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything from there but I will if it means no sub-launchers.
That’s rad. 🤔
It depends on the game.
I just had a horrible experience with Assassins game purchased through Steam. I had bought the game few years back. Played some and stopped. And deleted my Ubisoft account. This week I downloaded the game again hoping to play it. I created a new Ubisoft account but the game wouldn’t launch.
Hours spent with the support got me nowhere. In summary, their response is that since the original Ubisoft account was linked to the purchase, they cannot now link the game to the new account.
I provided the Steam proof of purchase but that didn’t help.
Steam support didn’t help either.
I can’t play a game I purchased and own.
This should be illegal!
But that’s the neat part! You don’t actually own your games. You own the right to play a copy of the game, but if they don’t wanna provide a working copy, then you can’t play anymore. It’s all in the terms and agreements we click “I agree” on
Arr me matey, thar be many a way to acquire that treasure! Ignore the blockades - hoist the colors!
New law: every time they lock someone out of a game they paid for, either for lack of Internet or any other reason, they have to give a 1,000% refund and the contents of the CEO’s phone get uploaded to their store to be downloaded for free.
Makes me wonder, how much data does it take to hold every users account info and library details? Not the games themselves, no profile pictures or anything, just the data that they must have in order too know who owns what. That has to be a huge consideration when you build an online store, right?
Did they run out of space? Are they deleting “old” accounts to free up servers for the absolute flood of new Ubisoft accounts that they’re massively inundated with every day?
But seriously, what would an actual real world reason be for needing to delete accounts after X amount of time?
It certainly adds up, and it makes maintaining the databases more complex and costly as a whole.
Imo this is just lazy, they could at the very least “archive” old accounts and move the bare minimum data out of the main DB, as to make it possible to reactivate the account later on. Why can virtually every platform keep old account arround, but not Ubisoft?
Totally negligible. All you need to keep is a line in a database with the person’s email, hashed and salted password, and a unique identifier for each game they own - that’s an amount of space that won’t even register on any service nowadays. There might be other optional stuff that takes more space, like display pics, cloud saves etc but you can delete those without deleting the whole account.
Napkin maths to illustrate the point: Steam’s game IDs are short numbers, typically close to 5 digits long. ASCII characters are one byte each, so let’s assume 5 bytes plus one more for a separator character per game. If you wanted to store 8 billion accounts with 50 games each then the IDs would be about 2.4 TB, so a consumer hard drive worth ~$100 would do the job at least in the raw terms of data capacity
Your sums are right, but a ‘hard disk somewhere’ is not a robust, always on-line database. Running a 3TB Postgres instance on Amazon RDS will set you back something more like $1k/mo. Still absolute pocket change for Ubi, though.
https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSPostgreSQL
I logged into steam after like 10 years no problem.
I trust Steam to maintain my library the same as any bank with my money. I don’t feel that way toward any other service.
@Boiglenoight @someguy3
Totally fair, too. I used to “own” Resident Evil 4 on Xbox 360, but it didn’t count the same once the Xbox One released. Suddenly the license was revoked, and I was expected to repurchase the game.
Steam has, so far, kept its word for most of us.
Well that definitely won’t get people to put on their pirate hats…
Huh. I’ve got some games on Ubisofts store… Well, maybe not anymore.
You’ll have to explain to me why I shouldn’t just steal any future Ubisoft titles if they steal all mine first…
Yeah, was just thinking I should log in sometime. If it’s gone, I got it free off epic anyway, so no big loss, but also a better reason to sail them digital season.
I will say, it could be someone hit a wrong button. My account isn’t available because I’ve got 2fa apparently, but it’s still there. I doubt even a big game company would be so stupid as to automatically delete a paying customer’s account.
If you got it from Epic then you probably still have it with Epic. You’ll just no longer have any achievements or playtime stats from Ubisoft.
At least, I hope.
As if I give a fuck about anything on Ubisoft’s platform. Honestly it’s an annoyance that makes me never want to pay for their games again. I bought Assassins Creed Origins on Steam and somehow I still have to fucking use Ubisoft’s launcher. Fuck them. Great game, but fuck them anyway.
Yeah that’s how I felt about EA after buying Jedi Fallen Order on Steam. The bastards require not only the information from your PC at all times, but the information Steam has about you also.
Fair enough I suppose. It’s been so long since I played whatever it is, I can’t even remember what game it even is. All I know is the Ubisoft launcher is taking up space.
I’d you already paid for them, it’s not stealing.
Why do so many people, usually children, think digital games are a good idea? Absolute scam, and it’s only going to get worse. Next gen of consoles will probably be all digital. You will lose access to games for seemingly no reason, everything will be $70, no trading, no selling, and no one but the big guys making a dime from the sale.
Please shop at your local game stores, don’t buy digital. You are not only ripping yourself off, but helping to enable a future where you don’t even really own the games you buy. Look at ubisoft right now. You bought those games. You own them. They’re literally stealing games just to try and force you to buy another copy.
Con artists.
Because game store doesn’t exist in my country and international shipping costs much as the game itself
That sounds like a great reason to pirate!
Well, single-player games anyway…
What about pc gaming? As far as I’m aware physical pc games don’t exist anymore.
Yeah when I hear about mUh pHySiCaL games I smell a console user. PC hasn’t had physical in over a decade. Unless you like Hidden Object games.
No, our defense isn’t physical it’s just DRM free cracking or a GOG library.
I haven’t even had a disc drive in the last 7 years, I’d need an external one because high end laptops tend to not have space for that shit when there’s stuff that actually matters to consider, like performance and cooling.
I miss the days of CD keys and multiple disks, oh and owning a cd drive within the last decade. Oh wait, nah I like my expansive day 1 regged steam account with everything in it, ever and cheap keys.
Although I do miss manuals. A good manual in the pre-smartphone world was epic toilet reading. Or a good bradygames strat guide. The GTA:SA one was soooo good.
If it was source code on a disk then I might agree, but as it is, your idea is juvenile and dead. Only rarely grabbing an old game release on physical media and just playing it is what you want or what you get. It may signify ownership, but so may a digital receipt.
Convenience.
Digital software delivery is perfectly fine.
DRM is intolerable.
People in discord tell me “it’s convenient” and to “shut up, it’s the way of the future” because they are children who grew up in a permissive environment that did not condition them to question that kind of rule. They question governments and lawmakers, but not game creation.
Because everything is digital these days, most people are getting their music, films, TV, books, comics, etc digitally already. Why wouldn’t they do the same with games. Especially if you’re not the kind of person who cares about trading games back in or having them all up on a shelf.
Are you like 12\s :D ?
The reason digital games took off is because it was a hundred times better in every possible way. In 2006 if you didn’t live in a capital of a country in Europe. (Which is most people), buying games was a fucking pain in the ass.
First of all games had a short shelf life. Like insanely short. 3-6 months MAYBE. After that go fuck yourself. If it sold superb well maybe it got a platinum rerelease, but honestly most games that platinum-d, you probably had already, because they were the must have-s for the console, and those were basically the games you could buy in your tiny video game store / supermarket(s). (What I mean is they had a very narrow selection of the most popular games, and budget games). The idea that your budget games were older bigger titles didn’t exist. You had awful budget games instead. Notice those are all but gone? Thank digital distribution. Makes no sense to stop selling a game. Also owning a more obscure console like the Saturn, was pretty much out of question, because there were even less stuff for it. Also in these stores no game, unless it was LITERALLY unplayable was marked down much. There was a very real cost associated with a physical game. It was perfectly possible to lose money on a real copy, unlike a digital one.
Also more experimental games were a huge risk for a publisher. Especially lower budget ones. Distribution and cartridge printing was awfully expensive. This did get better with CD based consoles a little.
Also the way games are distributed since the 90-s is optical media. Optical media is a huge PITA. The disks get damaged real easy, often without noticeable damage to the surface, they take up a lot a of space, and the optical drive is the single biggest point of failure on any period device. Laptops consoles, desktops. The first thing that always broke was the ODD. This resulted in a costly difficult and with more exotic devices impossible repair. I have a stack of like 20 PS2-s (I know I know), that I got for effectively free, because they were useless to their owners, because they don’t read disks anymore.
So this is why digital distribution took off as hard as it did. Because people remember when games were an expensive pain in the ass, and dd made it incomparably cheaper, more convenient, and let’s be real here, more long lasting.
They’re making the case for pirating games even better.
What fucking morons
Don’t feel bad about pirating AAA titles. See, the creatives and people that actually put work into the game have already been paid - usually at least. There are cases like Bethesda, who stole work from their composer - and so you’re not taking any profits from the people that matter.
Any money you’d pay to license a game would mostly just go to shareholders and greedy execs.
Yeah so their studio gets downsized, closed or merged. The big companies don’t care about the people. Tech lost 10k dev jobs last year, plenty of talent out there desperate.
And with the advent of AI tools and such much more work will be expected from fewer people. It’s a cutthroat industry that chews up passionate workers and spits them out when it’s done abusing them. The big companies definitely deserve to crash, and if a little bit of piracy can help induce that then I’m even more for it.
Yes but then again I’d be pirating Ubisoft games. Ain’t got time for that bloated crap.
I saw a great quote,
“It’s not pirating if buying it isn’t owning it”.
It’s definitely still pirating. I think the quote uses the term “stealing”.
Also you can steal services. For example imagine hacking the payment panel on an automated carwash so you don’t have to pay.
But this isn’t about services like Game Pass - these were bought games.
It is service, which I agree is really shitty and shouldn’t be a thing. You’re buying access to a game, not a copy of the game.
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I like that quote a little better
And neither is it piracy.
piracy: robbery or other violent actions outside of the jurisdiction of any state.
Luckily, it can be understood as rebels/feighters for freedom too.