My point is they never have and never will.

I think Ubisoft is clearly in the wrong, but you’re not making a good case. You’re conflating very different meanings of the word “own”.

In terms of legal ownership, only the copyright holder owns the intellectual property, including the right to distribute and license it. When a consumer “buys” a piece of media, they’re really just buying a perpetual license for their personal use of it. With physical media, the license is typically tied to whatever physical object (disc, book, ROM, etc.) is used to deliver the content, and you can transfer your license by transferring the physical media, but the license is still the important part that separates legal use from piracy.

When you pirate something, you own the means to access it without the legal right to do so. So, in the case at hand, players still “own” the game in the same sense they would if they had pirated it. Ubisoft hasn’t revoked anyone’s physical access to the bits that comprise the game; what they’ve done is made that kind of access useless because the game relies on a service that Ubisoft used to operate.

The real issue here is that Ubisoft didn’t make it clear what they were selling, and they may even have deliberately misrepresented it. Consumers were either not aware that playing the game required Ubisoft to operate servers for it, or they were misled regarding how long Ubisoft would operate the servers.

Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty, i.e. a promise that what they buy will continue to work for some period of time after they’ve bought it, and an obligation from the manufacturer to provide whatever services are necessary to keep that promise. Game publishers generally don’t offer any kind of warranty, and consumers don’t demand warranties, but consumers also tend to expect punishers to act as if their products come with a warranty. Publishers, of course, don’t want to draw attention to their lack of warranty, and will sometimes actively exploit that false perception that their products come with a perpetual warranty.

I think what’s really needed is a very clear indication, at the point of purchase, of whether a game requires ongoing support from the publisher to be playable, along with a legally binding statement of how long they’ll provide support. And there should be a default warranty if none is clearly specified, like say 10 years from the point of purchase.

It’s a nice bonus but too short the be a full game.

What they should probably do is is cap the settings to what computers at release time can handle, then patch it later with “graphics enhancements” that do nothing but raise the cap. They could even do it more than one. It keeps users’ expectations reasonable at launch and then lets the developers look like they’re going the extra mile to support an older product.

As a bonus, they could store the settings in a text file somewhere that more sophisticated users can easily edit to get max settings on day one.

Bowties have been out of fashion for so long they just look silly most of the time. That seems like exactly what you’d want for a character who’s supposed to be whimsical.

Also a necktie doesn’t go with a tophat. For reasons I can’t explain, that kind of incongruity looks more accidental than it does whimsical.

Is the difficulty in 4 as broken as it is in 3? I gave up in disgust after realizing I could win most encounters by literally just standing still and holding down the A button.

There are studios out there making games with the QoL improvements modern gamers demand without without modern bullshit like subscriptions and microtransactions. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a particularly prominent example of a studio doing the right thing and being massively rewarded with sales.

So a From Software DLC, basically?

Also not a squash.

I work there and I’m not surprised.

The real nightmare is the kerning.

Man, we’re getting close to the point where the release a game at the same time as its remaster.

Not wanting to fix a problem includes not caring if it’s fixed or not.

I’ve never been much of a Nintendo fan, but news like this makes me want to get into using Nintendo emulators.

Silly me for thinking it was cool that Sony finally decided to port their high-profile games to PC. Why must they fuck everything up?

UAC POPUS sounds like a new Doom character.

Such a great game. And The Last Guardian is criminally underrated.

Then you have to make sure it’s reasonably straightforward to figure everything out without the tutorial, so then why bother with the tutorial at all? As a player I’d hate to get stuck because I missed something that’s clearly spelled out in a tutorial I skipped.

Why is that supposed to matter?

I think what he means is that AI is needed to keep making substantial improvements in graphic quality, and he phrased it badly. Your interpretation kind of presumes he’s not only lying, but that he thinks we’re all idiots. Given that he’s not running for office as a Republican, I think that’s a very flawed assumption.

Compared to the US, the EU is lightning fast. California probably beats them sometimes, though.

I’m looking at Resurgence on Steam in the US and it doesn’t seem to be on sale.

Man, if I had any illusions about Lemmy being filled with literal children, this thread would clear them right up. Sexual objectification is gross and it does have consequences, y’all.

Nah, objectification of people is fucking gross. That doesn’t change if you say “it’s just a joke, bro.” And it does matter when enough individually powerless people take up an idea. That’s literally how movements start. Like the MRA movement, for example, and now we have Andrew fucking Tate.

That’s about $32k in today’s money, using the “Other goods and services” category at in2013dollars.com.

I would assume they’re taking about platform exclusives. I bet Nintendo is the only company making games just for Nintendo platforms. Any other company making games for the Switch has a strong inventive to port their game to other, more powerful platforms.

For most games that’s a ridiculous requirement but it makes a lot of sense in this case.

Not really. I didn’t and it was fine.

Too late! 😁

A lot of people learned it wrong, myself included. I found out when I went to confirm that “Hap’s Burgers” is a funny as I thought. Sadly no.

I swore off early access after Phoenix Point. It sucks to already be bored with a game before it has the major kinks worked out.

Dead Cells is kind of a counterpoint, though. I’m not sure if I got it as “early access” per se, but since I bought it, they made some major balance changes that completely changed the meta, and those changes got me playing way more enthusiastically than I was before.

Who are “these companies”? Game publishers and developers certainly aren’t a monolith. To me, this publisher’s complaint seems like an implicit critique of how big publishers have trained gamers to have expectations that are unrealistic for all but the most high-profile games.

I was thinking about how Hollow Knight got included in this post. It’s fantastic but not even a little bit Roguelike.

Y’all, Metroidvanias are not Rouguelikes. Randomly generated levels are an essential element for a game to be a Rouguelike, and fixed levels you can memorize are an equally essential feature of a Metroidvania.

Civ IV is the GOAT.

Microsoft is kind of infamous for different internal groups working against each other.

In my experience with telemetry, it’s100% about understanding how the product is performing and being used, and 0% about monitoring individual users. Telemetry data has little to no value for anyone not directly supporting the product.

The original PoP is 2D.

Making money isn’t capitalism. A market economy isn’t capitalism. You can look up the textbook definition, but to me capitalism means organizing absolutely everything around the pursuit of profit for the ownership class. Indie developers by and large aren’t in it for the money; that would make no sense, because they could make better money doing something else.