>Closing the online services for some older games allows us to focus our resources on delivering great experiences for players who are playing newer or more popular titles.
Then release a container image of your last working server software so that anyone can host it privately. And release a patch to the games to allow pointing at a private server.
Having worked on games that old with services, docker didnt exist and I don't work there anymore, I built the server. The ami+server has been chugging omg with minor os updated since 2011. The software would be a pain to dockerize and relies on a config/deploy system that is megacorp proprietary and some internal security libraries with console signing keys for auth that are baked into the binary. We'd have to release the source, libraries, and describe the auth system.
It's really not realistic to do what your saying.
Then again my feature is only a part of the game and I designed it so you'd get 80% only hosting parts of it statically on S3.
Provided as context. The amount of effort the company (not ubi) has given to keep the servers running since 2011 and through gdpr is surprising given how few people actually use the feature. It's be way cheaper to refund the 10s of people actually playing their full price game license. many more people than actually playing would be offended though that we shut the feature down.
It's really a matter of them not doing _anything_ that could help.
Asking for additional development work on a game that is being shutdown obviously won't work, as that that amount of time spent on a dead product is just a waste of money for the business. For example, asking the company to dockerizing the server software, or split their code from the licensed third party tools like speedtree, RAD Game tools, etc and release it open open-source just wont work.
However, I do think most companies could justify asking one of their developers to spend just a single hour to document/copy+paste the _bare basics_ of the network logic for the good PR alone.
They could literally copy+paste their network serialization logic (whether it's something high level like protobuf, or just a raw C++ enum for associating the packet ID's with descriptive names). That's it. Just that one thing alone would immediately raise my opinion of any company that has to shut down an online game service. Just that single thing alone would save their fanbase hours of time spent on reverse engineering the networking for server emulator development.
Good documentation publicly exposed and reviewed by legal takes a hell of a lot more time than 1 hour with just a dev. Doing this right is likely at least a week of full-time effort by an engineer and probably a month or two shepherding stuff through legal review and all the other crap. I think you're greatly underestimating the efforts and the value that what you're talking about would actually provide.
And as I pointed out that still won't work without hacking the actual console game because the console game has pined ca certificates and dependencies on the game network authorization that relies on crypto that just cannot be released. So to make the actual game work you'd actually have to make a change to and recompile the game.
Note this is running on a console so there are limited ways to hack/alter the game.
Four of the games on that list are Assassin's Creed games. AC is one of the best selling game franchises of all time. Ubisoft has sold something like 200 million copies of the various installments of AC.
We are talking about games that do like $150M+ in their first week of sales.
They have the money to put a dev on this for a week and shepherd it through legal or whatever. They could put a dev on it for a month.
There is no excuse, they're just being cheap and seeing if they can get away with it.
My favorite feature of Internet forums is definitely the one where someone gives a detailed explanation as to why something is expensive or at least a lot more work than one might think, probably not worth the engineering effort and a legal review will take a bit, but it was good while it lasted and someone else pops in at the end by saying we can fix this with words on a page because that just automatically negates the expense of time, effort and money borne by actual people.
Software isn’t a bunch of prepackaged recordings cut together and copied over and over again. You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in. Server software needs maintenance because it lives on a network and networks attract people who will screw around with it if vulnerabilities are known to exist (and there will always be vulnerabilities); and if the entity maintaining it decides that it is no longer worth the expense, they stop maintaining it. That’s their goddamn right so the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them because more often than not it is not if they will shut it down, but when and what you can expect afterwards. A $60 game you bought once probably doesn’t entitle you to full service for the rest of your natural life. Even a subscription has a time limited term of service.
The 'words on a page' weren't specified and the idea of 'fix' isn't an absolute notion. I can think of a simple rule change that might be an improvement without forcing any procedural changes raised earlier in the thread: Restrict use of the word 'Purchase' or 'Buy' in marketing materials for products that the user is not guaranteed to have access to the primary features of for as long as they wish. You can subscribe to a game that the creating company cant/wont support indefinitely, you can buy a game that stands alone and operates indefinitely, or you can do both and purchase a binary while subscribing to online features. The precise details of which features are 'primary' or significant enough to justify ownership could be hashed out in courts, but the problem arises when these companies advertise Sale/Purchase when the unspoken reality is, as you mention, that it's really a lease, but with unspecified terms!
> You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in.
Those are the requirements for making it easy to host it in an alternative location. Laws for incompatibility don't need nor usually require it to be easy, only possible.
Microsoft was able to release the network protocol for smb without releasing the binary, the assets, or the environment for their Microsoft server. They were able to release the network protocol without needing to be responsible for the development and maintenance of samba. Microsoft is not in any form responsible for security vulnerabilities in samba.
If Ubisoft released the protocol for Assassin's Creed 2 multiplayer then the only person responsible software updates would be the group implementing that protocol. A law requiring that minimum disclosure would not be expensive nor take a lot of work (unless the protocol documentation is conveniently deleted).
The biggest issue would be certificates, but if companies know before hand that protocol and authorized keys need to be published by the end of the product life, then companies will plan ahead to make those things easy for them. People who run companies can plan ahead when they are required to do so.
If I buy something, I expect to own it. The implementation details and challenge incurred to the vendor are not my problem. They took part in this transaction fully knowing this, while I had no way to know how "durable" my dlc are..
I understand how the cost-benifit analysis today favours shutting down servers and retroactively taking away recently sold products. This is probably why the previous comment suggested the need for legislation.
You do. You own the disc. Or you own a copy of the virtual equivalent on a disk that you have. You also own the equipment serving as the runtime environment.
What you don’t own are the servers running the server side features or the software not on the disc you bought.
I think that is overly reductive; just ask anyone who bought Dark Spore. The single-player campaign is entirely on the disk that they own, but the game contacts a server that tracks your progress. It then doesn't allow you to go back to any level you have already played. There's no way to start over or replay any part of it. This is simply abusive; they should have been required to state up front, in very clear terms, that the player had not actually purchased anything, and that they could only play the game once.
It is true that the players do not own the servers, but it should also be illegal for game companies to abuse their customers using that asymmetry.
This is true even though Dark Spore was apparently a pretty dull game (I never played it myself).
I don’t think that it is. I’m unfamiliar with Darkspore (spelling I found when searching conjoined it), but part of being an informed consumer is knowing what you are buying.
If you’re buying a game with a substantial single player game, LAN-based multiplayer, and online multiplayer, the part you don’t get to keep is the latter portion when the game ends. You’ve effectively bought a game and a ticket, and you should know you bought a ticket because business entities don’t have the obligation to keep existing or to continue owning their assets beyond whatever their contracts require (and there’s even ways to sell those out depending on the contract). But you still own the rest.
In the case of a MMORPG or live service game, all you own is a ticket. And even then it’s not as if you can’t be banned from accessing the servers effectively at-will but usually for cheating or harassment. You have to know the difference, because an online game is an experience in entertainment terms where as an offline game is a re-runnable piece of media. That’s not to discount the scummy things software shops can do, but check the original article; they’re shutting down the servers mostly for games 9+ years old, one that’s only a few years old but is online-only (never heard of it, must not have been too successful), and I have no idea what Ubisoft is doing with the access to DLC part in some of those titles. The article didn’t explain that part very well which is basically what I expect from game journalism, but is this DLC that is intrinsically part of the online experience? Is it offline DLC you can still keep, but not redownload? Is this a little bit of column A or a little bit of column B?
Point is, for some things that you “buy”: when the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets taken down.
This has nothing to do with multiplayer. This was a single player game that vanished as soon as you played it; even if you liked it, still had the disk and a computer to run it in, it was gone. It was sold as an ordinary computer game, not as a concert that happens exactly once. (Even concerts are given dozens of times in a year, rather than one single time.)
I’m going to just have to take your word on that one. That frankly sounds like a case of actual fraud that I’ve been unable to verify, despite finding plenty of other controversies around the title, and basically an unproductive outlier to this discussion.
I will note the DRM server shenanigans are something I think should be illegal (on the basis that’s it’s a kind of fraud, but different than what you wrote about) though, and I’m surprised you didn’t bring that up.
Well I’ll be damned! That’s a terrible way to sell a game. Chalk that up to another reason not to buy from EA. That said, did people continue buying this game knowing that? Was there any backlash or controversy? Because despite the DRM activation servers going down I did see some enthusiasm around keeping this game going.
The controversy was mixed up with the overall dislike of single–player games that required you to have a constant internet connection, which had gotten started a few years earlier. SimCity, released by EA in 2013, got a lot more hate because of it than Darkspore did, but at least you could have more than one city at a time and when you finished with one you could still play it as many times as you wanted. If you could stomach it.
Darkspore just didn’t have the cachet that SimCity did, so it didn’t attract as much attention.
> the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them
that opinion is pretty convenient for the game publisher considering I've yet to see a single one who made it possible for a consumer to know the date they would pull the plug before purchasing the game.
How generous that it's our responsibility to do what we cannot do, but misguided to expect game publishers to do what they can do because it would be more expensive for them. Ubisoft makes billions in revenue. They can afford to not be deceptive and to make sure that players have an opportunity to access and continue to use their purchases for as long as the company has purchases on offer.
It’s an inconvenient fact for all of us that buy things in the marketplace. There’s a lot of products that are not worth buying or I think are a bad value that people will purchase anyway, and a lot of companies with mixed reputations doing dodgy things or “strategic” plays that aren’t always great for their customers. EA is an example of a company I buy zero products from precisely because their reputation is completely garbage in my household, whereas Ubisoft is an example of a company that has a borderline but still passable reputation and Nintendo is an example of a company that has a fantastic reputation in my household.
How you spend your money is up to you, but unconsidered legislating has much broader implications for society. If you think companies are not upfront enough now, or that it is not completely bleeding obvious that services with a cost component to them can be shut down at will after some length of time, then maybe that’s something to be arbitrated in court before we start flippantly talking about Acts of Congress for every paper cut we experience in life and it’s a meme at this point that like clockwork, somebody can go into some level of detail in what is involved for what people are asking for and you’ll almost immediately find someone saying “we need legislation” in nearly those exact words to the point that I don’t even think it is said in good faith; it just a reflex some people seem to have.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the multiplayer and live services components of games are more like an experience that you buy a ticket to than an ongoing game you can always return to. When the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets torn down.
We aren't talking about a cash strapped startup who penny pinches their way around their devs time.
Grow a fucking brain and consider the implications of this little "stunt" where a user who has been playing an old game suddenly cannot play anymore. Why do you think that user will spend their hard earned money to pay you for a new game when they know the company will shut down their servers after a few years?
There are limited ways to fuck this up and the company is looking like doing the absolutely worst in terms of looking bad to their "target audience".
Cool I guess if that saves them a week or a month of a full time Devs time. That's worth more than the clusterfuck of PR nightmare it is going to cause. Nice.
I don't know man. The technical limitations you mentioned should not be difficult for the company that built the darn thing in the first place.
Make what can be made public available and someone will fill in the gaps. One infamous example was the leak of the server behind Ragnarok Online (Aegis)[1]. Much of it was missing, but people pieced together a working server over time and eventually there were countless emulator projects built in part on that learning.
Well, if Ubisoft starts to see a sales hit from these shenanigans that is greater than the development costs for the migration, I think they'll be able to summon the willpower to accomplish the task.
Even just half-assing it and asking the community to help would make a lot of people happy. People reverse-engineer closed games/consoles/services all the time. That's what a lot of cheat patches are anyways.
The problem here is there is no direct way or feedback mechanism to link "lost sales" to this issue, other than people messaging directly.
Otherwise, it's the kind of thing that usually ends up as a positive feedback loop: "We need more money" -> "Cripple some old games" -> "Users are buying less of our games" -> We need more money" -> "Cripple more old games" -> ...
We've seen it before with DRM, we've seen it before with microtransactions. When there's no organic way to complain other than "don't buy", execs don't get the message.
Let's ignore the "how" of releasing server code - I don't care if it's in a container or not.
Release the binaries and installation instructions.
I used to play on a pirated WoW server. I was not in the community long enough to know /how/ there were rogue instances of a Blizzard hosted server software in the wild, but it was fun.
The same should go legally for games that age out of company support.
You don't own your games on steam, uplay, or any other drm filled service.
If you want to own your games, get used to either having old games and going to flea markets to find them, or buy from GOG. I've made a deliberate and purposeful shift to buy my games from GOG for this reason.
You don't own them, but they sure do everything possible to obfuscate that fact. Regulation will likely be needed as the sellers have shown they will do what it takes to deceive the customer.
For example going to the Steam checkout page it very clearly states that I have the option to "Purchase for myself" or "Purchase as a gift". I, like most English speakers, understand the word "Purchase" to mean something very specific. The words license, lease, rental, etc. do not even exist anywhere on any page in the checkout flow all the way through entering your payment information. I can only assume this omission is by design.
Valve doesn't but the companies that use Steam as a platform do.
For example, your Titanfall purchase on Steam is now useless, and actually it was useless for the entire time it was available for sale (since the servers were never operational at any time during the period it was available).
All of these titles they're talking about Ubi are available on Steam too (and the article specifically notes that some of them are still on sale with no indication they will be removed in less than two months).
"Steam games can't be taken away" is false, and "valve as a company hasn't taken away your orange box yet" is not a particularly interesting or insightful observation. And to be clear, they are legally allowed to do so under the ToS under some circumstances!
They don't, because unlike Ubisoft, they're mostly a middleman. They run the marketplace for other game vendors and so they have reputation to uphold. However, Ubisoft is primarily a game developer, so there is a moral hazard of them screwing you.
We all hate middlemen but this shows why they're needed (in the absence of regulation).
Valve is also a games developer, and they never pulled any of their old or failed games. You can still play Artifact or Ricochet multiplayer (if you really want).
This isn't entirely true. Most (all?) of the games require the Steam client which they are constantly updating and increasing the system requirements for. Systems that could previously run the Steam client and games just fine can no longer run those same games after a while. If I remember correctly the Steam client no longer supports systems running Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X versions before 10.10, etc... to name a few. This is currently preventing me from running some games I've purchased and I will no longer be making any purchases on Steam until they resolve this problem.
What if Steam where ever to shut down? (E.g. it loses to Epic in the long run, or services like Game Pass consume the entire industry and render it obsolete)?
It doesn't say the games will be kept if Steam goes under. In fact, they don't let you keep games if they're removed from Steam "for any reason"
> If a game is removed from your Steam account for any reason, such as through manual deletion or a refund – we reserve the right to remove the games from your GOG.com library. (see https://www.gog.com/connect#faq)
I'd say it's unclear at best how well you'll be protected, but at least you can download and backup the DRM free installers for use even if GOG pulls the games out of your library.
Yeah, this is my take. I didn't trust Ubi before this debacle and I'm not surprised now. Now, if Valve, Epic, or GOG pulled something like this, I might be inclined to sweat.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that (at least from a contract law perspective) you could interpret that as "purchasing" a revocable license to play the game. It's still misleading in the sense of common English, but that probably wouldn't stop a lawyer...
Its pretty explicit in the agreement terms that you need to separately click to agree on every purchase:
> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services
> F. Ownership of Content and Services
> All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Content and Services and any and all copies thereof, are owned by Valve and/or its or its affiliates’ licensors. All rights are reserved, except as expressly stated herein. The Content and Services are protected by copyright laws, international copyright treaties and conventions and other laws. The Content and Services contain certain licensed materials and Valve’s and its affiliates’ licensors may protect their rights in the event of any violation of this Agreement.
> G. Restrictions on Use of Content and Services
> You may not use the Content and Services for any purpose other than the permitted access to Steam and your Subscriptions, and to make personal, non-commercial use of your Subscriptions, except as otherwise permitted by this Agreement or applicable Subscription Terms. Except as otherwise permitted under this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use), or under applicable law notwithstanding these restrictions, you may not, in whole or in part, copy, photocopy, reproduce, publish, distribute, translate, reverse engineer, derive source code from, modify, disassemble, decompile, create derivative works based on, or remove any proprietary notices or labels from the Content and Services or any software accessed via Steam without the prior consent, in writing, of Valve.
> You are entitled to use the Content and Services for your own personal use, but you are not entitled to: (i) sell, grant a security interest in or transfer reproductions of the Content and Services to other parties in any way, nor to rent, lease or license the Content and Services to others without the prior written consent of Valve, except to the extent expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use); (ii) host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet, network play utilizing commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks, websites or services, without the prior written consent of Valve; or (iii) exploit the Content and Services or any of its parts for any commercial purpose, except as expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use).
IDGAF, just because you wave a license agreement around doesn't free you from the moral responsibility to be honest about what you're selling. If you say BUY NOW and then bury specific redefinitions of 'buy' in a 5,000 word contract then you are engaged in deception. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you're not running a fraud, it's just a particularly elaborate and narrowly specified one. It's not that I don't understand contract language, but most people don't and there's a reason most service contracts are rendered in 5 point type and optimized for leverage rather than clarity.
I rarely bother to pirate anything, but lose zero sleep over the phenomenon because so many corporations engage in deceptive practices.
> Its pretty explicit in the agreement terms that you need to separately click to agree on every purchase
Which illustrates a large part of the problem. The sales page is designed to deceive you with the expectation that a very small number of customers will ever see and read through those terms. The terms by the way are 4,676 words and would take an average reader more than 15 minutes to read even if it wasn't obtusely written legalese.
Should that be legal and OK? To me this seems like an area where the offer needs to be plainly stated, and since that isn't happening then perhaps a consumer protection agency needs to step in.
(edit: previous word count was from the wrong version of the terms)
I hope for regulations to protect consumers by not allowing to advertise this as a "buying action" if you later have to through the entire lengthy terms and services to figure out that they are not really selling this to you, but rather licensing.
I also accept a license to use my toaster when I buy it, and the intellectual property rights are still owned by the manufacturer, etc. I wouldn't call burying it in legalese that no one ever reads and even fewer understand, "pretty explicit".
It's really frustrating to me that "say one thing on the page and another thing in the terms" has been steadily creeping from "that's a scam" to "that's a completely normal business practice", and it's even more frustrating that some people defend it.
> It's really frustrating to me that "say one thing on the page and another thing in the terms" has been steadily creeping from "that's a scam" to "that's a completely normal business practice", and it's even more frustrating that some people defend it.
Maybe we need a law that says "if advertising and the terms of purchase say different things, whichever one is more favorable to the buyer applies, even if the less favorable one has a provision that says it always applies in cases of conflict".
> Its pretty explicit in the agreement terms that you need to separately click to agree on every purchase:
It's okay to lie everywhere else, as long as they tell the truth somewhere inside the small print nobody reads? And we are supposed to know which parts are lies and which the truth?
> You don't own your games on steam, uplay, or any other drm filled service.
Unless you live in a country with actual consumer rights. Like Australia, as Steam found out when they tried to claim that their games weren't actually goods [0].
I think that the headline article with Ubisoft will also attract the attention of the ACCC, because how they're withdrawing access to a sold good's service, particularly the withdrawal of DLC, is likely to breach the conditions for how you're allowed to advertise and sell items in Australia.
>You don't own your games on steam, uplay, or any other drm filled service.
Off-topic I know but Samsung retroactively disabled the oxygen sensor software for Samsung phones in Canada. I had been using it for a few years but one day after an update it was disabled by Samsung. The physical sensor still existed obviously but it was no longer usable on a Samsung phone that I owned. I think that should be illegal.
100%. I can't wait until consumer laws hit all the phone shenanigans.
As a general rule, it should be illegal to issue updates that are not easily consumer-revokable to any device, if it changes functionality to be different to the time of purchase.
You don’t even own your steam account. If you forget your password, but have other ways to proof (7+ years of purchase history of your credit card and paypal, your ID etc) they will still say: „go fuck yourself, buy all games again.“
They have an obligation to provide you with the items/services you purchased. That includes access to them through an account. If you can actually prove the account is yours, you should be able to.
Of course, it might be ridiculously expensive (go through the courts)--but that's what these companies are counting on.
After one year of sending tickets back and forth I just asked my credit card issuer to charge back all purchases ever made. Going to court or similar was not an option as a poor student :/
Perhaps if they try to force you to arbitration you can push back and demand proof that you agreed to their terms, which is conveniently achieved by creating an account.
Arguably, if the court ends up agreeing that you did have an account and that Valve needs to give control of it back to you, would that not be evidence that you had agreed to the terms, then broken them by rejecting arbitration? (Leading to Valve being able to take your account away because you broke the ToS.)
I love gog, and have gone through a similar shift for any games that I can.
However, I hate to point out that, GoG does in fact have some games with DRM, even though they make a big deal of the fact that they are an anti-DRM shop, and they get away with it buy pretending the definition of DRM is different to what most people think.
E.g. I recently bought Worms WMD. You need a Galaxy account to play. I'm not even sure you can cross-play with Steam, I think you can't. Without it, the game is crippled. I would not have bought it if I had known.
GoG should refund you for that if you run into it in the future. I don't buy games that require accounts with 3rd parties or need some weird client installed. I eventually installed Steam, but that's it for me.
I'm not installing Galaxy either, and GoG has developed some dark patterns to try to push it on you (links to the actual installers keep getting buried deeper and deeper) but as long as they continue to let you download games without it I'm happy enough.
> If you want to own your games, get used to either having old games and going to flea markets to find them, or buy from GOG.
You forgot the great equalizer that is internet piracy. Download cracked copies of every single game in your steam library and you'll be fine for as long you can emulate your current platform. It doesn't stop online services from being shut down, but it does mean you can at least play games offline in 15-20 years as well as you can do it now, not matter what happens to steam or your account.
I'll say I love GoG though, and it's the first place I look when I'm buying PC games.
While there is no easy way to discover for which game it is the case, many if not most games on steam are actually DRM free. The choice is with the dev/publisher to include steamworks DRM.
Gog pranked people by saying they were going offline and you would lose your games. I guess it was to highlight that they're the only service where you can back up your games and don't need to worry about DRM, but there was a lot of confusion and people didn't find it that funny at the time.
It was a marketing prank. Someone, high up in their company, thought it would be HIGH HUMOR to pretend their site went down before users could download their drm free games. They relaunched a completely new redesigned site a few days later, but this was a mistkae.
I still haven't forgotten or forgiven about this, but I still buy from them because the alternative is much worst.
GOG doesn’t solve this for the online games mentioned. You’d just be left with the files and license to play a game which no longer exists and therefore still can’t be played.
They really do though. You can't start most games without Steam running, unless you replace the Steam DLL that those games link against (but that is considered "cracking").
They is a fraction of Steam games that don't integrate with Steam in any way and therefore can be started by running their binary, but in my experience that is not most games.
I read a really excellent article once (which I think was about itunes or kindle) about how the modern content delivery business model relies on creating ambiguity between buying and licensing. Like for example, the seller wants to be sure that if you lose your game you have to "buy" it again rather than just prove your identity and continuing license to use, but they can still control what device it goes on and for how long.
So here we have Ubisoft taking away, I presume, some amount of single player downloaded content from people who "bought" it because they don't want to maintain the servers that confirm they continue to be licensed to use it.
Sure, the company needs to control their resource commitments, but this sort of exposes the whole shell game. It would have been smarter of them to just unlock the downloadables when the servers go offline. It would be cheap goodwill.
There is not that much ambiguity in practice when realistically consumers never fully purchase any (digital) media. So its always licensing. Only exceptions that come to mind are commissioned work, but then the ownership status should be pretty clear.
I'm not an intellectual property lawyer, but I'm sure you're right that there's no _legal_ ambiguity with these "purchases." The point is that ambiguity is deliberately generated in the mind of the consumer in order to have the marketing benefits of a sale (and create the fiction that the user has property, which if mishandled would need to be replaced), while also heavily restricting use of the content under an onerous license.
What would consumers think they were buying if not a license to it? How would it work if everyone bought the actual copyright? What else could you be buying?
Just my guess, but I think most people believe they are buying a copy of a game. Like you used to be able to buy a comic book or a Pokemon card made of paper. You didn't have obscure rights to the art or prose, but you could draw moustaches on the Pikachu.
There is a lot of ambiguity in practice when realistically (almost) every consumer thinks they're purchasing an item but they're actually only licensing it.
The company named 2K pulls this every year where they disable the multiplayer and even single-player story-mode of their NBA 2K games that are less than 2 years old (they turned off NBA 2K20 servers in Dec 2021)
Call me old fashioned but I expect games to come on physical media, be able to enjoy multiplayer on a LAN and be able to enjoy them long after the company who created them is gone.
I'd also add that distributing an installation file that requires no activation server is also sufficient. Physical media is getting kind of dated as seen by many devices no longer even including optical drives.
> Physical media is getting kind of dated as seen by many devices no longer even including optical drives.
the lack of optical drives in consoles isn't because the tech is 'dated' it's because forcing users to online-only and preventing players from owning physical media they can let their friends borrow or sell used makes more money for gaming companies and gives them greater opportunity to collect your data and push ads at you. It gives them greater control to censor, patch, and remove content too.
All of the reasons you gave for removing optical drives are true for consoles but I'd also like to point out that even desktop and laptop manufacturers have been removing optical drives as well. The reasons you gave largely do not apply to computer manufacturers yet they have still been removing them. Optical drives aren't needed as much as they used to due to software distribution over the Internet so many computer manufacturers have been removing optical drives to reduce computer prices, make computers smaller, etc...
It's very much the same problem with the PC. They do make laptops smaller and lighter, and removing them makes them cheaper (DVD/bluray players include the cost of licensing fees), but online distribution of software often provides similar benefits to Apple and Microsoft. They get to push more ads and gain more control when you have to use their marketplaces to get software.
Optical drives in computers can also be a nightmare for consumers. Try playing 4k bluray content on your PC for example. It wouldn't be unreasonable for people to complain to Dell that they bought a computer with an optical drive but can't play the media they own without jumping through hoops due to DRM like this: https://www.pcworld.com/article/606652/4k-blu-ray-support-is... so Dell saves themselves a lot of problems by removing those drives.
Getting a game via disk is no different from getting a game via the internet. The distribution method doesn't change that you are just getting a license.
> Getting a game via disk is no different from getting a game via the internet.
Not true, because publishers or other middlemen can't censor the games that are on my shelf. My shelf also won't remove music from my games after license disputes arise. My shelf doesn't care if my ISP is down or if cloudflare experiences an outage either.
If I burn down my shelf, or step on a disk I'm on the hook for replacing the games. Physical media comes with its own vulnerabilities, but at least those are mainly in my control.
> Not true, because publishers or other middlemen can't censor the games that are on my shelf.
Sure they can. Tons of games sold on physical disk only had part of the game on the disk, with the remainder requiring internet access to download. Particularly more recent AAA games that are tens of gigabytes.
IANAL, but reconsider: Your physical copy retains your first sale doctrine rights, in that you may resell it (or melt it down) without any violation of “applicable laws”.
The fact that the companies selling the media make it useless without an account is a different, though absolutely material, discussion. It’s been a slow March, though, from “this is your unsecured audio disc and you can use it and copy it within fair use and sell it if you want”, then DVDs in 1996 with “you can use and play this disc if your hardware with this idiotic, fatally flawed encryption scheme says you can” - quickly amended via the DMCA in 1998 with “well, we meant as long as we and your hardware says you can, and if you break that it’s Bad”, then continuing on to later physical disc formats with other, still idiotic and fatally flawed encryption schemes. You could still sell your disc though, or loan it to your friends.
Now? Yeah, it’s all lies about it being a purchase, all the way down. How it would be nice, though, to see a court bitch-slap Amazon and Apple, and force them to facilitate your doctrine of first sale right for the Kindle ebooks and iTunes Store media you “purchased”.
Ignoring everything else, making millions of plastic discs and transporting them to people is incredibly bad for the planet. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a DVD of a game has a carbon footprint several thousand times greater than the digital equivalent.
As much as I dislike companies having the ability to revoke licenses and ownership, the climate impact of physical media means they should remain firmly in the past.
Also DVDs don’t last forever. Some sources say they last 10-30 years, depending on the manufacturer and quality.
I’m more curious about why people think things ought to be preserved forever at all costs? I’m sure there are many video games from the 70’s and 80’s that have been forgotten.
Even physical media is largely a license check at this point. The last XBOX game I installed came on a disc but then required downloading hundreds of GB before I could play it. The next time I wanted to play, the game wouldn't launch without the disc being inserted, even though all of the files needed were already on the hard drive.
ubisoft be like "you know that game we released 3 years ago and are still selling for $20? yeah you won't be able to play it after September"
Also... can we talk about the fact that they're killing off these old games because of, supposedly, the maintenance burden... but they're keeping the remastered versions. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just use the same game server in the first place?!
There's a mixed bag of articles surrounding this. If you've bought the game on Steam or other platform of choice, you will retain access to that game. Online game play and DLC that requires the on-line component is going to be retired.
Additionally, the remastered versions of listed games will be retaining online features.
This is the summum of the fraud, they can deprecate and then resell to you what you have already paid for to continue playing the same game for a marginal cost to them.
Same as Fortnite on iOS. Epic couldn’t upgrade but at least it was playable as an old version. Then one day Apple removed the app from the purchased history so you can’t download it anymore. Unless you had it on your device or you have the ipa file on your computer.
Are they going to provide the code to run private servers or is the goal to get people to stop playing older games and spend more on new games? Is the deadpool timer ticking on GhostRecon and all the other FarCry games?
The author is correct about centralized NFTs not being what you expect them to be. They are wrong that NFTs are debunked. A true web3 game will never have the servers shut down. Everyone collectively pays for the server costs. Every time you do something in the game, you pay for your little slice of server time.
They make mention of Overwatch towards the end - that's sort of happening later this year. Blizzard has stated that when Overwatch 2 is released, Overwatch 1 will no longer be accessible.
The do say that "player unlocked content will transfer over" but you'll lose the game dynamics of the first game forever...
> The do say that "player unlocked content will transfer over" but you'll lose the game dynamics of the first game forever...
This is something I don't like about the modern game landscape. But it appears to be overwhelmingly popular, for reasons that escape me.
Every time an existing game is updated, you lose the dynamics of the first game forever. How is Overwatch 2 replacing Overwatch 1 any different from that?
Dice/EA's Battlefield 2142 (2006) was one of my favorite games on PC as a teenager. It's still fun - many of the game mechanics and game modes have not been replicated in any Battlefield title since.
For some background - Battlefield is a mostly multiplayer game, only a few have had anything approaching a campaign and it always feels like an afterthought.
Progression in BF 2142 is tied to you having an online account, whether you're playing a LAN game or not. Obviously today's landscape is way worse than even that, but it was something that felt egregious at the time. The game even came with a dedicated server binary so you could self-host game servers. However, it had to communicate with EA servers to check progression data of people joining the game and such. When EA shut it down, they took out both the matchmaking AND the progression service - meaning self-hosted servers and LAN matches were taken out as well.
Some people reverse engineered the progression service for what was essentially a decade old title at that point, and EA brought the hammer down on them. Let me remind you that you still needed a valid key for the game, this wasn't a crack to get a free copy, it only replaced the progression server so that LAN and self-host (official binary) servers could still function as originally intended.
EA said something about how it was their right to decide whether or not they were going to do something with the IP in the future, but it's dystopian to me that deciding the future direction of an IP can include reaching out and making previous content that people paid for inaccessible. We're not even talking about piracy in this case, we're talking about restoring function to people with real copies.
That's one kind of update. It's not obvious that it's the majority of updates. The modal update appears to be motivated explicitly by the concern "we thought you might get bored if the rules of the game were too stable, so we're changing some of them".
I know that hovercraft sticking to the sides of walls in BF 2042 was a bug ("spidercraft"), but it was so stupid and fun I'm actually sad they "fixed" it.
Notice to Ubisoft: in any agreement between you and me, the term "pay" signifies a loan. Full balance lent (plus accrued interest) is due upon any material change in the product or service sold/rented/licensed/leased. By continuing to offer me its products, Ubisoft accepts this contract term.
Strictly speaking, ownership does not apply to content. One can hold the copyright, or not. You own the DVD, but you are not the copyright holder. Also: Copyright law only disallows you from copying the DVD (and some other things, like making a public performance of the work, etc.), any license document which accompanies the DVD is irrelevant, and cannot remove any rights you already have. If the license would be considered a contract, it would be irrelevant since you have not agreed to it, nor signed it (or even read it). If the license would be considered a copyright license, it would only apply when making a copy (or public performance, etc.) of the work; it does not apply for you simply watching the DVD.
In short, no, you have not been “granted a license” to view/play the content of a DVD – you don’t need one.
Indeed, and Copyright etc. still applies, of course.
But in most jurisdictions, what you do with a DVD that you bought, in your own home, is totally up to you, so you can install the game even if the company that created it no longer exists. Heck, in most jurisdictions you can even legally disassemble the game and remove any form of online activation or similar, if the servers are no longer available
> Who would want to commit to maintaining multiplayer for an ancient game?
This is part of why I believe in making multi-player exceptionally cheap and stable over time. I'm building serverlesss game infrastructure which is super cheap. It's a small tragedy when a multi-player games loses critical mass because the operational and maintenance costs don't out weight the revenue.
I thought about that, at first, but then I realized that I didn't want to setup servers for a single game. The problem with dedicated hosting is that you're still looking at a minimum of $5/mo, and I'm too lazy to spin it up and down.
I'm building a new kind of serverless which requires one to use my language, and it is a completely vertical stack (by myself).
If you let people run their own multiplayer servers, you have no way to stop them from playing with pirated clients. You're not in control of the servers.
Company-provided servers are an expense the company suffers, not something that's cheaper or more convenient than letting the player base operate their own servers. They make the game worse for both the company and the players. Why do you think they're mandatory anyway?
Serverless is never cheaper than running on your own machines once you hit any scale. Just cheaper to start with. They want to hook you in so when you scale you pay them the big bucks.
I'm building my own, and I'm currently using WebSocket. I intend to integrate towards WebTransport at some point, but I need the WebSocket fallback since the world is not too kind to QUIC.
Adobe Creative suite (photoshop.illustrator etc) started this ownership ambiguity back in the CS4 era, the last version you could buy on DVDs. There are an awful lot of people running old mac os's to keep using this version. It does phone home and has some suspicious bugs that may be associated with that so some are paranoid enough to keep their dedicated CS4 computer offline.
This is high cost software that people rely on for business but since that era our phones and macs update all the time in the background, rendering sw we thought we owned non operational and requiring 'upgrade$'.
It's insidious and has created a whole generation who feel 'ownership' is ephemeral and at the whim of the sw creator, while being encouraged to think of products like creative suite as pay as you go, pay to play rental services.
We really need to get some user rights laws back in place around the idea that if you buy something you own it permanently because vehicles are rapidly evolving to be rental software cash cows too.
In the case of Adobe's suite I don't mind because it's priced accordingly and quite clear from the outset to be a rental model. It's a bummer there's no just purchase option, but it's not ambiguous either.
The Ubisoft situation here is different. This wasn't ever positioned as a subscription, it's not sold or priced as one, so it's I think tantamount to theft by Ubisoft. They're stealing from everyone who bought the game.
It used to be retail. For the particular product I use a lot (Audition, audio editing SW), they moved to a rental model without adding any new features in the last 5-6 years. In fact, there are older versions of the software that I keep around because they have features that Adobe took out after they acquired the product from Syntrillium software.
CS4 & CS5 had a complete adobe acrobat and distiller included. That sw today is gutted as a rental product, with various module 'features' you can pay extra for that are effectively identical to the original complete package. I don't think the product has evolved significantly, but the monetization monitoring and charging system certainly has
Retail Adobe was really expensive, easily $1k+, and people would blanche at the cost of upgrading to newer versions, so at least the subscription would help spread that cost out.
Games have never been priced that expensively and so are less compelling even if they are subscription.
there are some options for people like using affinity which you own outright for ~50 bucks or davinci studio which is like 2 or 3 hundred. both very powerful in their own domains... photoshop and premier. there is no alternative for older games. They really should opensource the code for the server to save it for posterity sake.
I feel your sentiment, but Adobe is probably not the best example to use since it is clearly sold as a subscription and the annual subscription service solves a lot of historical issues* while being nearly 27x cheaper than buying the CS master-suite outright. Also Adobe never made moves to kill the apps which you did buy outright (they even still offer some cut back versions of their apps this way).
A better example is Stadia - where you buy the game, can only play it in Stadia and since Google seem likely to pull the plug on it; those games will quite likely become unplayable forever.
I can only partly sympathise with Ubisoft's argument that online services can't go on in perpetuity. Since there are a lot of really reasonable counterpoints:
1. Ubisoft aren't discontinuing online service for remastered editions
2. Is it really unrealistic to keep running such a service, at least until it is no longer played by large numbers of people? Also similar to your line of thinking, it's a shame that Ubisoft can't be compelled to release the server software when they discontinue online play.
3. They are literally still selling a title which will no longer be playable in less than 2 months.
4. DLC for these games wasn't free, and it'll be gone.
People aren't being unreasonable here, they're right to be upset.
* Adobe: Creatives/agencies were almost always on different versions of the software, or simply didn't have all of the apps. Something that hamstrung the industry and made it very difficult to switch agencies. Secondly each app began to reproduce functionality of their sister applications because it wasn't realistic to possess the master suite (e.g. 3D, vectors and video in Photoshop.) Now with the suite available to everyone, the apps are becoming more focussed for their purpose, and developers can spend more time enhancing that core purpose, rather than having to code shoddy me-too functionality.
Photoshop Elements (and I assume Premiere) is still available as a perpetual license. Some MacOS update finally broke my old version but I get Photoshop along with my Lightroom subscription anyway so I've never bought a new version.
Hijacking this rambling on Adobe, to try and get some visibility for this issue:
To substance designer users, Adobe is about to *shut down substance share* with all its shared graphs, materials, textures and tools alongside it, they will not port any of these graphs onto the new monetized platform they made, and newly added tools on that platform will be locked off for learning as they are stored on the innacessible sbar format rather than the open format of sbs
They will shut down substance share on September, so if you want to keep local copies of tools stored there, it is now or never to back it all up
For reference to non-substance users, all of the info above was corroborated after a lot of discussion with adobe's lead product management, they will do it anyway, no matter what, there's nearly a decade worth of collective knowledge in that repo, and yes, they will nuke it anyway because it can't be easily monetized
It also created a new problem. Software being released unpolished without adequate testing in semi beta state because customers will receive updates shortly after that may or may not fix the issues. This is particularly an issue with games (see cyberpunk 2077 story as an example).
I was about to say that it greatly reduced the cost of building the software, at very little inconvenience for end-users, since entire blocks of features don’t need to be built when you can launch quick and observe what customers use the product for.
But in the case of games, it’s like a movie, you can’t go Agile with a movie and release the first two scenes and see what stories customers would like you to develop.
You are making a valid point. I wouldn't mind if for example Adobe included a new experimental denoising algorithm in lightroom and later release an update to fix it but with a video game it's a different story. Games are an experience, and if that experience is riddled with bugs I will never go back to replay those parts when a fix is released.
Yes I think CS5 is a lot harder to keep running due to the Adobe activation 'service'. What I find fascinating is a whole generation of people learnt last century how to use Adobe sw on cracked Photoshop and others, an invaluable trained user base. Adobe have gone right to the other extreme of creating a walled garden with very tight monetization, which must surely result in a rapidly shrinking user base?
I've also heard horror stories of Adobe going after publicly listed companies who have multiple licenses for CS but who have people in offices in other countries who have gone shadow IT and are running unlicensed creative suites, with Adobe insisting they can sue the multinational company for license revenue for every single employee the company has worldwide.
None of this is healthy, whether a game, creative software or a car....
I ended up buying Affinity Designer/Photo, and Procreate on ipad, to replace a huge amount of what I did with adobe software. It’s not perfect but its close enough, and I’d rather do a one time purchase and just have the license instead of the monthly subscription.
I think adobe is pretty happy with the results of their switch to subscriptions, but I personally don’t get enough use out of it to pay monthly. I used CS5 for years and years - I don’t need to have the latest and greatest. Maybe for someone else it is worth it.
That’s a lot of claims you’re making there with regards to people not caring at the time. You should back them up with evidence. It might be challenging to do so considering you’re stating all this stuff as absolutes then claiming it’s market manipulation.
You’re just stating that “no one” complained about other events that are similar then presented that as argument for market manipulation. It’s a complete straw man argument for market manipulation that does not even manage to make a provable case for the straw man part.
Stating things without evidence and saying “you find it out” is clearly in bad faith and can be dismissed as low value. That’s what happened here.
Fwiw i didn’t flag it but clearly others found the comment to be of low value too.
First: I don't like this click bait headline. Ubisoft does not take away the game I bought, Ubisoft deactivates the online feature.
But saying that I totally agree with you that this is a bitch move.
But hey, let's think about "the system" here:
The internet and digital products changed some basic capitalistic processes: If you bought a conventional good, a chair or shoes, you were never able to just copy them. You have this one unit.
If you bought some piece of software, you could easily duplicate it and give it away. That is this great pain point that "the industry" is facing since the internet emerges (it's not the internet, I know, I'm just simplifying things here).
Now "the industry" tries to find a way out of this dilemma - and that is totally fair. The concept of "buying" a piece of software, a product, does not fit to the conventional concept of buying goods. A shoe is a shoe. You used it and at some point you throw it away. A software needs to be maintained. Someone needs to maintain it. It's just not comparable to a physical good and therefore the buying process cannot be applied.
Sure, Ubisoft could help the customer to get over it: Offer a server that you host for your own. I'm pretty sure: At some point in the future they will.
I don't like the concept of paying a monthly fee to use a software. Like probably most of us. But keep in mind: You cannot compare a piece of source code to a pair of shoes. So eventually we have to accept different business models like that.
For many of the titles, purchased DLC will no longer work. Presumably because the game asks the server if the DLC has been purchased and the server will no longer be there to reply.
So yes, people will be able to play the base games but will no longer be able to play the additional content they purchased.
> Presumably because the game asks the server if the DLC has been purchased and the server will no longer be there to reply.
Seems very easy to patch out. They should release one final patch that downloads all DLC for everyone and removes the server check. That'd take a lot of the sting out of losing multiplayer and be a nice way of saying "thanks for supporting us and playing our games after all this time" instead of saying "fuck you for supporting us, now buy the remaster and pay us for it all again suckers!"
The headline seems click-baity, and strictly speaking it's wrong - they're taking away one (online-only) game, the others are losing online features. Ubisoft pulling online support for multiple games would have been a more adequate title.
The actual headline of the article is "Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC", so the problem is the HN title not matching the article, which should be fixed.
> It's worth remembering that every live service game will one day stop getting official support and eventually shut down
Obviously yes, and it was as obvious when those games were launched and sold.
> This mass decommissioning also demonstrates the preservation issues inherent to walled garden online services
Many game companies are not aspiring to build some everlasting cultural artifacts, but to provide entertainment today. Preservation is not some intrinsic moral obligation
> Obviously yes, and it was as obvious when those games were launched and sold.
It was obvious that they'd become a pile of junk bits in less than a decade?
> Many game companies are not aspiring to build some everlasting cultural artifacts, but to provide entertainment today. Preservation is not some intrinsic moral obligation
Okay? That might apply if they were simply, say, no longer selling the product (although at that point there's no reason for them to retain their copyright and other parties should be free to rip, crack, distribute, etc). But that's not the case here. They're taking something which users may have already preserved and saying you can't fully use it anymore.
The issue isn't just that the publishers don't preserve the games themselves. The issue is that they go out of their way to do things to make it harder/impossible for anyone else to do so either.
As much as I don't like a company taking something away that you paid for, where is the line when it comes to online games? Most of the games on that list are from 2009-2013 which makes them all 9-12 years old at this point. At what point can you say the company has done enough, because keeping the servers running indefinitely is clearly unsustainable.
It’s fine if they don’t want to support a 12 year old game, but then they should release one last update that removes all DRM and lets anyone who is willing to host the multiplayer infrastructure.
Or they should be required to tell you when you purchase it at what date multiplayer function will become unavailable so you can make an informed purchase decision. Perhaps they can give disclose a minimum service period and offer full refunds if they shut down before that date.
The line is "whenever they're old enough that the publisher doesn't see any commercial disadvantage to releasing an update that removes all DRM, unlocks all DLC, and allows multiplayer without a centralized server".
A game does not exist in a vacuum. There is always going to be a commercial disadvantage to releasing anything, since that would divert attention from other, newer, more expensive games which the publisher would much rather that everyone bought instead of playing old games.
There's a commercial disadvantage to car owners continuing to drive 10 year old vehicles instead of purchasing new ones. Doesn't mean Ford (or Tesla, more likely) should be allowed to remotely brick sedans.
> Doesn't mean Ford (or Tesla, more likely) should be allowed to remotely brick sedans.
I agree – I was not arguing that anyone should be allowed to do that. It’s just obvious why they would do this, if it was allowed. And Ubisoft is allowed to do this, so they do it.
I once read an article making the point that copyright is "[economic] protectionism against the past" - its purpose isn't really to accomplish anything in the present or future, but to prevent current producers of intellectual property from having to compete with the intellectual property produced by the past. When you read Pride and Prejudice instead of something "more appropriate" to the modern day, that's money taken out of the pocket of a book publisher today.
You've rediscovered that concept as applied to video games.
If you never want to let your game that people already bought and paid for work without your central server being up, then I do think you should have to keep it up literally forever.
Revamping multiplayer to be entirely P2P seems a bit excessive if there's no commercial advantage left.
I would be satisfied with releasing the server as freeware (or open-source!) and adding a feature to set the multiplayer server by domain or IP address.
It would be kind of cool if the big engine developers would include a "switch to P2P mode" in at least their built-in multiplayer engines. Wouldn't help in this case, but would be nice going forward. Then at least we could say "well there isn't much commercial advantage but why not be nice? It isn't difficult."
I do wonder if Ubisoft would gain some commercial advantage from being known a company that isn't just waiting to rip off their customers. Hard to speculate as most of their games look pretty mediocre in the first place, IMO.
I'm fine with losing some functionality. Let's say community leader boards. Ofc, a nice thing would be then to provide API description and configuration options and allow fans to implement their own.
1) They're literally still selling the game that will be completely turned off today for $20. They've been selling each and every one of these games far more recently than 9 years ago.
2) Really? 9-12 years is too long for you? I can still play the entire version of virtually every single game I bought prior to 2010. (Okay, that's a lie, I've lost a lot of the discs and keys. But if I hadn't I could.)
Then release a container image of your last working server software so that anyone can host it privately. And release a patch to the games to allow pointing at a private server.