Larian director of publishing Michael Douse, never one to be shy about speaking his mind, has spoken his mind about Ubisoft’s decision to disband the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown development team, saying it’s the result of a “broken strategy” that prioritizes subscriptions over sales.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer’s Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it “a slow burn to a fault” in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on “other projects that will benefit from their expertise.”
This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft’s focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole “feeling comfortable with not owning your game” thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.
My favorite thing is Ubisoft blaming something and then gaming companies going, “Uh no? That’s just you.”
Can I actually own BG3 or is it only available as a license as well?
You can. There are physical , drm free, releases and drm free releases on gog :p No online required either. So yes, you can :)
All consumer software is only available as a license. That is how the law is written, if you hate that fact you need to lobby for changing the law.
Point me to the EU law which clearly states this, please.
EU is similarly confused about first sale doctrine as the US is. Steam was ordered to allow games reselling by a French court but eventually got it reversed on appeal, for example. https://www.bfmtv.com/amp/tech/gaming/la-justice-se-prononce-contre-le-droit-de-revendre-ses-jeux-video-dematerialises_AN-202210240308.html
This is despite the first sale doctrine being established as part of digital media in the EU with https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=A87D18058F3F93DB5719943E51D3B25F?text=&docid=121981&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=6657274
First sale doctrine applies to some software and not to others(often having to do with possessing physical media). Their general argument that it doesn’t is when they say it’s a “license” but that license gets superseded by the first sale doctrine where applicable. It’s a general shit show.
Edit: an example of the shit show nature of this: “Can you modify a copyrighted work you were sold and then resell it without the copyright owner’s permission?” The courts are split on this with one saying yes and another saying no. And mind you that’s just pasting pictures onto things with no EULA involved. What happens if you modify a physical representation of software and resell it? Who knows.
You can get it through gog where it’s DRM free. So I would say, yes you can
Yeah but is that technically purchasing the game, or just a license? Not that they have any means of enforcement if it’s DRM-free but you still might not technically own it.
Practically, outside of second-hand sales, there’s no difference between e.g. GOGs offline installer and a physical copy of the game. No, you don’t technically own it, but for all intents and purposes you do.
Legally it’s still a licence.
Nice, thanks.
Even the Stream version doesn’t require Steam. You can just run the executable. A few folks over on Reddit claim they’ve given the game to their friends just by copying the files from an external drive.
The multiplayer also works no problem without Steam. I own the game on Steam and I did a playthrough with friends who torrented it. They just had to keep the patches up to date manually.
Love how that worked but me and my friends had version issues even though all 3 of us own the game on steam
That’s very decent of them wow.
I mean given the massive industry layoffs over the past few years developers are already pretty used to not having jobs.
I hate how developers are the ones attributed to game industry problems. Decisions like this almost never fall on the developers shoulders, specifically the ownership quote was from their subscription service director. You know… the guy whose job depends on you not wanting to own games.
In the past decade, game companies have been releasing devs after a game is finished. I have a few friends in the gaming industry, and it’s brutal as a software engineer.
Agreed, I’m always saddened by quotes like “well the devs should have” when it’s almost certainly “the execs should have.” Unless a studio is owned by its devs, or they make up some of its leadership, which are few and far between, the devs don’t have the say on the shitty things that happen to the product they’re working on, and often when the devs have more say you end up with like Kingdom Come Deliverance from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhorse_Studios. One of my favorite games, was supported by the studio for long after it came out, and now they’re working on a promising sequel
Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.
But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.
Worst part is, they got acquired the year after release, so even if KC:D 2 is good, their games in the more distant future are bound to be enshittified.
Even worse that acquisition links back to the Embracer Group. Hopefully KC:D 2 makes it out the door before Embracer full fucks up Warhorse.
Gamers be like “We don’t mind not owning our games as long as we don’t own them through the monopoly that we like, ok?”
You don’t know the definition of monopoly then
Yes I do and yes one platform is in a monopolistic position and people keep defending them.
Ya I trust Steam more than Ubisoft. I feel like that’s pretty reasonable?
Sure that’s reasonable at the moment. And while it seems Gaben would never sell out, he is going to die at some point. What’s going to happen to steam / valve after that?
Lets fight the battles we’ve got, man.
The inner-circle at Valve might be tighter than we assume. The next three or four in line might be just as aligned with Gabe. There’s a chance they aren’t, but Gabe made it this far with the people he’s working with, I’d say he probably picks people he trusts.
I hope you’re right. I’m future proofing anyway by preferring DRM-free stores when possible.
I wouldn’t know. We’d probably have to re-evaluate the situation when it comes to that.
Just pointing out the hypocrisy
Do you really find no difference in buying games (or the license to play them) and subscription services?
If you’re talking about Steam, while it provides its own DRM system, games can be published on there without any DRM whatsoever, so you can do whatever you want with the downloaded files and then play the game without Steam.
Oh so you can resell your used copy?
Plenty of people sell accounts with a specific game activated on it.
I guess you could sell a literal copy, yeah. But ironically, the lack of DRM binding that copy to an account by a user makes a “proof of original ownership” harder, if that’s what you want.
That’s not how it works with digital goods, but that’s a limitation of digital goods really.
It is really both, the law tries way too hard to pretend digital data is goods that can be thought of in individual instances like physical goods can. That is how misconceptions like “owning” or “reselling” are put into people’s heads in the first place.
Valve has a good track record, and you’ve never owned a game in your life. They’ve always been a license, with few exceptions. Even physical media.
The difference being that I can resell a physical media, even at a profit if there’s enough demand for it, and to most people that’s the definition of ownership.
Defining ownership as “can I sell this” is ridiculous
If you can’t dispose of it by selling it to someone else, your don’t own it. Notice how even DRM free games are just the purchase of a license and the distributor can revoke your right to use that license? Yeah, do you don’t own DRM free games either.
If that’s the definition of ownership we’re going with, does the fact that I can sell my steam account mean I do actually own every game on it regardless of DRM? Also, does a lack of a demand for a game degrade your ownership?
You can’t though (not by following the terms you agreed to) and Valve can ban you or remove your right to use the license you paid for whenever they want.
Indeed but being able to dispose of something by selling it does not automatically means you owned it
Unless you’re acting as a proxy for the owner, yes it does.
If you buy something out of some guy’s trunk in a parking lot, it does not mean that guy owned it before selling it to you.
