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Comment on Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games

tias@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

For most games, I’m fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher’s discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin’s Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.

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luciole@beehaw.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m with you. It’s hip to hate on Ubisoft, but I’m of the impression that subscription based gaming has already gained traction with Game Pass. The article is spot on though when the author remarks that Ubisoft offering their library at 18$ a month is a hard bargain. Especially considering Game Pass is currently at 10$ a month… and includes Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Origins & Odyssey.

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thejml@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For this to work it would have to be like, hourly or minutely billing. This takes care of the multiple games issue as you’ll likely never play more than one at a time and don’t pay for the time you don’t play it that month. You can try a game for a few days or a week and stop playing and also stop paying. You can try some indie games because you’d only be spending $0.05/hr or something.

Or you just have to include a whole library of games like Game Pass or access to all of Steam or something which would allow you to hop games yet not own them.

I’d still want to be able buy games I intend on playing for years (like Skyrim or Civ or City Skylines). So maybe a “rent to own” scheme would be cool.

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- lolcatnip@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I wish rent-to-own was a more common model. Unfortunately the only examples I know of in real life involve customers paying several times the retail cost of the items they rent before they actually own them.
  
  What I’d really like to see is a system that keeps rental and purchase prices roughly where they are, except that once you’ve paid rental fees equal to the purchase price, it counts as a purchase. That would relieve me of having to guess whether I’ll be using something enough to buy it, and I doubt it would hurt seller’s profits.
  
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  - Kiloee@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    For digital goods you would be right about sellers profits (to a degree, discarding the minuscule amount of interest the money of your purchase could accrue), for physical the use does degrade the worth faster so the seller would loose out.
    
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ramble81@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
So you’ve had the game for 3 years and you’ve now payed more than the retail price. Are you going to keep paying for it, or do you expect it to be “yours”. Also, as with most things digital, let’s say you invest a hundred hours, almost get to the end and…. They decide to yank the game from their service. No ending for you. Thoughts on that? Both are very real scenarios by “renting” the game.

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- TwilightVulpine@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  To be fair nobody plays just one single game for 3 years. Economically speaking it is more affordable to pay the subscription than to buy it. That said there are no guarantees they won't raise prices. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually decide to include ads and add limits eventually. There's not even an expectation of control by the users.
  
  But we have seen enough of how streaming libraries change and split. Losing access to your favorite game is an almost inevitable eventuality.
  
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  - Remmock@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Skyrim, Fallout 4, RDR2, Witcher 3, The Sims, Dark Souls, Civilization, Borderlands 1/2, Stardew Valley, Persona…
    
    Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean there aren’t people that come back again and again between games to dust off an old favorite. While I personally never touched Fallout 4 again after beating it, I’ll break out my XBox 360 and give New Vegas a whirl to see what character concept I’ll try this time.
    
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    TwilightVulpine@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You are confusing my argument. You listed me 10+ games. If you paid $2/mo for 3 years and got to own a game for it, that would be enough for a couple of them at most. I'm not saying old games are not worth playing. I'm saying that if you had to pick between buying all the games you like or paying for a subscription, most likely the subscription would be more affordable.
    
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  - TigrisMorte@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Got numerous friends that prove you wrong.
    
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  - MagicShel@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I play single game for years with a bit of other games mixed in. I played Diablo 1, 2 and 3, World of Warcraft (already a sub, of course), Minecraft, and Skyrim for many years each. You could maybe put Team Fortress 2 in there by I didn’t continue going back to that well nearly as long as the others - I hate lootbox shit and I miss the days when skill and strategy was the only difference between players. I would totally play TF2 vanilla, though.
    
    I’m sure I will continue to play Diablo 3 (4 does nothing for me) and Skyrim for years to come. So we do exist, however we are probably an unknown and unserved group since we don’t tend to pour a bunch of money and time into new games. I do have 800 hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m going to regret having that on console instead of Steam, I’m sure. Probably wind up buying that one twice.
    
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  - Telorand@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’ll lose access to games by virtue of lack of support. Systems will change, libraries and dependencies will fall out of sync with requirements, and “the games you love” will be forgotten by devs (though not in all cases).
    
    I used to play a really fun game on MacOS (pre-X) called Glider Pro. There was no easy way to play it, since you’d have to emulate a MacOS 9 system. Only recently did the original devs upload the files to GitHub and open the source. Some smart people then forked the repo and made it playable on various systems.
    
    And that’s just one game. Lots more are now lost to time, and yet we’ve all collectively been able to continue gaming.
    
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    TwilightVulpine@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This sort of argument is just a way to cope with the erosion of customer rights and the overreach of corporations over digital media as if that's some inevitable entropy of the universe type of thing. We still have books that are thousands of years old, but even though we have better technological means to store and reproduce media than ever, arbitrary legal hurdles are leading people to treat cultural loss as an inevitability.
    
    You got your answer in your own response. Emulators are a thing. Virtual Machines are a thing. Proton is a thing. We figured out how to recover games going as far back as the Atari. Unless actively and fiercely obstructed people will figure out how to keep these things available out of sheer passion and goodwill.
    
    A DRM-free installer/executable for a game, when properly backed up, will still be playable most likely indefinitely.
    
    Unfortunately, as the mention of DRM itself indicates, obstructions are plentiful and ever increasing. This is why supporting DRM-free media and open platforms is valuable. Can you imagine what people could do if they were empowered instead of obstructed?
    
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- tias@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I’m okay with renting, and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won’t ever own the game). I’m also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.
  
  What I’m not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it’s only licensed to you and the license can be withdrawn at any time. It’s all the disadvantages describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that’s what I had in mind with my comment: I’d be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest and fair terms of service, instead of the bullshit they’re pulling right now.
  
  If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn’t need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.
  
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ConstableJelly@beehaw.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve said before that being a PS Plus subscriber has changed the types of games I play by making indie games more accessible to try, with low stakes. Prior, I usually reserved my funds for what I assumed was the biggest bang with AAA titles.

There’s value there with having a library of games to just try out. That being said, the trajectory of subscription services generally and “digital ownership” (see Playstation’s recent Discovery kerfuffle) is really concerning.

I think Ubisoft’s mindset here is on the wrong track (surprise…). Luckily, as others have said, there’s not a lot of temptation here for Ubisoft’s modern library (Prince of Persia being an admitted exception).

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