Part of me is sad because some of my favorite games might get shitcanned as a result, but it’s a loss I’m willing to accept if it kills such a parasitic company.
Nah, the IP will be sold off and someone else will take over your favourite tower climbers.
I’ll be sad if For Honor stops being supported
Ubisoft needs to get comfortoble with not owning their company
Please die, please die, please die, please die
I know people working there, in towns where little other opportunities for such jobs exist. I… really don’t fancy the prospect of Ubisoft going bankrupt.
I know people who work there that used to steal my parking spot with their baby Blue Ford Mustang, on a residential street two blocks from the Ubisoft building. They can all go away.
Don’t you mean… AAAA company?
Yeah but… You do get that you don’t own any of your games on Steam, Epic, whatever either?
Just GOG is DRM free.steam can be DRM free as well but it depends on the game to use or not the Steam API for license…
Id just like to point out when you read the full article the context is different than the headline as usual. But regardless Ubisoft deserves their demise.
itch.io as well
You’re not wrong, but Ubisoft were absolutely tone deaf for saying that.
I stopped buying games that require online login. It’s a real pain in the ass when I’m traveling and offline. I stopped buying anything from Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar. They made their choice, so I did too.
I hate that Halo:MCC requires my like, 28 digit Microsoft password AND 2FA to play a game from 2007. It should allow you to bypass login and just play as your steam account.
Every time I want to play it, it asks for that, and I just quit and play something that is far less of a hassle, particularly offline.
Hey I have a real easy solution to that.
I’m perma banned because I had the gall to play modded MCC from the steam workshop on the day it released, before the moderation team knew modding was legal. I can’t even log into Halo waypoint to get help from the Halo team.
I now can’t play any Microsoft game, own an Xbox, or use game pass and I refuse to make a new account on principle.
This bugs the hell out of me too. I don’t think I’ve even started it yet for this very reason.
kinda unrelated but I’d love it if valve sold physical copies of their games to use with the successor to the steam deck
Maybe they should come as some sturdy USB stick that you just plug in the back and start playing.
Ubisoft just needs to get comfortable with no longer owning their games. 😈
Literally all they had to do was make good games
Hey, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was great!
Sadly, that’s not necessarily true: https://youtube.com/shorts/IHZru-6M8BY
I mean, it’s not true inside a bubble. I’m sure there’s some incredible games that have been made by one person that didn’t find the kind of success that Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Super MeatBoy, etc did. But at a giant corporation like Ubisoft, they’re not on their own! They have marketing people, interns, studios and sub-studios, finance people, trend analysis, etc.
Ubisoft has some great IPs. But all of their best games came out over 20 years ago! So yes, quality is not the only thing, but it definitely matters.
Not sure what you mean. They needed more NFTs and AI from what I can tell! /s
Honestly though whenever I hear big companies like this fail, it keeps making me go back to the Steve Jobs interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
How have I never seen that interview!? Thanks, great stuff…
Yeah the full interview is a real treat (in my opinion)
Steve Jobs The Lost Interview: https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4
I’m not gonna defend Steve Jobs as a person at all but there’s some real insightful stuff in the interview. Even just from a historical perspective.
It’s funny it happened to Apple too
Exactly what is happening at Intel right now. History repeats itself.
Get rid of uplay. I might buy ubisoft games if they weren’t tied to that horrible service
Not just Uplay, but also their activation servers. Their games make calls to their endpoints to authenticate if you own/access the game and DLC. If those activation servers are decommissioned without a replacement, your game won’t activate and you’ll lose access to DLC.
They announced they would do this for legacy games several years ago, and I was going to lose access to all the DLC I paid for with my Splinter Cell Blacklist game that I physically owned on a Wii U disc way back in 2013. Bought all the DLC because I loved the game. After enough gamer backlash, Ubisoft backpedaled and the activation servers remain for now. However, the concern is still there that I’ll lose the stuff I paid for when they decide they can’t serve it anymore or if they go bankrupt. Without them updating the game code or open sourcing it, I lose updates, DLC, etc.
We need digital ownership reform, or else it’s piracy time again. This will especially be critical when Gabe steps down from Steam and new owners are appointed, or if Steam goes public.
The US is kind of a lost cause, but there is an effort out there!
My god I dread that day.
That’s awful, sorry. Sadly, until we globally overhaul the laws regarding DRM, or consumer backlash threatens to destroy the industry (like with music piracy), this kind of garbage will continue to happen.
they MBA’d themselves into extinction
edit; everyone with an mba is only qualified to be a farm laborer
Management will destroy this world.
There’s a world where management is treated as an important but not godly position. Where they are schedulers and arbitrators of conflict, and where they aren’t free from consequences because they’re already at the top. And holy hell it’s also not the place where the position is used to promote someone out of where they’re useful simply because paying a labourer more than a manager is seen as unthinkable. It ain’t this one, but I like to think about it sometimes.
Under New Management :)
Farm labor is complicated and specialized.
Yeah then they’d get to suffer being the incompetent bumbling idiot that does the back breaking stuff. MBA appropraite.
And fucking physically hard
Every single MBA holder I have met has been a completely shit human being. Without exception.
They’re qualified to be pig feed.
Well said
Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.
They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.
I don’t think i even play Ubisoft games, they can go down for all i care.
Maybe they should just have fewer avocado toasts for a while?
I’ve hated what ubisoft has done to gaming ever since the fc3. Only shining beacons were early siege and rayman games. They have incredible artists and programmers working at it and could make some great games but the directors completely double down on the most generic, most mindeless wide appeal possible. I regret buying wildlands because the setting is unique. The game is as tactical as far cry which is just mindleslly run into camp, use your overpowered character against deaf and dumb enemies and complete the collectable.
I remember “Far Cry Blood Dragon” as the only entry that really stood out. The gameplay was exactly what you described but dialed to 11 (as it should be).
FC 3-6 … same game, identical mechanics, less over the top fun more boring and repetitive tasks. Somewhere at Ubisoft there is someone who is responsible for this, including all the consequences.
FC3 was a game changer. It was absolutely wild in its time. It’s just a shame that all of its successors went the same road… I stopper playing midgame FarCry V because it was… bad. The scenario was shit. The gameplay was shit. The map was huge but lacked substance.
Not for me since i had already played better open world games. Games like stalker which had amazing a life and animals that were programmed to act like real ones rather than spawning a tiger and an antelope 20m infront of you and setting one hostile to other, fc2 which was flawed but the ai interactions were mind blowing like sniping out a guys leg and watching allies drag him to cover, arma, crysis etc. all were better but fc3 was casual, accessable and marketed.
Blood dragon was amazing. I probably should give it a go again
I’m a very casual gamer. Where can I find out what Ubisoft is doing to get them so much hate?
It is difficult to know where to start, since there have been a lot of unpopular actions. A lot of these are pretty standard for the triple A studios unfortunately. Think DRM with always online and authentication server issues, toxic workplace, decommissioned games by removing the servers for them and not giving ways for people to self host, rehashing existing properties to milk success, having their own launcher so having double layers of authentication, microtransactions, subscription based model pushing, game variants locking out certain content unless more money is payed etc.
and I was mad when I couldn’t local host StarCraft anymore.
I really try to avoid recreation companies with human right ‘challenges ’ like abusive working environments.
So is Ubisoft worse than most others ? Do they do that junk on console games as well? Like if I got an Ubisoft game for switch would I need a non-Nintendo account?
Based on the words of internet strangers I will not purchase their games. Sounds like way to much to go though just to play a game. Do people really go though all of that to game?
It sounds like way too much effort
Ubisoft games on game pass require ubisoft logins. Not sure about switch. Steam versions usually require it too.
At this point I think its smart for most people to just pirate ubisoft stuff if they really want to play it.
decommissioned games by removing the servers for them
The pirated version usually works.
A year ago Ubisoft exec gave an interview where he said that the next leap in gaming industry should be fueled by gaming subscriptions, and that gamers should get comfortable playing by subscription as opposed to buying and owning game licenses.
He then proceeded to give an example on how players got comfortable switching from physical media and full ownership to digital licenses.
This caused a massive player backlash on the wave of protests against the migration from ownership to subscriptions (aka “You’ll own nothing and be happy”). Ubisoft has got a financial dent as sales and subscriptions dropped, and is now facing a problematic financial future.
Thanks. Is that like how steam or console games need to connect to a server to validate a game before you play, so when the server stops so does your game or is this worse than that? Can’t say that idea appeals to me either.
Anything else ? or was that enough
That’s what happens with DRM and digital licensing, which was considered by the exec to have most players already onboard.
Here, he was talking about gaming subscriptions, i.e. paying a monthly fee to have access to a library of games. Once you stop paying, games become unavailable, and games outside the subscription are not available either. His idea is to make more gamers are more comfortable with the subscription model despite it taking away any possibility to play when you stop paying.
Steam doesn’t do that. Some games on Steam do, but it’s the games deciding to do that, not Steam.
There are many games on Steam that are DRM free and can be played offline and without Steam running or being installed at all.
