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.
lol ubisoft publishes a good game once in a blue moon and when they do they disband the team that does it. seriously these motherfuckers need to be jailed.
It’s all a distraction from the truth that you already don’t own games.
GOG is a slight argument against that
It depends on your definition of ownership. If having perpetual access to a product is enough then yes. But we aren’t allowed to, say, disassemble a game and use it’s assets to make something of our own. As opposed to say a spoon. Nobody can tell me how I can and can’t use my spoon.
It’s not realistic to demand to own games in the same way as a spoon any time soon. It is, however, pretty reasonable to demand you own games like you’d own a book. You can chop up a book and use it to make a paper maché dog, but you can’t chop up the words within to make a new derivative book (or just copy them as its to get another copy of the same book except for a single backup that you’re not allowed to transfer to someone else unless you also give them the original). The important things you can do with a book but not a game under the current system, even with Gog, are things like selling it on or giving it away when you’re done with it and lending it out like a library.
About a hundred years ago, book publishers tried using licence agreements in books to restrict them in similar ways to how games and other software are restricted today, but courts decided that was completely unreasonable, and put a stop to it. In the US, that’s called the First Sale Doctrine, but it has other names elsewhere or didn’t even need naming. All the arguments that applied to books apply equally well to software, so consumers should demand the same rights.
Oh yeah, I understand. I was just trying to describe the difference between ownership and a perpetual license in overly simplified terms. Also, can you think of any examples of digital goods that retain first sale doctrine? With physical disks at least a second hand market still exists for that very reason, but I can’t think of any digital media that allow resale. I would love to be wrong!
You can make mods for many games and many people do.
Yes, but you can’t use their assets to make other games or products.
You can add whatever you want to Skyrim, but you can’t add Skrim to whatever you like.
You can. If your project gets big enough, they’ll take legal action. But you can definitely get away with fan projects.
Also with physical objects, you can’t legally do whatever you want either. There’s nothing physically stopping you from taking a piece of wood and carving it into any shape you like. But if you make a big enough project out of it, you may eventually run into legal issues. It could be related to IP like patents, trademarks, or copyright, or it could be something like safety.
It’s ok to make a hamburger for your friends at a cookout, but if you start selling your burgers or distributing them in mass, your government may expect you to follow food safety laws, and you can’t market your burgers as “McDonalds”.
I know you didn’t ask, but may I volunteer a car engine instead of a spoon. There’s still IP involved in a car engine, but nobody is going to tell me I cant put my VW engine in Honda and sell it.
Yeah that’s more comparable. I was mostly just trying to state the difference between ownership and a perpetual license but I’m thinking I oversimplified lol.
Except Battle for Wesnoth and Pingus.
Maybe OpenRCT and Osu! a little further down the line.
My favorite thing is Ubisoft blaming something and then gaming companies going, “Uh no? That’s just you.”
That’s every publisher’s wet dream. AI’s almost ready, right?
god I wanna see them fail so badly.
This is to bad, I really enjoyed this game one of the better platformers to come out in a long time.
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
Let me guess, Windows also not a monopoly, because Linux exist, and it’s just a loud minority that doesn’t like their data monitored by third parties for “ad” purposes.
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.
Let Joy have the console for a while, Anxiety.
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?
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.
Plenty of people sell accounts with a specific game activated on it.
And baldur’s gate 3 is one such game, it only runs the steam service (which includes a check that you actually can play the game either through ownership or family sharing) when steam is actually running so you can join multiplayer properly.
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.
Mostly yes, especially if you’re a big AAA publisher, so your game won’t get buried under cheap shovelware and the latest AAA slop. Also don’t forget that Steam barely does any moderation, especially once you become a power user, so hate groups will buy your game, leave a negative review, then refund it, because a YouTuber named Prof. Chud called it anti-white and anti-male…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I’m really glad I didn’t get on that track even though it had been a childhood dream
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
As a huge KCD fan (donated to the Kickstarter!) I have very, very low hopes for KCD2.
It will have Denuvo. Warhorse is awesome, but they are already not great at optimization. KCD on launch was rough. Amazing, fun, but rough.
Adding Denuvo is just asking for exceptionally poor performance.
Ah that’s disappointing to hear. And also probably extends my point that now warhorse has grown, and their execs are making bad calls that I’m sure the devs would choose not to make
The studios owned by the devs almost uniformly don’t put out complete gacha cash grab bullshit
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.
Seems they already did. KCD2 will have Denuvo.
Let’s put CPU heavy malware on an already CPU taxing game from a dev team known for not having the best optimization. Wcgw?
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.
Yeah, this is classic class warfare and the trajectory of these things has been moving away from developers having any say for a long time, the difference now is that business majors have finally found a killer app to convince society it is ok to destroy software development as a decent career… it is called AI and it doesn’t actually matter if it works or not, the point is to convince people it is only natural and right to treat software devs like worthless commodified contract labor that is just around the corner from being entirely obsolete.
I find it darkly hilarious how confident so many people who work in the software industry are that they aren’t about to have their future crushed by the rich. Again it really doesn’t matter if AI lives up to the hype at all, if AI fails to deliver and a market crash happens all the better since society will readily accept that as proof there needed to be a market correction on out of control labor costs for development, consolidation will occur and the labor of software development will be indefinitely and likely permanently devalued.
This should be clear as day to programmers but people who program for a living tend to think understanding programming is a shortcut to understanding everything and it leads to hilariously naive views from otherwise apparently very intelligent people.
Make no mistake this is the beginning of an awful era for game developers and software development.
