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.
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!