dr_st wrote on 2024-04-16, 11:30:

I am as big an opponent of online DRM as anyone - I only buy my digital games from GOG - but The Crew is a rather poor example, almost clickbait-grade in my opinion.

Let's see. An online-only game, with no single-player content at all (per my understanding), which was from the day of its release tied to the servers of the publisher. What exactly did you expect?

End-of-life was never mentioned by Ubisoft anywhere. That's the point. Game rentals are being sold as full purchases.

Munx wrote on 2024-05-01, 07:45:

End-of-life was never mentioned by Ubisoft anywhere. That's the point. Game rentals are being sold as full purchases.

You should read the details of what you buy, and apply common sense as well. When you are buying a game that is strictly online only, it is quite naïve to expect that your grandkids will still be able to play it.

Those details are always unclear and locked behind a ToS screen that someone can only agree to AFTER purchase or outright never mentioned, like this game being shut down and licenses removed. My grand-kids SHOULD be able to play it. If I dont own the game, then the store page should say RENT and not BUY or at the very least refund me.

If the publisher plans to shut a service down at some point, THE DATE SHOULD BE MADE CLEAR.

Its also very unrealistic to assume that the average buyer will be knowledgeable enough to understand online DRM.

Good luck with that attitude in life, and that's the last I'm going to say on this matter.

I will never understand arguing for less ownership. I fear for the future, attitudes like this spill over into other avenues too.

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-05-01, 14:37:

I will never understand arguing for less ownership. I fear for the future, attitudes like this spill over into other avenues too.

Ownership infers maintenance costs taxes storage fees. It's like paying a yearly tax to live in your house

twiz11 wrote on 2024-05-01, 14:39:

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-05-01, 14:37:

I will never understand arguing for less ownership. I fear for the future, attitudes like this spill over into other avenues too.

Ownership infers maintenance costs taxes storage fees. It's like paying a yearly tax to live in your house

Ownership infers my responsibility to maintain what I own however I want, everything else implies co-ownership, or worse outright extorsion. I don't want to get too far off topic here, sorry, I'll try to have this be the last thing I say towards this.

The legal stuff is fascinating, I think.
In my country, there's a small but important difference between possessor and owner.
Long story short, the possessor is in possession of something, whereas the owner has a legal demand about something.
Does this exist in English speaking countries, too?

Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-01, 15:17:

The legal stuff is fascinating, I think. In my country, there's a small but important difference between possessor and owner. Lo […]
Show full quote

The legal stuff is fascinating, I think.
In my country, there's a small but important difference between possessor and owner.
Long story short, the possessor is in possession of something, whereas the owner has a legal demand about something.
Does this exist in English speaking countries, too?

I mean in the US there are current issues with determining who has ownership of something , but being a possessor is only about determining the proper owner. I'm speaking about current squatting issues with home ownership. If you have a loan you are considered a co-owner with the financial institution that loaned you the money, not a "possessor". However when it comes to video games or software licensing these issues about safety or liability don't matter, these requirements in other areas of ownership dont apply.

twiz11 wrote on 2024-05-01, 14:39:

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-05-01, 14:37:

I will never understand arguing for less ownership. I fear for the future, attitudes like this spill over into other avenues too.

Ownership infers maintenance costs taxes storage fees. It's like paying a yearly tax to live in your house

to stay with the house example: you will pay that anyway. rent a house for a year and your rental includes all the other costs. rent it for a day and those costs are included. the difference is that you have no right to sell and you will be bound by whatever agreement you have signed. as added 'bonus' you will be disinclined to improve the house, its just making someone's else's property better, so it will never really be "home" in quite the same way. Sometimes the flexibility of renting works for people, its not all negative.

but anyway - none of that translates that well onto games - because games are temporary experiences, relatively cheap and of little consequence in comparison. Even so renting a game reinforces that you cannot exercise any owner-like control over the game. if that doesn't bother you then its fine, if it does then don't play it. i cannot see any other options to be honest, and i know most people - especially those encultured with the idea of not owning things - will just go along with it.

Continuing with the house example....
When you rent, you NEVER STOP PAYING. You could live there for 30 years, and then you retire, can't make the payments anymore, well, you are out on the street. Those 30 years count for nothing
You could pay Netflix for 30 years...and the price is up to $400 a month and you say screw it, you have NOTHING
Companies are pushing all this because they MAKE MORE MONEY THAT WAY, plain and simple.
Same with houses, same with netflix, same with games, same with software

ncmark wrote on 2024-05-01, 20:06:

Continuing with the house example.... When you rent, you NEVER STOP PAYING. You could live there for 30 years, and then you reti […]
Show full quote

Continuing with the house example....
When you rent, you NEVER STOP PAYING. You could live there for 30 years, and then you retire, can't make the payments anymore, well, you are out on the street. Those 30 years count for nothing
You could pay Netflix for 30 years...and the price is up to $400 a month and you say screw it, you have NOTHING
Companies are pushing all this because they MAKE MORE MONEY THAT WAY, plain and simple.
Same with houses, same with netflix, same with games, same with software

Netflix seems like a weird comparison here. A service can offer value apart from having a physical collection in the end. It's value is that the consumer has a convenient library of movies that they have access to. I similarly wouldn't criticize people who go to movie theaters for not ending up with a movie collection either. For both of these examples, the value is in the journey, not the end.

While I believe that the costs to enter the housing market are ridiculous and need to go down, renting has some benefits. For example, if you are going to work somewhere for a couple of years, it would make sense to rent instead of buy a house just to sell it right away.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-05-01, 21:55:

It's value is that the consumer has a convenient library of movies that they have access to.

I can do it myself. I'd love to be able to buy movies digitally DRM-free to load it onto my self-made NAS and stream it for myself through Jellyfin.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-05-01, 21:55:

While I believe that the costs to enter the housing market are ridiculous and need to go down, renting has some benefits. For example, if you are going to work somewhere for a couple of years, it would make sense to rent instead of buy a house just to sell it right away.

If I were to rent my place my rent would be double than my mortgage payment and since I bought real estate prices went up 40%. If I had to move, I have the freedom to get a tenant or sell for a profit and use that as down payment for my next home. Maybe it's not as flexible when moving, especially if you have to move often, but on the other side, owning real estate is a money hack.

dr_st wrote on 2024-04-16, 11:30:

I am as big an opponent of online DRM as anyone - I only buy my digital games from GOG - but The Crew is a rather poor example, almost clickbait-grade in my opinion.

Let's see. An online-only game, with no single-player content at all (per my understanding), which was from the day of its release tied to the servers of the publisher. What exactly did you expect?

well your understanding is entirely wrong, it is (was) a single player game through and through with an online component that allowed other players to interact in their campaign.
you could play through the entire game without ever connecting to anyone else, there was no reason to, it just required to be connected to ubisofts servers at all times.

and even then that's not an excuse, yes game companies should be obligated to make the game still be playable at it's end of life, even if it's a multiplayer only game, release the tools for people to host their own servers.

imi wrote on 2024-05-02, 17:14:

well your understanding is entirely wrong, it is (was) a single player game through and through with an online component that allowed other players to interact in their campaign.
you could play through the entire game without ever connecting to anyone else, there was no reason to, it just required to be connected to ubisofts servers at all times.

Well, my apologies then for understanding it wrong. Although the question remains whether the connection to the server requirement was just a form of DRM (like "Prince of Persia the Forgotten Sands", for instance), or whether the content ("game world") was actually all online. I understood it was more like the latter (i.e., if the server is down - there is no world, and nothing to play). With that said, if one could get a 'personal' copy of the online world and play it entirely by themselves, as you describe, then it is hard to distinguish that from a proper offline experience, and then the confusion and anger of players suddenly losing access to it is easier, for me, at least, to understand.

I'll stay out of the discussion on who should be "obligated" to what. It's real tempting for people to wish to impose various obligations on parties other than themselves.

dr_st wrote on 2024-05-02, 21:09:

or whether the content ("game world") was actually all online. I understood it was more like the latter (i.e., if the server is down - there is no world, and nothing to play).

Nope, all the game was downloaded to your device. Only the community features required strictly to be online, the rest was just an always online DRM. There was even some remains of an offline mode in the game code.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Crew/comments/18 … _not/?rdt=44828
Also there were a fan-patch in the works to add offline mode to the game, but Ubi didn't just shut it down, they completely nuked it so there is no game left in anyone's game library to patch.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/241560/discuss … 46999810591752/

its a change in viewpoint that i think is something prevalent in all media (and actually, increasingly in everything) and it follows technology. there wasn't really much of a way to lease out media in the past, the only way was to sell rights to broadcasters and to sell actual records, cds, vhs etc. now its possible and it seems that when given the choice the bulk of poeple moved away from cds and dvds to streaming, and thats happening in similar fashion now in games.

at the moment vintage gaming interest is

a: "Do you remember Quake?"
b: "Yes i have a copy, its great, i play it on my pentium system"

in future it'll be

a: "do you remember random-online game?"
b: "no, well, sort of but no one can play it now"

There is growing dissatisfaction with Limited Run Games, which last year announced a pre-order of the collector's edition of the game "D" for 3DO consoles at a price of $64.99 per piece plus shipping, contrary to the expectations of collectors, instead of stamping, regular CD-Rs were used, which are not readable on some consoles, in particular GoldStar. It was assumed that no one would open the kits after half a year of waiting for an order, and therefore would not notice the catch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLE9bVMwz-c

Imo the battle has already been lost. This is the direction the AAA/AA industry is going and it's just gonna get worse; no government is gonna step in and protect consumers, not for something like this. We've entered an age where big companies simply do not give a shit about their customers, because they make enough money and can ignore anyone that is unhappy.

But wait. What are you really missing if you just don't buy any AAA games? Is any of this garbage really worth playing? Of course, there's an argument to be made that any game is worth preserving... but if the people releasing the game don't care if it is erased from history once it's not profitable, then was it ever worth playing?

Fortunately, there are many games released today that don't have any DRM (even on Steam), and are totally worth playing, though not in the AAA/AA realm, of course. If you really want to play AAA/AA games up through 2020 or so, pick up a used PS3/PS4; games were required on those consoles to be complete and playable on disc. For example, Diablo III is completely playable offline on PS3/PS4 (and Switch) even though the PC version requires an Internet connection at all times... and Dragon Age: Inquisition and all the Ubisoft games are playable off disc on PS4, even though they require awful online client software to play offline on PC.

The most insidious thing imo is that Steam drops support for older versions of Windows. They are supposed to be the "good guys" of DRM. I know why they do it, but it still sucks. If they really wanted to be consumer friendly, they would "officially" drop support, but still let you install the client (or an older client) on your PC, with a warning every time you launch it saying "NO SUPPORT IS PROVIDED FOR THE CLIENT OR ANY GAMES." Like, I mentioned above, there are a lot of sub-AA games that are DRM-free on Steam... but once your version of Windows is not supported, you wouldn't even be able to install them!

newtmonkey wrote on 2024-05-03, 18:50:

The most insidious thing imo is that Steam drops support for older versions of Windows. They are supposed to be the "good guys" of DRM. I know why they do it, but it still sucks. If they really wanted to be consumer friendly, they would "officially" drop support, but still let you install the client (or an older client) on your PC, with a warning every time you launch it saying "NO SUPPORT IS PROVIDED FOR THE CLIENT OR ANY GAMES." Like, I mentioned above, there are a lot of sub-AA games that are DRM-free on Steam... but once your version of Windows is not supported, you wouldn't even be able to install them!

Maybe they're just nudging users to migrate to Linux that way?