Who said that?

Be specific, include the word “only” as you quoted, and very important: Don’t lie.

I can’t speak towards whatever you might be misinformed about. The only other close thing I can think of is when a support staff told a user that their account was going to be deleted, which prompted a huge backlash. But, one of the determinations seemed to be that they only do so for inactive accounts that have never purchased anything; and was in fact a GDPR requirement. So, it was another nothing article based on rumors.

Which makes sense if you think about it - actually put some kind of motivation behind the “evil schemes” you’re reading. Greed is very much expected, but removing people’s old games doesn’t gain Ubisoft anything but poor press. If you told me they were selling cheat codes for old games for $30 each, I’d believe it. There’s no profit in what people are actually suggesting though.

The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.

I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I’d say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I’ve watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it’s not a fantastic game and I don’t plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.

Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade’s Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were “Ubisoft Southern Northland” and “ubisoft = shit”.

Man, I really want to assume our lords and saviors will keep putting out perfect games, and yet we’ve been burned in our history.

CDPR put out a half-baked Cyberpunk after a year of hype. Valve put out “Artifact”, the Dota card game. It feels like the really inventive studios sometimes get tired of the working formulas they’re adored for and end up putting out things not many people like - possibly as a way of doing a personal passion project.

I’ll be happy if that never happens for Larian, but it’s a worrying possibility.

At least we have that fanmade expansion for Heroes 3.

Is this at all accurate?

The closest thing I could find when I searched for this topic is that the multiplayer and online services related to those games were being taken offline. Given you can still play Counter-Strike 1.6, I can see some frustration on that, but I also didn’t think many people knew AC1 had any multiplayer features.

Anyone reading can go and take a look at current reviews on Steam for Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2. The newest reviews come from the last few weeks, and no one is highlighting “Ubisoft STOLE this game from me, CANNOT BE PLAYED” etc.

Which makes it hard for me to respect memes like this one when the reactions, at least in part, seem to be driven by constant misinformation. Ubisoft games are absolutely mediocre, I can agree with that, but there is absolutely no need to lie about them.

I am aware of the game preservation movement, focused on The Crew, and I’m in favor of that. I still don’t think it had anything to do with the quote. No one in game publishing makes a business around taking away games people were already playing.

Still confused about this one.

If there’s a reason Star Wars Outlaws is mediocre, for example, it doesn’t have much to do with microtransactions or game renting.

And the quote that was offered was between investors when asking why Ubisoft+, their subscription service that lets you cheaply rent games, wasn’t doing well.

Might be a point of obviousness, but: Most of us own most of our games. Those of us not owning games via subscription rental are choosing to do that, because we don’t care about completionism or playing a title once a year for nostalgia.

Ubisoft is low on creativity and their games don’t interest me, but I’m sometimes weirded out by the illogical way they’re painted as evil, or the way this stupid quote suggests they’re “Cumin’ for muh game discs”.

I abandoned it. One of the specific things I could tell disappointed me was the foley effects. There’s a 5-10 second sequence of Bean escaping from some evil queen that’s taken her captive, climbing over obstacles and up a rope, and it was basically silent except for the music.

I understand in isolation it comes off as a nitpick, but it’s maybe the most direct explanation I have for the show feeling low budget and incomplete. On top of that, the writing seemed to want to be higher stakes than Futurama by wrapping a larger story, but things just got resolved so unceremoniously. (That escape being one of those instances - it went from a moment of capture and peril to just going home out of nowhere)

I might enjoy this, but I’d have a requirement: Every participant join via webcam, not text posting.

Yes, that gives away much of your identity and makes you vulnerable. That’s the shared price we’d all pay to have a little bit of trust in each other. It would make it much harder for one person to be a bot posting from multiple accounts.

Ah, Khura’in! I admit, I was always curious whether the locals were offended by the way the Ace Attorney series depicted them as corrupt.

Remember the rules; Princess = innocent and blameless, Queen = evil and despotic.

I honestly don’t know of any free basic image hosts anymore. Searching the term gives so many misleading or data-invasive sites.

True, most metaphors around DRM related to physical items collapse reasonably quickly. The thing about home locks was only worthwhile for the topic of how dysfunctional society gets with locks on everything and no trust.

Most DRM metaphors start with “A person has X object, and is greedy for money” - nothing written as to how they obtained that object.

The more intricate comparison is that someone has produced a good that is easily copied, but required deep financial investment on their part to first create. It’s disingenuous to forget that part or imply all people selling something digital are rich by those or other means. People put large investments into the idea that their copiable works would be desired by other people. No one’s obligated to buy it, but they’re betting enough people will want it to pay for it and recoup costs. “It’s okay, we didn’t delete your copy from your hard drive” means nothing.

The extension to the thought about “we don’t put locks on everything because we trust most people act honorably” is this: If we naturally expected all players to pirate all games, then there would be much, much fewer artists dedicated to creating media. There are many cases of people writing software for donations, and they often need additional funding. Firefox is unfortunately a prime example of that, being primarily funded by Google.

By the way, Google puts out its free software thanks to ads. Don’t you love those? Makes you prefer a different financial relationship with consumers.

It’s a lot like locks on a house.

Picking a lock is not prohibitively difficult. It’s just there to provide a form of friction to make clear that you should not expect to burgle homes.

However, a world that puts every single item of any value behind bulletproof glass and deadbolts because of pervasive thieves is oppressive. And yet, that’s what we aim for when everyone decides to take whatever they feasibly can. A good world would mostly rely on honor policy.

This message written from a computer; which was built using minerals mined from conflict areas blah blah-…

Don’t worry, I’m not actually blaming anyone on the topic of conflict minerals or anything; but I do think there are some issues/businesses where it’s not realistic to just not participate, and better to target better legislation to account for deceptive/evil businesses.

I’ve always liked the feeling of the protagonists being stuck in a rut of feeling like they’re barely getting by, while their combined creativity is enough to get them farther than anyone has managed in the dungeon with inferior supplies.

They can’t, there are acorns in France

If we can’t say dick it makes it hard to discuss my favorite detective in the Ace Attorney series.

Pretty shore

Sorry I’m out at a beach and just commenting on the first thing I see

Turning down a potential partner is certainly known to make you 10x more desirable.