597

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] pyre@lemmy.world 12 points 9 hours ago

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.

[-] Randelung@lemmy.world 25 points 16 hours ago

That's every publisher's wet dream. AI's almost ready, right?

god I wanna see them fail so badly.

[-] catch22@programming.dev 3 points 11 hours ago

This is to bad, I really enjoyed this game one of the better platformers to come out in a long time.

[-] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 50 points 20 hours ago

My favorite thing is Ubisoft blaming something and then gaming companies going, "Uh no? That's just you."

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 12 points 16 hours ago

It's all a distraction from the truth that you already don't own games.

[-] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 hours ago

Except Battle for Wesnoth and Pingus.

Maybe OpenRCT and Osu! a little further down the line.

[-] normanwall@lemmy.world 16 points 16 hours ago

GOG is a slight argument against that

[-] kieron115@startrek.website 4 points 16 hours ago

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.

[-] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 hours ago

You can make mods for many games and many people do.

[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago

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.

[-] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago

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”.

[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Believe it or not, "It's only illegal if you get caught" isn't how copyright works.

[-] kieron115@startrek.website 1 points 5 hours ago

Having to fly under the radar or risk financial ruin doesn't sound like ownership to me.

[-] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago

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.

[-] kieron115@startrek.website 2 points 13 hours ago

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!

[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

Microsoft actually was going to allow that starting with the Xbox One.

IIRC, the way they were going to implement it would be to make a license transferrable X times a year. They were also going to allow free sharing of digital games to friends that had been on your friends list for at least 30 days.

But then people freaked out over it when they showed it off at the Xbox One reveal due to the fact that digitally-purchased games would have always-online requirements to keep people from duplicating games by installing them, disconnecting from the internet, then logging in elsewhere and sharing the game with a friend.

So after the backlash they pulled the plan. And that really stinks because they still have always-online requirements for digital games. You just can't sell or share them now.

[-] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 5 points 15 hours ago

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.

[-] kieron115@startrek.website 2 points 12 hours ago

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.

[-] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 1 points 8 hours ago

Haha, I just happened to be watching engine swap videos earlier today and thought it fit well!

[-] MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 141 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

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.

[-] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 16 points 20 hours ago

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.

[-] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago

Yeah I'm really glad I didn't get on that track even though it had been a childhood dream

[-] kautau@lemmy.world 36 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 10 points 17 hours ago

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.

[-] AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee 7 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

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.

[-] kautau@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

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

[-] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

The studios owned by the devs almost uniformly don't put out complete gacha cash grab bullshit

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] halfapage@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

Can I actually own BG3 or is it only available as a license as well?

[-] DacoTaco@lemmy.world 23 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

You can. There are physical , drm free, releases and drm free releases on gog :p No online required either. So yes, you can :)

You can get it through gog where it's DRM free. So I would say, yes you can

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
597 points (99.2% liked)

Games

16589 readers
1332 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS