"Ubisoft's own shareholders demand response to the Stop Killing Games consumer movement"

[kane_magus]

"'Obviously, support for all games cannot last forever,' Ubisoft says."

As is pointed out in the article, pretty much everything Yves Guillemot said here is just the same banal deceitful bullshit that has already been debunked by simply reading the Stop Killing Games website and FAQ or by watching the several Accursed Farms videos on the subject.

Remember, this is the same asswipe who infamously said that gamers need to start "feeling comfortable with not owning your game." So, obviously, he's going to be against (and lying about) Stop Killing Games. No surprise there.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I don't think game companies realize how vulnerable that leaves them. After all, if you don't satisfy your customers, someone else may do it and scoop market share. That's actually how capitalism is supposed to work.

So while the current situation sucks, it leaves the field wide open for new game developers to meet those unmet needs. "Do you miss owning your games? Buy ours! Got extra spending money? We also sell mod keys, toolkits, and dev courses so you can tinker with the games you buy from us!"

I keep waiting for someone to do this with farm equipment, which has a similar problem.

Re: Thoughts

[kane_magus]

The modern video game industry seems to be starting to become an oligopoly. Or, at the very least, if not a true oligopoly, it's still the case that the very biggest companies at the top[1] almost seem to be actively colluding to set the standards for which all the rest of the industry inevitably follows. When any given gargantuan publisher decides to pull some crappy anti-consumer thing out of their asses, said thing tends to become industry standard practice very quickly, no matter how many actual gamers revile said thing... mostly because the vast majority of those gamers still continue to buy the games made by these gargantuan publishers, warts and all, regardless of their complaints about it. (I mean, what are the going to do? Not play the latest flavor-of-the-month AAAAAAAA video game that is infested with DRM, is chopped up into a million different DLCs which might cost $100-$1000 or [way] more overall, is an unplayable roach-motel of game-breaking bugs and glitches and crashes, and is all the other things gamers claim to despise in anonymous comments?) And the gargantuan publishers know this. They have decades of sales data to back them up. And once the crappy anti-consumer thing becomes entrenched, it never goes away. This has been going on for the past 30 some odd years now.

And there's also the demonstrable fact that even if some big video game journalism news site or blog or whatever calls out the stuff being done by the big companies, the comments under those articles or posts too often will be flooded by fanboys of the companies (or, worse, by disingenuous reputation management drones pretending to be fanboys) arguing that the thing isn't so bad and maybe is even good, actually ("You don't like draconian, phone-home DRM that bricks your game if it can't phone home? Then you must be a filthy pirate!"), and that we should just accept it and get used to it and stop whining about it and be deliriously happy about it. Which, in turn, too often results in the website in question simply throwing in the towel and catering directly to the fanboy/rep drone parts of their community because everyone else has been driven away.

Sure, right now, there are plenty of indie developers who don't do that stuff, and make it a point of not doing that stuff, but they're such small fry, often niche, that "mainstream gamers" either don't bother with them or haven't even heard of them before (or else they do indeed pirate the games out the wazoo and drive those well-meaning indie devs right out of business). And that is another reason why all of this oppressive anti-consumer crap becomes normalized and standard practice, to the point that even those indie guys too often start thinking it's okay to do similar crap.

As has been the case for at least a decade or so now, at this point, I'm just hoping the modern video game industry will utterly crash (again) and burn to the ground altogether, because I have no hope at all that the industry will ever fix itself in its current iteration. Only then, maybe, will we see more sensible game devs returning to the practice of simply making a damn video game without first having to slather a ton of worthless feces on top of it. Well, up until the cycle starts to repeat itself yet again, anyway, and we just end up right back to where we are now.

[1] - Most of which are gobbling up the smaller companies below them... and then unceremoniously shutting them down for no good reason and/or turning them into zombie shells of their former selves, while either making a complete travesty of whatever wonderful games those smaller companies might have made in the past or else just letting those games or franchises disappear entirely, via abject neglect and apathy, into little more than (formerly) fond memories, forever.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>The modern video game industry seems to be starting to become an oligopoly. <<

This matches my observations.

>> mostly because the vast majority of those gamers still continue to buy the games made by these gargantuan publishers, warts and all, regardless of their complaints about it.<<

If they choose to buy, play, and promote the games anyway then they don't get to complain. It's not like food, where you have to eat something even if it's questionable in quality. You could play an indie video game, or a board game, or go read a book.

>> there are plenty of indie developers who don't do that stuff <<

Then one thing people could do would be to search out and promote those.

>> I'm just hoping the modern video game industry will utterly crash <<

That sounds both probable and helpful.

>> and then unceremoniously shutting them down for no good reason <<

Oh, there is a reason: monopoly.

Re: Thoughts

[kane_magus]

Yeah, like I said, no good reason.

[goldpseudo]

Yeah, this is probably my biggest issue with the whole StopKillingGames initiative; even if they get everything they asked for, the big publishers are pretty much just gonna double-down on the whole "we're providing a service, not selling a product" narrative. We're not looking at a future where games stop getting killed here, we're just looking at a future where there's no longer any illusion of us ever actually owning anything in the first place. They're gonna keep on killing games for as long as they can still profit off of us buying renting new games to replace them.

[kane_magus]

And just like with every other crap thing that the modern video game industry has layered on top of the previously simple process of buying and playing video games, too many people almost assuredly will indeed simply "feel comfortable with not owning their games," normalizing it. Happened with DRM, happened with games being broken up into piecemeal DLC, happened with the increasingly prevalent releases of buggy unfinished games, and it will happen with games being unceremoniously and arbitrarily yanked away for no valid reason, too. Some of us complained and will continue to complain about all that shit, but most everyone else just did the whole "lips to the sewer pipe" bit, swallowed it down, and declared it chocolate.