I feel a bit disappointed by the number of people suggesting that an NFT would somehow help here.
An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. (He probably still has the receipts from when he bought the games in his inbox somewhere, but of course, his account is still closed.)
We can store whatever records we like in a fancy distributed database, but his account will still be closed. The only fix here is Ubisoft needs to not close peoples accounts.
Somewhat amusingly Ubisoft is in the process of launching an NFT system (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/ubisofts-first-nft-pl...) and as anyone paying attention would no doubt expect, it doesn't solve anything related to this; up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs.
NFT's are stupid. It's just the NFT idiots trying to find an actual legitimate reason for them to exist by saying it solves every problem, which it doesn't.
Exactly. The idea that NFTs somehow help in these kind of situations is utter nonsense. Sure, if Ubisoft minted an NFT and give it to you, they couldn't delete the NFT itself. However, it is always up to Ubisoft or whoever else is using NFTs whether they want to honour that NFT or not. You can present them with the NFT, and they can say "Hmmm... no."
An NFT is like a key to a house. You can use it to open the door until the owner of the house decides to change the locks. You still own the key, but that impresses nobody.
It'll be bad PR if they don't honor it, though. Purchasers of the NFT don't know the original holder got banned, and they have every reason to assume buying the NFT from that person will give them whatever privilege or cosmetic it's supposed to grant them in-game. Enough people don't have that happen and complain about it loudly enough and Ubisoft will feel pressure to change their policies to honor it.
It'd be a stupid hill to die on anyway. Granted Ubisoft has done some stupid stuff in the past, but this one I don't think they'd win in the end.
"...up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs."
That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.
People have pointed to the fact that Ubisoft is using a separate chain, but I want to point out that even on Ethereum you're not guaranteed to have the kind of universal access that you want. Smart contracts are code, and an Ethereum contract can be coded to rely on a centralized service or to only allow selling through a specific marketplace. Additionally, even on Ethereum Ubisoft could monitor the sales and reject tokens or ban account that go through sales endpoints that they dislike even if they didn't code the restrictions into the smart contract. The blockchain makes that kind of historical monitoring and restriction really easy.
Of course, Ubisoft could in a theoretical world also not do that stuff, but the point is they could also allow you to transfer your games using a centralized service. The NFTs don't force them to be more open or customer friendly, if they were customer friendly they would already be allowing you to download games without DRM or transfer them around. They could already offer you a Steam key with every game you bought from the Ubisoft store; it's corporate politics and competition between Ubisoft and Steam that prevents this from happening, not technology.
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What Ubisoft demonstrates so well here is that the incentive structure behind NFTs also doesn't really seem bias companies towards being more open. There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game.
What you're seeing with Ubisoft is not going to be an exception, this is going to be the norm of how companies work with NFTs. A quick heuristic you can use: releasing a game DRM-free is easier, cheaper, simpler, and more directly beneficial to consumers than building a consumer-friendly NFT system; so whenever you look at a company that says they're going to work with NFTs, do yourself a favor and check to see if their games are currently DRM-free. Do they currently allow game trading/gifting? If they don't, then I think it's a strong probability that their NFTs are going to look more like Ubisoft's and less like the ethical systems that people imagine and hope for. Because I can't stress enough that it's not hard to build the systems and restrictions on the blockchain that Ubisoft has, it really comes down to corporate choice about how they proceed rather than the technology.
In short, NFTs offer no additional positive incentives to be more consumer friendly, and the technology doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before with good-old-fashioned OAUTH or signed public databases. If Ubisoft wanted to allow game transfers, there are dozens of ways they could do it today, many of which could survive as authentication mechanisms even if the company folded. Game ownership on the blockchain is not going to go through the kind of revolution that people suppose. My advice is, if you want a revolution in game ownership then lobby to reform copyright and/or establish a legal digital right of resale. If you want to more directly protect your games, boycott and criticize companies like Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/EA/etc that bundle DRM into their storefronts.
What if it was all on chain? See https://ultra.io (a Steam competitor) for an example of this:
"All the content you buy from Ultra, such as games, DLCs, and virtual items, are on-chain digital goods you truly own. On Ultra you’re in control of your assets as though they were physical items. These assets can be sold, traded and given away to your friends within Ultra, or outside of Ultra, through 3rd party marketplaces and mobile apps."
Does Ubisoft have to honor that Blockchain though by providing you services in perpetuity?
They might if they contractually agreed to honor it. But even if they were inclined to offer such licenses (lets say consumers everywhere demanded it), there's not many meaningful enforcement advantages of shoving NFTs in the mix.
As a consumer such a contract could (including transferability) could exist without an NFT, and be just as enforced by the (centralized) judicial system or consumers voting with their feet.
I wonder if this train of misleading information is gonna keep on chugging, or if people are going to realize that they really just own a string of alphanumeric characters that are just arbitrarily interpreted by centralized software. No different than how virtual items are done today.
Maybe I am also salty that I was one of the "early adopters" who saw this glaring flaw and missed out on a fortune because I understood the technical side. Right about the technology, wrong about the adoption I guess.
I own a physical copy of Diablo 2 that does not work anymore. License is dead and I don't know why.
Owning a physical copy is not helping me play the game as Bliz has decided that license is no good.
An NFT could have the same experience. Nothing forcing the vendor to honor it.
Seems if NFT game licenses worked the way they are being talked about in this thread then there would be no way to ban players for bad behavior because it would be out of the hands of the developer. Which clearly isn't true.
Yeah, what if? Your serial key would be in the chain? No, it won't, then everyone can access it. Ubisoft has the power to revoke a serial key, and they want to retain that right. I also want them to retain that right, as I want them to ban cheaters (or hellban them in an underworld together). I just don't want them to unrightfully delete an account with games attached (inactivity is a bad reason).
What about proving ownership, on the balance of probabilities, to show tortuous damages in a court? Seems like a list of receipts that's somehow certified would be beneficial to that end?
Probably first we need legislation to make digital purchases resalable, and to require DRM free versions to be made available if a product is EOL-ed.
Companies world copyright against the populous who are [in a functioning democracy] the ones who give them the copyright in the first place.
You’re conflating two different things here: the user next owned the games, they owned a license to the games that Ubisoft could (and did) revoke.
NFTs aren’t magic. The issue here isn’t proving ownership, it’s that the thing that was owned (a license) is not the thing people really want to own (the game). I can deploy an NFT that replicates the current system 100%
It's an illusion to think that they are, but they aren't. The stolen art that is put on NFT's from artists is still the artists one and not from the NFT creator.
I dunno - when MP3s became thing, in my country you were allowed to convert your CD to MP3. But you need the CD to prove your ownership (technically - I don't know if there ever was a court case where somebody produced the CDs).
It seems to me in that sense a NFT could help - you can get the MP3s anywhere, but the NFT proves you actually paid for it.
Of course there would have to be a way to get the Ubisoft games, or they would have to play along.
I don't get how this would be even remotely helpful in real life. It's just a solution for a manmade problem. I know there are a lot of manmade problems getting circumvented by code but this time it's just all on us.
A correctly implemented NFT would mean that he could still sell the game to someone else, he should still be able to take the NFT of his games with him and make a new account theoretically. If they provide no way for him to auto export his NFTs then nobody should bother buying NFTs of games since as you're suggesting, it's pointless.
How does your correct implementation force Ubisoft to do something against their will? If they want to block someone, opening another account will work only to the extent that they don't really care — otherwise their terms of service would be meaningless since everyone could just crank out sock puppets.
What's your definition of "correctly implemented"? Because the NFT platform Ubisoft went with has all kinds of restrictions on it, and I imagine they consider it to be "correctly implemented."
But if he creates a new account and transfers the NFTs (that function as your proof of ownership of a game in this case), then you're good to go again. Since they can't be deleted. It's a different story if your NFTs are banned of course, then it wouldn't matter if you transfer them to a new account.
Ubisoft is already making NFTs (for cosmetics in this case; same tech though) where they control who can own or transfer NFTs. So...no., this doesn't help.
Ubisoft doesn't need NFTs to let people transfer their games to a new account, and they don't need to let people transfer their games just because they've given you a fancy commemorative memento of the time you gave them money in exchange for not owning a game.
I think it would be far more frequent that crackers gain control of NFTs and transfer them to a new account. Are users going to rejoice in the existence of a smart receipt they didn't understand when they are locked out of their purchases and perhaps declared dead on the block chain?
That may be how some NFTs are utilized. But it’s probably better to think of an ERC20 (tokens) and ERC721 (NFTs) as self executing code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The difference between the two is that ERC20 standard is self-similar and the ERC721 standard is uniquely identifiable.
Sure you can mint an NFT with “whatever record” you want in theory, if the NFT isn’t minted within a given self-executing smart contract, then your NFT is immediately recognizable as bullshit.
You are simultaneously suggesting there is no need for a technological solution, the answer if forcing Ubisoft to act a certain way, whereas the technological solution removes the need to trust Ubisoft to act a certain way or force them to when they don’t.
> But it’s probably better to think of an ERC20 (tokens) and ERC721 (NFTs) as self executing code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Right, and Ubisoft is making NFTs right now, that will use that self-executing code to implement customer unfriendly restrictions on who can own and transfer the NFTs.
If your self-executing smart contract says "you lose the games when Ubisoft bans you or goes out of business", then you've gained nothing. "Ah", you say, "but what if Ubisoft decided to be nice and customer friendly?"
But this is Ubisoft. That's not going to happen. :)
That wouldn't be a problem with NFTs as they could just go to another game provider, show their proof-of-ownership and download their games from there. Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.
Furthermore NFTs would allow used game sales, something we have lost with the switch from physical to digital, despite it being required by law in many countries. A signed recipe is nowhere good enough, as that still depends on your account at Ubisoft, e.g. to keep track of if you refunded the game or not.
Now getting the game industry to actually implement and use an NFT based game-ownership system, that's the tricky part. But claiming there is no technological problem that needs solving is ignoring all the freedoms we lost by going digital with our purchases and that could be regained with NFTs.
OPs point is that all of that can be done without the use of NFTs - the reasons Ubisoft are doing this are commercial not because of technical limitations.
Just saying NFTs will solve it even if Ubisoft goes rogue completely ignores other things that would need to happen too - ie how do you avoid double redemption and multiple installs?
> That wouldn't be a problem with NFTs as they could just go to another game provider...
...nothing says an NFT needs to be arbitrarily transferable. Again, Ubisoft is launching an NFT that has a huge laundry list of conditions around who can own them and when and how you are allowed to transfer them.
If Ubisoft won't let you transfer your Ghost Recon pants NFT to whomever you like, why would they let you transfer an NFT representing a game?
> Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.
Again, this is not a technical problem, it's a legal and economic problem. And as you say, we already have this feature (without NFTs), so why do we need NFTs? I bought a copy of Satisfactory on Epic; I'd like to play it on Steam. There's is zero technical reason why I can't go through some basic oauth flow to verify that I control both accounts, and let me remove the license from Epic and add it to Steam. Or even better, let me press a button and turn my copy on Epic into a product key that I can paste into Steam, or resell on Ebay. Wouldn't that be cool?
And why doesn't this exist? Well, because the companies involved (markets and publishers) don't want it to. So, well, yes, you could also solve this is a much more difficult and expensive way (with NFTs), they don't want that solution to exist either.
Steam already had a very well functioning marketplace for transferring digital items including - in very limited cases - games between accounts. Why can't I sell the copy of Portal 2 I've finished? Again, no technical reason, but because that's the last thing they want people to do.
Ubisoft could generate some XML with list of games and sign it with their private key with known certificate. This XML is proof of purchase that you can back up and import into other stores. All it takes is some cooperation between stores. You don't need blockchain, it's basic public key cryptography.
No, that would require the other game provider to accept your Ubisoft-minted token. Since they already don't with a very centralised system that makes this very easy, having an intermediate token adds _more_ friction.
This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account".
Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games? That doesn't seem right (and no, I don't really care too much about what the Terms and Services say).
I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.
Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms.
'Hire this book' would be fair to use in this context.
(Afterwards I successfully converted to book to an e-book format that I owned with some Calibre plugins).
Nobody gives a flying fuck whether the terms are legally accurate. This distinction is entirely already covered in the existing terms of service.
People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.
Companies shouldn't be able to shift the burden of the negative aspects of running an online service (dealing with abuse) entirely onto society by offering no meaningful appeal process. Regulation isn't an appealing option, but companies have full well demonstrated that they aren't going to handle these cases unless forced to.
>I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.
right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"
IMHO a better way forward is to de-categorize downloads of “purchased” items from “downloading” in legal context, such that removing access is considered theft rather than enabling downloads to be considered willful distribution.
That’s technologically backwards, but it’s not like justice system behavior and software industry logic always converged nicely.
That sounds like a good idea. It would probably make sense to require that they specify how long you get to lease it for, rather than the current situation which is pretty much "until we decide not to run the service anymore".
>Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN
My PlayStation account was blocked for online games/chat for 2 months with no clear reason, this also wasted 2 months of PS Plus subscription sice I could not really benefit from it. They did not offer any way to dispute this or clarify what exactly was wrong to avoid it.
My son was using the console to play Fortnite, he told me that some guy blackmailed him to give him gifts or he will submit fake reports, I have no idea who checks this reports and if they have competent people that understand our native language or is all just some shit AI and some dude somewhere just confirming that the AI was wight.
This incident completely changed my sentiments on Sony consoles and on top their greedy pricing and for sure I will avoid them in future.
Sony is extremely trigger happy with suspending based on messages. I’ve gotten a few weeks suspension for ‘harassment’ because I told someone that kept messaging me I was hacking that that was ‘honestly kind of dumb’.
> I don't really care too much about what the Terms and Services say
It does not matter even if you care. You do not have negotiating power to change them. It is a 'my way or highway' situation.
And the government should be involved, you alone cannot change the Terms of Service, but your country can create laws to protect you from thieves, whenever they steal physical or digital goods. If you don't like your government fight to improve it but do not renounce to the power that it gives you as a citizen.
> You do not have negotiating power to change them.
IANAL, but I have heard from some people who claimed to be on the Internet things that, if I have understood it correctly, suggests that this fact would weigh heavily against the companies writing the ToS if it came to a court case involving them.
I believe the relevant term is "contract of adhesion"?
Yes you do. I had a ToS with an anti competitive clause in it, no reselling, was told they needed to transfer all our customers, etc, or they and us could get fined for illegal reselling.
Phoned their regulator, was told to register as a reseller, and call back if we still had issues.
After the registration had been finalized we contacted our new wholesaler, all that came of it was being unable to add new accounts for a few months.
The next company we had the issue with you could basically hear the face palming on the phone why they had allowed a registered reseller to open an account that didn’t allow reselling, and whether they would allow us to continue reselling or whether we should do a conference call with <name of person> at <four letter agency>.
It was basically one of those pray I do not alter our agreement further moments.
I wouldn’t feel any guilt about pirating the content I bought on any of those services if my account was taken from me for inactivity. I’d be interested to hear the argument about why that would be wrong though.
These days I generally pirate the single-player content I purchase anyway. Anything that requires Origin, Epic, uPlay, or any other cancerous software to be installed gets paid for and promptly pirated. I trust the Pirate Bay more than I trust Ubisoft.
Because laws are not about justice. If you get something stolen you need to go to a judge to get a sentence that gives it back to you. You cannot take justice on your hands and expect to not be punished.
Everybody I've talks to jumps on the victim blaming high horse every time this comes up. "Well just don't get banned. What did you get banned for? What were you wearing when you got banned?"
I have friends that got banned because somebody hacked into their account and fraudulently bought things. This is apparently account sharing, ban. Or filing a dispute about the charges = ban. Mass report by trolls = ban. There's a bunch of technical reasons outside your control where your account can be banned.
Most of the legal protections you otherwise would have apparently do essentially nothing when you're banned from the service / platform you are required to use instead of just the thing you bought.
This is annoying when your Steam account is hacked. This is a life altering problem when your YouTube comment gets flagged for a combined technicality of a combo-rule like "hate speech or terrorism" by calling somebody a "dummy," causing your YouTube account and all videos to be shut down, gmail account and all archived email deleted, all google docs deleted, all linked google cloud services to be suspended, and all 3rd party login oauths to be revoked. You won't be able to log into even non-google things, and further can't reset your password / login credentials or prove who you are because your email was deleted.
This entire nightmare can happen to anybody at any time for any reason. Even further, because YouTube in particular is fully automated customer support, your rebuttable is likely to be automatically denied and flagged for trolling putting you in an even worse state. The only chance you have is if you happen to personally know a higher-up human before hand that you're able to talk to.
> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?
You absolutely do.
Anyway, I agree with you. Digital marketplaces are becoming more and more important and certainly I'm sure I have a lot of money in Steam, Kindle, and various other services. It'd be nice to move away from the Wild West phase given how much money's sloshing around at this point.
You can still play the games without steam (I often play without internet connection). But of course you'll miss out on a lot of things (multiplayer, achievements etc.) which might be important to you.
That's exactly why it's safer to buy DRM-free from GOG because you can keep a backup of your purchases without having to worry the service might lock you out or remove a product.
https://gog.com has (nearly?) all games DRM-free, so you can backup (and also actually torrent I believe) any of the games, that's why I choose to buy from them.
The question may be silly, but how does GOG handle multiplayer ?
- Are players that bought the game on GOG able to play with those that bought it on steam/Uplay/other when lobbies are involved
- Are there DRMs for online play that have lobbies ? If so, how are they handled ?
Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play. No GTA V, no God of War, no Red Dead Redemption, no Call of Duty, no battlefield V, which seem to be some of most selling games of past years.
I know it's not their fault but because of it, it won't fit a huge chunk of the users' needs.
If you try to take this to court, you will typically be offered a "goodwill payment" of a complete refund of all your games.
That's because, even though the TOS is quite clear that you can lose all your stuff due to inactivity, Ubisoft doesn't want the risk of the court deciding the TOS is unfair and striking out those clauses.
We should go in the complete opposite direction and abolish data ownership straight up. Copyright needs to end. The second it's gone it will no longer be a crime to copy and these problems will no longer exist.
I consider it a fair game to torrent those games that the publisher screws me over. Like San Andreas, the Steam version of which was FUBAR a few years ago and then removed altogether (for new buyers). I've paid for maybe five copies in my entire life, sorry, I'm not paying for the sixth.
I apologize but I find this to be a silly question. I buy because I want to play. I do not have an expectation of indefinite ownership (even though I should have indefinite ownership), hence my comment.
It must have been around 2006 when I registered my Steam account. I was just a kid back then. Didn't understand the fact the buy button was lying to me.
You are of course correct but at the same time I often buy games for $5 - $10 on sale that are a few years old and after completion they have little to no replay value. Although many may not be as frugal they might well have the same attitude towards reuse/replay/resale. Play and forget.
> Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?
You didn’t buy any games. You paid for access, but as you note you don’t actually own any of these games. Please stop giving in to the doublespeak BS of these companies.
Other than the false marketing (using words like “buy”) and that DRM is toxic, I don’t see what’s really not right - it’s a terrible deal but you’re free to not partake. As long as people keep giving companies money for this kind of thing it will continue.
It’s not like being able to play the very latest AAA game is something that is hard to give up, unlike a lot of other essential software. Just say no.
(BTW, is this really the case with Steam? Last time I checked you could always make a local offline backup of a downloaded game and bring it with you; any connectivity/license check would have to be made in the game itself)
> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?
I can kind of understand if you were legitimately in the wrong (e.g. sending death threats to other users, getting a warning, and then doing it again), but in the situation where you are simply inactive for some period of time I think it’s unreasonable.
Even with such extreme things, the course of action should be:
- Disable online features on the account
- Fill a complain to authorities if illegal in the user's country (in France, sending death threats online is totally illegal)
But not "Delete the account with its paid content".
IMHO, the community part and game library part should not be strong-linked in such a way. If only for false positives.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty straightforward way around legislation that requires that people have access to games they've bought, and companies are already moving in that direction: Just make every game have an online component, and make it not run if it can't properly authenticate with the server.
Banning this type of practice gets into much thornier ground, because plenty of games legitimately do run only online (MMOs of all types, for instance), and for plenty of others, there's a legitimate reason for them to at least have an online component...and just how deeply embedded in the game that online component has to be is rarely going to be a simple matter to determine.
I don't really see a good solution to this at the moment, sadly.
> I don't really see a good solution to this at the moment, sadly.
Preferring games that don't do the bad thing and being willing to pay a premium for (or accept lower production values from) them is the market solution. I think you’ve outline why there isn't a legislative solution that doesn't adversely impact lots of genres of games where online is fundamental to the game and not an abusive control methods with no other purpose.
> I generally hate getting the government involved in things
It is sad when it occurs, but that's the exact reason why governments are there: they're (theoretically) reliable powerful people that should protect us from other unreliable powerful people, in exchange of being kept in power.
Any other alternative would involve violence.
That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server.
Let’s say you bought a bunch of things for The Matrix Online, do you expect that server to run forever? It won’t. It didn’t. Why should someone else maintain it forever? Are you getting a refund? Why? You already extracted the useful life of it.
If there’s government regulation it’s around the deceptive use of the word “purchase” it’s just a long term rental
> That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server.
Don't mean to sound too cranky but this "you just bought a license" crap has been a thing since software began being software. It was no more fair back then than it is now.
No one is arguing, at least I don't think they are, that a company has an obligation to keep servers running in perpetuity. But to tell me I have no portable way to retain the bits I bought--excuse me, "licensed"--from a company is just crap. If a game can run in single-player mode without a server, or if a movie file can be played, or a song file listened to, then the act of "buying" it should mean I can do that for as long as I can keep my computers running and the onus on keeping backups of those files is on me.
We call them app "stores," we use the moniker of "purchased," and the ads call them "ours." If companies don't want to let us keep the ability to independently use the software or content files we "purchased," then they should be prohibited from using the lexicon of buying things and be very explicit that this is a one-time fee for a rental that can be taken away at any time.
Being explicit does not mean burying it in a multi-thousand word document that no person with a regular command of English can understand and that none of us have the power to negotiate for ourselves.
It's one thing if it's an MMO or something else that inherently needs a central server. It's another if it's a game that could work 100% offline if not for the DRM.
This makes a good case for decentralization no? Imagine all those items in the blockchain, you can leave for years knowing you can retrieve them anytime. The only con at the point is if you lose your keys.
Reminds me of some friends who had Bitcoin and “forgot” about it and only to come back with massive profits.
Blockchain isn't a good replacement for functional legislative and/or regulatory bodies that actually give a shit about the people they're supposed to be protecting. In this case, corporations unwilling to grant actual ownership of "digital purchases" to the consumers who paid for them aren't going to change that policy just because it sounds like a cool application for blockchain. If they were willing to do something like that, they would already offer portable DRM-free installers and license keys to match. Indeed, some publishers do exactly that, but Ubisoft's management are the sort of bottom of the barrel scum who will only be dragged kicking and screaming into a world where consumers actually own what they've paid for.
At the same time, there are people who lost their wallet and RIP to all that potential wealth. And then there are people who had their computer stolen/broken and then just downloaded Steam on a new device and had their games and saves ready to go.
Not that I'm defending centralized services like Steam, because I'm very well aware that companies have happily wielded their power to randomly lock people out of their accounts (like the main subject here). But crypto isn't solving anything either (or at least not yet).
I don't understand how blockchain would solve this problem. How much would it cost in gas fees to download a 100GB game? That aside how would you handle licensing, revocation, etc?
Trustless trust doesn’t solve any problems here. Having your ownership of games notarized without someone central, does not mean you can access them. You need someone to enforce that.
How so? The technical answer to this problem is that it must always be possible to store games and media on media that you physically own, and load these on the gaming device in a completely offline process that does not depend on having an account.
I don't think blockchain has any application here. You already have a receipt of your purchase, and noone is disputing that, so blockchain would add nothing but an extra layer of complexity. The problem is that the rights that follow with that purchase does not match what consumers would naturally expect.
How would an NFT help here? Nobody is disputing that you bought the music (or, more precisely, bought a license for the music, that they may revoke at their discretion). The NFT proves nothing that a receipt wouldn't also prove. What you want is a law that forbids the current practice of revoking ownership.
Sounds nice, but I don't think we need legislation. It would bring the entire digital content ecomony to a grinding halt. The line between what can be owned and what cannot be is not clear. The line between what's a digital good and what's not is also not clear. Is your online bank balance a digital good? Is it an immutable binary that's considered a digital good? An in-game item in a MMORPG that requires servers to operate? Is Adobe Creative Cloud a good or a service?
The details are messy. And the lawmakers would guarantee the passing the most fucked up version of it with some other draconian measures bundled in there. Startup ecosystem would be in sheer panic to comply and some won't even contemplate starting a company selling digital goods/services. The scope is so insane, I am having a hard time thinking about it.
or just let Web3 and onchain NFT's happen, accepting one of the reasons why the incremental improvement is being seen as valuable.
Even if a company offered a convenience service, the ideal implementation allows people to restore their account from the current function state onchain, which is what most web3 services do in an increasingly standardized and predictable way right now.
regarding the NFT's and where they store the images, many NFT classes have getter methods that tell enough about what the implementation of the digital item should look like, usually when I'm talking to people I get the impression that they haven't looked.
there are so many ways to do this right, even if they aren't passing muster right now.
I don't understand how NFTs would solve the problem I described. Even if all of my Oculus games are NFTs - if I'm banned and can't access my account to download the games then I'm out of luck.
> We may also close long-term inactive accounts to maintain our database.
How many kilobytes takes too store ownership data? I can just imagine that tracking data is thousands of times bigger.
> The crazy thing about this is that it’s perfectly legal for video game companies to delete your account regardless of whether you’ve spend zero or a thousand dollars on their games
It's a shame that we are going to fight for our digital rights because currently we have almost none because justice does not understand technology.
Is it unnecessarily complicated though? I feel like while “stop paying more” should be an easy process, “permanently lose access to a thing I already paid for” should be difficult in order to guard against unexpected things, since it is a potentially irreversible event with negative monetary consequences for the user.
In a world where malicious parties might break into your (say) GOG account and try to delete it, there are "non-evil" reasons for GOG to make account deletion somewhat difficult.
NFTs wouldn't help here. I can have NFTs for the games on my steam account but if steam bans me who is honoring my NFT to provide me access to the game? No one. It's about as good as a paper receipt for a company you didn't purchase the item from.
You have the right not to pay money to companies that won't give you the guarantee of ownership and access that you want.
But if the lack of that guarantee is right there in the company's terms of service, and you pay them money anyway, you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences.
I also have the right to petition my local congress critters to crack down on whatever hairbrained schemes publishers are pulling like cutting off access to something I bought to save a kilobyte in a postgres database somewhere.
> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to
Oddly enough, publishers DO have the right to change ToS and frequently do, and "your silence is considered consent".
This reminds me quite a bit of the gift card nonsense where you'd be charged for not using a gift card, for using it, using it too soon, letting it get too old, etc. Now the rules around gift cards are extremely strict because it was abused by merchants. It sounds like we need something similar for digital items - if you yank my ownership, you owe me back my money and in whatever currency I paid you in, not your store funny money.
> You have the right not to pay money to companies that won't give you the guarantee of ownership and access that you want.
I have way more rights than that. Or if not I will fight to get them. I do not want to depend on the good will of corporations. I want fair laws that control their behavior like we have with physical goods.
What the large print giveth, the small print may not taketh away. If the large print says "Buy", the small print may not alter that to "License for a limited time that may be ended whenever we feel like it." The small print may clarify what the large print says, but direct contradiction is a form of false advertising.
> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences
Oh please. Virtually nobody reads that stuff. Chances are the handful of people who cared enough to read won't actually understand it. Are consumers supposed to consult lawyers before they spend money on products now? Even if you read, understand and agree to the deal, they can just change the terms later and there's nothing anyone can do.
I don't even want to stop paying them. I want them to stop their obnoxious bullshit so I don't feel like I'm a dumbass for trying to support creators every single time.
When possible, try to prefer DRM-free versions of games. If there's DRM, then one doesn't really own it. PCGamingWiki [1] is a great resource that will list the DRM status of a given game for different distributors (yes, some stores may have DRM while others do not). In general, GOG [2] is all DRM-free games.
DRM-free games generally do not have any license key (I’ve never seen one with it, but that’s anecdotal).
I’m not sure if an offline-only key check would be considered DRM; maybe is. Realistically such a check doesn’t do much, so what’s the point in including it. Back in the day it was often required to have one of the discs inserted to play—that is definitely DRM.
There's a lot of heritage in archived and emulated computer games from 80's and 90's. Further, I still have some games in their original boxes somewhere and being nostalgic enough to not have thrown them away I own my copies of those games in the true sense of the word. Same for music on compact discs. I have ripped most of them for myself but I still own the original copies in a closet.
Now, 30 years from now or roughly 2050, there will be a cultural and historical blackout because anything people are "buying" now are basically revokable privileges to temporarily hire games, music, and movies. There will be no single server up and running to provide today's games for people who are today young but will be middle-aged few decades from now. And, even before that, judging based on Ubisoft it looks like the "purchases" will be long gone before the service itself.
>“Please be reassured that Ubisoft does not automatically close inactive accounts,”
but
>inactivity warning from Ubisoft in his spam folder dated January 20th. The email stated that his account had been temporarily shut down and will be permanently closed if he didn’t click the provided link within 30 days.
So not automatic closures...but there is a live system to automate it?
Unsurprising. I have found Ubisoft customer support pretty abysmal.
I pre-ordered the latest Assassin’s Creed directly from Ubisoft thinking it was better than buying it from Amazon. It got delivered to the wrong address, so I opened a ticket. They ignored the ticket for weeks despite me sending follow ups every few days, so I eventually raised a dispute with PayPal to get a refund, which I received.
Ubisoft finally responded to the ticket at that point, saying that I “may have issues making purchases from the store in the future” due to the reversed payment. So basically, they no longer want me as a customer because I tried to get a refund for a game they failed to deliver.
I paid extra for a disc version of the PS5 for exactly this reason. If I buy a game today I want to be able to play it 20 years from now. I can bet money that none of the mainstream digital stores of today will be operational by then.
Ugh Xbox drives me up the wall with their "ownership" scheme. A disc doesn't actually contain the game, It's a _license_ for the game. When you insert the disc, your Xbox downloads the entire game to its drive, but the game won't launch without the disc inserted.
It's the worst of both worlds. After the Xbox store shuts down, none of your discs will work because they don't _do_ anything. And you can't even launch the game without messing with discs because you can't rip the license from the disc- it MUST be in the machine to launch.
I don't think that's correct. If you disconnect your xbox from the net, the game will still be installed (from the disc), and you'll be able to play it. Everything will still work after the Xbox store shuts down. You just won't get any updates or DLC.
That's a good point but odds are gmail won't be around in 20 years. The most popular email 20 years ago was aol later hotmail. Most popular search yahoo, altavista are gone. ICQ is mostly gone.
Myspace is gone. Facebook is dying slowly hopefully to be replaced with some form in the meta world.
To make it 18 years is special but it's going to take a lot of reinvention to keep up for the next 20 years. They have the best odds but so did myspace
In that sense, Steam is not tied to a single hardware platform. They are a bit more platform agnostic and that means they can keep moving with the times. Steam doesn't require a custom steam PC using proprietary hardware.
A good example of these online store going down would be the Wii and Wii U/3DS stores. The Wii store is already gone - it lasted 13 years.
The Wii U/3DS stores will no longer accept any payments starting 18th January 2022 as a first step towards shutting the services down. Wii U is 9 years old, 3DS is 10 years old.
Only yesterday a friend of mine fired up his Xbox 360. While the online system is still running it is a question of how long until MS will simply drop the entire thing even if it is a very minor thing to run.
Is that even a guarantee though? In particular, I know that you could buy the Orange Box (HL2, TF2, and Portal) on DVD in retail stores, but you needed a Steam account to play anyway.
It isn't. Even discounting day 1 patches, every console assumes an internet connection. You're at the mercy of the game devs, and unless you are checking for "internet connection required" (and believing the lack of such on the box means you really don't need one), you can still end up with something that will refuse to boot unless it phones home.
That is of course true, but nothing lasts forever. The disc may deteriorate, or be stolen, or their house might burn down, but that's life. At least by owning the physical disc, GP commenter can take full responsibility of its condition and accept the risks of "shit happens", rather than being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions or failures of a remote faceless organisation or of its future owners/creditors.
A few months ago I pulled my PS1 collection from storage to rip to ISOs, for emulation and backup. I was too late as the discs, despite being in fully opaque containers, were damaged and partly unreadable, one disc was 50% unreadable. And this is all for emulation -- if I wanted to play on a console I'd need a modchip to read CD-Rs, so if you backed up your Blu-Ray PS5 discs today, you wouldn't be able to play them on a legitimate console in the future.
The PS5's optical drive is paired with its motherboard[1]. If you replace it, even if you take the disk drive from another PS5, it will not be able to read your PS5 game.
I imagine that 20 years from now you are going to have a hard time finding a working PS5 with its original disk drive.
Funny that you mention it. Sony announced earlier this year that they would be shutting down the PS3 store permanently (including the ability to download past purchases), and only delayed the move due to public backlash. They did shut the PSP store though, so those games are unplayable now.
I typically do the same. (Ps2-4). I wonder though since a lot of these games now (typically ps4 onward) have fairly large “patches” downloaded when you play them how well the un patched games will play.
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An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. (He probably still has the receipts from when he bought the games in his inbox somewhere, but of course, his account is still closed.)
We can store whatever records we like in a fancy distributed database, but his account will still be closed. The only fix here is Ubisoft needs to not close peoples accounts.
Somewhat amusingly Ubisoft is in the process of launching an NFT system (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/ubisofts-first-nft-pl...) and as anyone paying attention would no doubt expect, it doesn't solve anything related to this; up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs.
There is no technological problem to solve here.
An NFT is like a key to a house. You can use it to open the door until the owner of the house decides to change the locks. You still own the key, but that impresses nobody.
It'd be a stupid hill to die on anyway. Granted Ubisoft has done some stupid stuff in the past, but this one I don't think they'd win in the end.
That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.
Even on a public chain, this isn’t true. It’s shocking to me how many people in this space really don’t know the basics.
An NFT is just a contract that implements ERC-721/ERC-1155. I can implement restrictions around the transfer functions however I like.
See the link I posted. As of right now, the stated plan is that you will NOT be able to do so.
Of course, Ubisoft could in a theoretical world also not do that stuff, but the point is they could also allow you to transfer your games using a centralized service. The NFTs don't force them to be more open or customer friendly, if they were customer friendly they would already be allowing you to download games without DRM or transfer them around. They could already offer you a Steam key with every game you bought from the Ubisoft store; it's corporate politics and competition between Ubisoft and Steam that prevents this from happening, not technology.
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What Ubisoft demonstrates so well here is that the incentive structure behind NFTs also doesn't really seem bias companies towards being more open. There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game.
What you're seeing with Ubisoft is not going to be an exception, this is going to be the norm of how companies work with NFTs. A quick heuristic you can use: releasing a game DRM-free is easier, cheaper, simpler, and more directly beneficial to consumers than building a consumer-friendly NFT system; so whenever you look at a company that says they're going to work with NFTs, do yourself a favor and check to see if their games are currently DRM-free. Do they currently allow game trading/gifting? If they don't, then I think it's a strong probability that their NFTs are going to look more like Ubisoft's and less like the ethical systems that people imagine and hope for. Because I can't stress enough that it's not hard to build the systems and restrictions on the blockchain that Ubisoft has, it really comes down to corporate choice about how they proceed rather than the technology.
In short, NFTs offer no additional positive incentives to be more consumer friendly, and the technology doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before with good-old-fashioned OAUTH or signed public databases. If Ubisoft wanted to allow game transfers, there are dozens of ways they could do it today, many of which could survive as authentication mechanisms even if the company folded. Game ownership on the blockchain is not going to go through the kind of revolution that people suppose. My advice is, if you want a revolution in game ownership then lobby to reform copyright and/or establish a legal digital right of resale. If you want to more directly protect your games, boycott and criticize companies like Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/EA/etc that bundle DRM into their storefronts.
"All the content you buy from Ultra, such as games, DLCs, and virtual items, are on-chain digital goods you truly own. On Ultra you’re in control of your assets as though they were physical items. These assets can be sold, traded and given away to your friends within Ultra, or outside of Ultra, through 3rd party marketplaces and mobile apps."
They might if they contractually agreed to honor it. But even if they were inclined to offer such licenses (lets say consumers everywhere demanded it), there's not many meaningful enforcement advantages of shoving NFTs in the mix.
As a consumer such a contract could (including transferability) could exist without an NFT, and be just as enforced by the (centralized) judicial system or consumers voting with their feet.
Maybe I am also salty that I was one of the "early adopters" who saw this glaring flaw and missed out on a fortune because I understood the technical side. Right about the technology, wrong about the adoption I guess.
Owning a physical copy is not helping me play the game as Bliz has decided that license is no good.
An NFT could have the same experience. Nothing forcing the vendor to honor it.
Seems if NFT game licenses worked the way they are being talked about in this thread then there would be no way to ban players for bad behavior because it would be out of the hands of the developer. Which clearly isn't true.
Deleted Comment
What about proving ownership, on the balance of probabilities, to show tortuous damages in a court? Seems like a list of receipts that's somehow certified would be beneficial to that end?
Probably first we need legislation to make digital purchases resalable, and to require DRM free versions to be made available if a product is EOL-ed.
Companies world copyright against the populous who are [in a functioning democracy] the ones who give them the copyright in the first place.
I think an Amex statement from 1999 would stand up just fine in court if you had a scanned copy sitting in your Dropbox.
Maintaining a list of receipts and transactions is basic finance. This still has not much to do with technology.
NFTs aren’t magic. The issue here isn’t proving ownership, it’s that the thing that was owned (a license) is not the thing people really want to own (the game). I can deploy an NFT that replicates the current system 100%
A receipt?
It's an illusion to think that they are, but they aren't. The stolen art that is put on NFT's from artists is still the artists one and not from the NFT creator.
Eg. https://opensea.io/DisneyCollectibles
Ontopic: the company that creates the software/game owns your account, there is literally 0 benefit for them to use a NFT.
It seems to me in that sense a NFT could help - you can get the MP3s anywhere, but the NFT proves you actually paid for it.
Of course there would have to be a way to get the Ubisoft games, or they would have to play along.
Ubisoft doesn't need NFTs to let people transfer their games to a new account, and they don't need to let people transfer their games just because they've given you a fancy commemorative memento of the time you gave them money in exchange for not owning a game.
It’s one of the many reasons games are digitally sold now: there’s no physical artifact the owner can sell to someone else.
Why would Ubisoft intentionally create a way for homes to be resold without them getting a cut?
That may be how some NFTs are utilized. But it’s probably better to think of an ERC20 (tokens) and ERC721 (NFTs) as self executing code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The difference between the two is that ERC20 standard is self-similar and the ERC721 standard is uniquely identifiable.
Sure you can mint an NFT with “whatever record” you want in theory, if the NFT isn’t minted within a given self-executing smart contract, then your NFT is immediately recognizable as bullshit.
You are simultaneously suggesting there is no need for a technological solution, the answer if forcing Ubisoft to act a certain way, whereas the technological solution removes the need to trust Ubisoft to act a certain way or force them to when they don’t.
Right, and Ubisoft is making NFTs right now, that will use that self-executing code to implement customer unfriendly restrictions on who can own and transfer the NFTs.
If your self-executing smart contract says "you lose the games when Ubisoft bans you or goes out of business", then you've gained nothing. "Ah", you say, "but what if Ubisoft decided to be nice and customer friendly?"
But this is Ubisoft. That's not going to happen. :)
That wouldn't be a problem with NFTs as they could just go to another game provider, show their proof-of-ownership and download their games from there. Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.
Furthermore NFTs would allow used game sales, something we have lost with the switch from physical to digital, despite it being required by law in many countries. A signed recipe is nowhere good enough, as that still depends on your account at Ubisoft, e.g. to keep track of if you refunded the game or not.
Now getting the game industry to actually implement and use an NFT based game-ownership system, that's the tricky part. But claiming there is no technological problem that needs solving is ignoring all the freedoms we lost by going digital with our purchases and that could be regained with NFTs.
Just saying NFTs will solve it even if Ubisoft goes rogue completely ignores other things that would need to happen too - ie how do you avoid double redemption and multiple installs?
...nothing says an NFT needs to be arbitrarily transferable. Again, Ubisoft is launching an NFT that has a huge laundry list of conditions around who can own them and when and how you are allowed to transfer them.
If Ubisoft won't let you transfer your Ghost Recon pants NFT to whomever you like, why would they let you transfer an NFT representing a game?
> Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.
Again, this is not a technical problem, it's a legal and economic problem. And as you say, we already have this feature (without NFTs), so why do we need NFTs? I bought a copy of Satisfactory on Epic; I'd like to play it on Steam. There's is zero technical reason why I can't go through some basic oauth flow to verify that I control both accounts, and let me remove the license from Epic and add it to Steam. Or even better, let me press a button and turn my copy on Epic into a product key that I can paste into Steam, or resell on Ebay. Wouldn't that be cool?
And why doesn't this exist? Well, because the companies involved (markets and publishers) don't want it to. So, well, yes, you could also solve this is a much more difficult and expensive way (with NFTs), they don't want that solution to exist either.
Steam already had a very well functioning marketplace for transferring digital items including - in very limited cases - games between accounts. Why can't I sell the copy of Portal 2 I've finished? Again, no technical reason, but because that's the last thing they want people to do.
NFTs are a bunch of worthless bullshit.
Which is why publishers will never do that.
Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games? That doesn't seem right (and no, I don't really care too much about what the Terms and Services say).
Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms.
'Hire this book' would be fair to use in this context.
(Afterwards I successfully converted to book to an e-book format that I owned with some Calibre plugins).
People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.
Companies shouldn't be able to shift the burden of the negative aspects of running an online service (dealing with abuse) entirely onto society by offering no meaningful appeal process. Regulation isn't an appealing option, but companies have full well demonstrated that they aren't going to handle these cases unless forced to.
right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"
That’s technologically backwards, but it’s not like justice system behavior and software industry logic always converged nicely.
My PlayStation account was blocked for online games/chat for 2 months with no clear reason, this also wasted 2 months of PS Plus subscription sice I could not really benefit from it. They did not offer any way to dispute this or clarify what exactly was wrong to avoid it.
My son was using the console to play Fortnite, he told me that some guy blackmailed him to give him gifts or he will submit fake reports, I have no idea who checks this reports and if they have competent people that understand our native language or is all just some shit AI and some dude somewhere just confirming that the AI was wight.
This incident completely changed my sentiments on Sony consoles and on top their greedy pricing and for sure I will avoid them in future.
It does not matter even if you care. You do not have negotiating power to change them. It is a 'my way or highway' situation.
And the government should be involved, you alone cannot change the Terms of Service, but your country can create laws to protect you from thieves, whenever they steal physical or digital goods. If you don't like your government fight to improve it but do not renounce to the power that it gives you as a citizen.
IANAL, but I have heard from some people who claimed to be on the Internet things that, if I have understood it correctly, suggests that this fact would weigh heavily against the companies writing the ToS if it came to a court case involving them.
I believe the relevant term is "contract of adhesion"?
Phoned their regulator, was told to register as a reseller, and call back if we still had issues.
After the registration had been finalized we contacted our new wholesaler, all that came of it was being unable to add new accounts for a few months.
The next company we had the issue with you could basically hear the face palming on the phone why they had allowed a registered reseller to open an account that didn’t allow reselling, and whether they would allow us to continue reselling or whether we should do a conference call with <name of person> at <four letter agency>.
It was basically one of those pray I do not alter our agreement further moments.
I have friends that got banned because somebody hacked into their account and fraudulently bought things. This is apparently account sharing, ban. Or filing a dispute about the charges = ban. Mass report by trolls = ban. There's a bunch of technical reasons outside your control where your account can be banned.
Most of the legal protections you otherwise would have apparently do essentially nothing when you're banned from the service / platform you are required to use instead of just the thing you bought.
This is annoying when your Steam account is hacked. This is a life altering problem when your YouTube comment gets flagged for a combined technicality of a combo-rule like "hate speech or terrorism" by calling somebody a "dummy," causing your YouTube account and all videos to be shut down, gmail account and all archived email deleted, all google docs deleted, all linked google cloud services to be suspended, and all 3rd party login oauths to be revoked. You won't be able to log into even non-google things, and further can't reset your password / login credentials or prove who you are because your email was deleted.
This entire nightmare can happen to anybody at any time for any reason. Even further, because YouTube in particular is fully automated customer support, your rebuttable is likely to be automatically denied and flagged for trolling putting you in an even worse state. The only chance you have is if you happen to personally know a higher-up human before hand that you're able to talk to.
You absolutely do.
Anyway, I agree with you. Digital marketplaces are becoming more and more important and certainly I'm sure I have a lot of money in Steam, Kindle, and various other services. It'd be nice to move away from the Wild West phase given how much money's sloshing around at this point.
This type of anticonsumerism would get so much attention if it were in another field. I can only hope it happens here.
Generally yes, and this is obviously bullshit.
- Are players that bought the game on GOG able to play with those that bought it on steam/Uplay/other when lobbies are involved
- Are there DRMs for online play that have lobbies ? If so, how are they handled ?
Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play. No GTA V, no God of War, no Red Dead Redemption, no Call of Duty, no battlefield V, which seem to be some of most selling games of past years.
I know it's not their fault but because of it, it won't fit a huge chunk of the users' needs.
That's because, even though the TOS is quite clear that you can lose all your stuff due to inactivity, Ubisoft doesn't want the risk of the court deciding the TOS is unfair and striking out those clauses.
And people want you to believe that "it is not ethical".
You didn’t buy any games. You paid for access, but as you note you don’t actually own any of these games. Please stop giving in to the doublespeak BS of these companies.
Other than the false marketing (using words like “buy”) and that DRM is toxic, I don’t see what’s really not right - it’s a terrible deal but you’re free to not partake. As long as people keep giving companies money for this kind of thing it will continue.
It’s not like being able to play the very latest AAA game is something that is hard to give up, unlike a lot of other essential software. Just say no.
(BTW, is this really the case with Steam? Last time I checked you could always make a local offline backup of a downloaded game and bring it with you; any connectivity/license check would have to be made in the game itself)
I can kind of understand if you were legitimately in the wrong (e.g. sending death threats to other users, getting a warning, and then doing it again), but in the situation where you are simply inactive for some period of time I think it’s unreasonable.
- Disable online features on the account
- Fill a complain to authorities if illegal in the user's country (in France, sending death threats online is totally illegal)
But not "Delete the account with its paid content". IMHO, the community part and game library part should not be strong-linked in such a way. If only for false positives.
Banning this type of practice gets into much thornier ground, because plenty of games legitimately do run only online (MMOs of all types, for instance), and for plenty of others, there's a legitimate reason for them to at least have an online component...and just how deeply embedded in the game that online component has to be is rarely going to be a simple matter to determine.
I don't really see a good solution to this at the moment, sadly.
Preferring games that don't do the bad thing and being willing to pay a premium for (or accept lower production values from) them is the market solution. I think you’ve outline why there isn't a legislative solution that doesn't adversely impact lots of genres of games where online is fundamental to the game and not an abusive control methods with no other purpose.
It is sad when it occurs, but that's the exact reason why governments are there: they're (theoretically) reliable powerful people that should protect us from other unreliable powerful people, in exchange of being kept in power. Any other alternative would involve violence.
The general idea behind a protection racket is that once you paid the goons, they protect you against aggression, from themselves, and others.
Why do you hate your elected representatives safeguarding fairness against large corporations like this?
Asking for regulation is kind of "gnome underpants" plan where regulate -> X -> profit. X is extremely complicated.
Let’s say you bought a bunch of things for The Matrix Online, do you expect that server to run forever? It won’t. It didn’t. Why should someone else maintain it forever? Are you getting a refund? Why? You already extracted the useful life of it.
If there’s government regulation it’s around the deceptive use of the word “purchase” it’s just a long term rental
Don't mean to sound too cranky but this "you just bought a license" crap has been a thing since software began being software. It was no more fair back then than it is now.
No one is arguing, at least I don't think they are, that a company has an obligation to keep servers running in perpetuity. But to tell me I have no portable way to retain the bits I bought--excuse me, "licensed"--from a company is just crap. If a game can run in single-player mode without a server, or if a movie file can be played, or a song file listened to, then the act of "buying" it should mean I can do that for as long as I can keep my computers running and the onus on keeping backups of those files is on me.
We call them app "stores," we use the moniker of "purchased," and the ads call them "ours." If companies don't want to let us keep the ability to independently use the software or content files we "purchased," then they should be prohibited from using the lexicon of buying things and be very explicit that this is a one-time fee for a rental that can be taken away at any time.
Being explicit does not mean burying it in a multi-thousand word document that no person with a regular command of English can understand and that none of us have the power to negotiate for ourselves.
Reminds me of some friends who had Bitcoin and “forgot” about it and only to come back with massive profits.
Not that I'm defending centralized services like Steam, because I'm very well aware that companies have happily wielded their power to randomly lock people out of their accounts (like the main subject here). But crypto isn't solving anything either (or at least not yet).
I don't think blockchain has any application here. You already have a receipt of your purchase, and noone is disputing that, so blockchain would add nothing but an extra layer of complexity. The problem is that the rights that follow with that purchase does not match what consumers would naturally expect.
this actually sounds like the only beneficial use for NFTs i can think of
If you show me well-written legislation that doesn't have generous handouts for cronies, I'm all for it.
The details are messy. And the lawmakers would guarantee the passing the most fucked up version of it with some other draconian measures bundled in there. Startup ecosystem would be in sheer panic to comply and some won't even contemplate starting a company selling digital goods/services. The scope is so insane, I am having a hard time thinking about it.
Even if a company offered a convenience service, the ideal implementation allows people to restore their account from the current function state onchain, which is what most web3 services do in an increasingly standardized and predictable way right now.
regarding the NFT's and where they store the images, many NFT classes have getter methods that tell enough about what the implementation of the digital item should look like, usually when I'm talking to people I get the impression that they haven't looked.
there are so many ways to do this right, even if they aren't passing muster right now.
How many kilobytes takes too store ownership data? I can just imagine that tracking data is thousands of times bigger.
> The crazy thing about this is that it’s perfectly legal for video game companies to delete your account regardless of whether you’ve spend zero or a thousand dollars on their games
It's a shame that we are going to fight for our digital rights because currently we have almost none because justice does not understand technology.
Companies just like to decide what is 'good for us', which ends up being what is good for their own metrics.
Reminds me of NFTs and people here arguing against what they don't understand.
But if the lack of that guarantee is right there in the company's terms of service, and you pay them money anyway, you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences.
> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to
Oddly enough, publishers DO have the right to change ToS and frequently do, and "your silence is considered consent".
This reminds me quite a bit of the gift card nonsense where you'd be charged for not using a gift card, for using it, using it too soon, letting it get too old, etc. Now the rules around gift cards are extremely strict because it was abused by merchants. It sounds like we need something similar for digital items - if you yank my ownership, you owe me back my money and in whatever currency I paid you in, not your store funny money.
I have way more rights than that. Or if not I will fight to get them. I do not want to depend on the good will of corporations. I want fair laws that control their behavior like we have with physical goods.
Oh please. Virtually nobody reads that stuff. Chances are the handful of people who cared enough to read won't actually understand it. Are consumers supposed to consult lawyers before they spend money on products now? Even if you read, understand and agree to the deal, they can just change the terms later and there's nothing anyone can do.
I don't even want to stop paying them. I want them to stop their obnoxious bullshit so I don't feel like I'm a dumbass for trying to support creators every single time.
[1]: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com [2]: https://www.gog.com
From that point on, even if you get banned you can still use your local installer copy.
I’m not sure if an offline-only key check would be considered DRM; maybe is. Realistically such a check doesn’t do much, so what’s the point in including it. Back in the day it was often required to have one of the discs inserted to play—that is definitely DRM.
Now, 30 years from now or roughly 2050, there will be a cultural and historical blackout because anything people are "buying" now are basically revokable privileges to temporarily hire games, music, and movies. There will be no single server up and running to provide today's games for people who are today young but will be middle-aged few decades from now. And, even before that, judging based on Ubisoft it looks like the "purchases" will be long gone before the service itself.
What a waste.
>“Please be reassured that Ubisoft does not automatically close inactive accounts,”
but
>inactivity warning from Ubisoft in his spam folder dated January 20th. The email stated that his account had been temporarily shut down and will be permanently closed if he didn’t click the provided link within 30 days.
So not automatic closures...but there is a live system to automate it?
I pre-ordered the latest Assassin’s Creed directly from Ubisoft thinking it was better than buying it from Amazon. It got delivered to the wrong address, so I opened a ticket. They ignored the ticket for weeks despite me sending follow ups every few days, so I eventually raised a dispute with PayPal to get a refund, which I received.
Ubisoft finally responded to the ticket at that point, saying that I “may have issues making purchases from the store in the future” due to the reversed payment. So basically, they no longer want me as a customer because I tried to get a refund for a game they failed to deliver.
It's the worst of both worlds. After the Xbox store shuts down, none of your discs will work because they don't _do_ anything. And you can't even launch the game without messing with discs because you can't rip the license from the disc- it MUST be in the machine to launch.
At least you can still sell the disc. For now...
Myspace is gone. Facebook is dying slowly hopefully to be replaced with some form in the meta world.
To make it 18 years is special but it's going to take a lot of reinvention to keep up for the next 20 years. They have the best odds but so did myspace
A good example of these online store going down would be the Wii and Wii U/3DS stores. The Wii store is already gone - it lasted 13 years.
The Wii U/3DS stores will no longer accept any payments starting 18th January 2022 as a first step towards shutting the services down. Wii U is 9 years old, 3DS is 10 years old.
Only yesterday a friend of mine fired up his Xbox 360. While the online system is still running it is a question of how long until MS will simply drop the entire thing even if it is a very minor thing to run.
There's a Twitter account that documents if games work without having access to the console's network/stores: https://twitter.com/DoesItPlay1/status/1474819155173908484
I imagine that 20 years from now you are going to have a hard time finding a working PS5 with its original disk drive.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+5+Teardown/13828...
Between that and day-1 patches that made games playable, the data on the disk will almost certainly not be enough to play games in 20 years