This statement was made by Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions, Phillipe Tremblay, who recently spoke to Gamesindustry.biz about the digital future and Ubisoft Plus specifically. Tremblay states that people eventually “got comfortable” with not owning their CD or DVD collections, and that a similar shift in attitude “needs to happen” in gamers.
I’ve never gotten comfortable with not owning CDs or DVDs. In fact, if I really really like a movie or album, I obtain a physical copy. If it’s an independent artist, I’ll even buy it directly from the record label.
And so far, I’ve been able to stream everything else when I just want to get my entertainment fix ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m in the same boat. I like having physical copies of my favorite games, music, movies, and shows. I also like supporting the artists/productions, so it’s a win-win that i can buy their products. I’ve always struggled to understand why someone would pay the same price (or nearly as much) for a strictly-digital copy.
Making everything fully digital has its advantages but i never once thought it would act as a complete replacement for physical media.
I’ve always struggled to understand why someone would pay the same price (or nearly as much) for a strictly-digital copy
Convenience. I’ve been in situations where it seemed easier at the time to just buy a movie on Amazon. For example, if I’m on vacation or a work trip and I really want to see something.
But that was before I learned about which sites were safe to use for streaming and had high quality content.
Also, I’ve learned that my library still has a large DVD collection, so I apprise myself of that.
Remember how the ps4 mocked the Xbox one for not being able to lend games, then the PS5 launches with a digital edition, and then a slimmer version launches with only digital and you have to buy a separate disc drive?
It’s nice that he’s being honest about the bullshittery but all the same he can shove it. Glad I haven’t bought a Ubi game in years and it doesn’t look like that’s going to be changing any time soon.
Hah. Ubisoft execs think they should be paid whenever someone produces a Let’s Play with one of their games. They’re the horniest of the publishers with respect to game streaming.
They are beyond adament that they own your experiences. If they never see a piece of physical media again, they’ll still be upset that their old games are still playable without their say so.
Even buying a game digitally from most storefronts doesn’t mean you actually own it. You simply buy a license to play it. Look what happens if your Steam account gets permanently banned for violating their ToS, you’ll lose access to any game you paid for on that account. Same thing with Microsoft or Sony. I think GOG might be an exception to this, where they will never revoke access to the games you previously bought, but I am not 100% sure of their policies.
Regardless, all gamers will never fully embrace subscription purity. There are so many games that require a lot of time to complete, especially so if you’re an adult with lots of responsibilities who can only game here and there. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is massive and I’ve owned it since launch. I’ve only gotten to Act 2 with like 60 hours clocked in and I still want to play it to finish. However, if it was on a subscription service, I’d be constantly stressed that it’d be leaving the subscription any day.
And what about classic games (includes new games that become instant classics) I’ll know I’ll always treasure and want to be able to play whenever I’m in the mood? To this day, my wife will randomly bust out Mario 64 or even a more niche game like Fable 2 and just have them be her comfort food for a lazy weekend. Hell, just a few months ago we got our our original Xbox to play some Fuzion Frenzy for nostalgia sake. Can’t do that with subscription models.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent. I just absolutely loathe this crushing pressure by corporations to force our entire economy into being rent based. Every expert economist has been warning us about the dangers of this for at least the last 10+ years, and yet consumers keep blindly marching towards it because it’s “convenient,” totally ignoring the long-term consequences.
and yet consumers keep blindly marching towards it
Consumers are being frog-marched friend, we have absolutely no control over market forces. Voting with your wallet only works in highly competitive markets
Ouch 😂 I remember playing the shit outta Fable 2; it’s a great game and holds up pretty well even today, easily one of my favourites. I always thought that Peter Molyneux got treated too harshly for overpromising, and I stand by that to this day. Dude made good games, just not as good as he said they were gonna be.
Ill wager it was just Molyneaux was a bad dev in a better age, before all games were released unfinished and had an online component, and dlc was truly dlc, like horse armor, not a part of the game deliberately withheld during development.
Games were expected to be finished products that lasted as long as you didn’t break the install disk.
If you’re old enough to remember horse armour then that reference has to be tongue-in-cheek. Nobody thought it was a good idea at the time I got weeks of mockery of Bethesda out of that nonsense 😂
I don’t think Molyneux was a bad developer, he just overhyped his games to a level nobody else has managed before or since. Like I said, the Fable games do actually hold up pretty well, and Black And White is iconic. I don’t recall encountering any bugs in Lionshead games, nobody T-posed randomly, and nothing that broke the game for me. But, I’m just one dude of course and the nostalgia is strong.
Im not being super serious but its true, molyneauxs promises became a punchline but i loved the games he made. Black & White was buggy, even had a game breaking bug (wolves or something, it happened to me too) but i still lived the shit out of it, fable i played 2 times thru back to back (super, super fun but not what he promised)
That’s what i mean. A broken promise back then was a game that wasn’t as great. Not a game that didn’t even run like that Batman fiasco, or many online only games that don’t even run stable at launch, etc.
He was a simple “problem” in a better age of gaming
Sadly this “own nothing and be happy” world only exists for those who don’t make hundreds of thousands for the great gift of destroying the world for everybody else.
According to their logic, you can set up a shellscript that repeatedly copies an ISO of theirs to /dev/null. That should bankrupt them after a week or so.
Tremblay’s view on physical games isn’t that shocking, considering he’s a director of subscriptions, but he does leave out some concerns shared by many when it comes to subscription services. For starters, games actually do come and go on these services right now, with the most recent example being Grand Theft Auto 5 leaving Xbox Game Pass. If you play games only via subscription services, you can very easily lose access to certain titles on a regular basis.
Secondly, games that are pulled from online stores, for one reason or another, would mean they cease to exist in an all-digital future. Two high profile example are the original Alan Wake and Ubisoft’s very own The Crew, both of which were pulled due to licensing issues. While the former eventually returned to digital storefronts thanks to the recent remaster, The Crew can no longer be bought and will poof out of existence on March 31, 2024.
I can see a lot of people being fine with that idea when it comes to subscriptions. I think people have kind of gotten used to the idea with content coming and going off of sites like Netflix.
I thought this has to do with DRM and license agreements when I first saw it.
Similar to what happened to Netflix, competing services will harm this process. Currently the most comparable to old Netflix is the Xbox Game Pass; which if companies like EA and Ubisoft pulled their games from; it would be way less prefered.
As the profits that come to these companies decrease, they’ll be more tempted to focus more on their own subsctiption platforms. Game industry has this trick up its sleeve that some games can be played 1000s of hours, but even adding games of this nature; satisfying every player with a single subscription service is impossible.
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