Larian director of publishing Michael Douse, never one to be shy about speaking his mind, has spoken his mind about Ubisoft’s decision to disband the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown development team, saying it’s the result of a “broken strategy” that prioritizes subscriptions over sales.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer’s Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it “a slow burn to a fault” in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on “other projects that will benefit from their expertise.”
This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft’s focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole “feeling comfortable with not owning your game” thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.
I mean given the massive industry layoffs over the past few years developers are already pretty used to not having jobs.
I hate how developers are the ones attributed to game industry problems. Decisions like this almost never fall on the developers shoulders, specifically the ownership quote was from their subscription service director. You know… the guy whose job depends on you not wanting to own games.
Agreed, I’m always saddened by quotes like “well the devs should have” when it’s almost certainly “the execs should have.” Unless a studio is owned by its devs, or they make up some of its leadership, which are few and far between, the devs don’t have the say on the shitty things that happen to the product they’re working on, and often when the devs have more say you end up with like Kingdom Come Deliverance from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhorse_Studios. One of my favorite games, was supported by the studio for long after it came out, and now they’re working on a promising sequel
Worst part is, they got acquired the year after release, so even if KC:D 2 is good, their games in the more distant future are bound to be enshittified.
Even worse that acquisition links back to the Embracer Group. Hopefully KC:D 2 makes it out the door before Embracer full fucks up Warhorse.
Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.
But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.
As a huge KCD fan (donated to the Kickstarter!) I have very, very low hopes for KCD2.
It will have Denuvo. Warhorse is awesome, but they are already not great at optimization. KCD on launch was rough. Amazing, fun, but rough.
Adding Denuvo is just asking for exceptionally poor performance.
In the past decade, game companies have been releasing devs after a game is finished. I have a few friends in the gaming industry, and it’s brutal as a software engineer.
Yeah, this is classic class warfare and the trajectory of these things has been moving away from developers having any say for a long time, the difference now is that business majors have finally found a killer app to convince society it is ok to destroy software development as a decent career… it is called AI and it doesn’t actually matter if it works or not, the point is to convince people it is only natural and right to treat software devs like worthless commodified contract labor that is just around the corner from being entirely obsolete.
I find it darkly hilarious how confident so many people who work in the software industry are that they aren’t about to have their future crushed by the rich. Again it really doesn’t matter if AI lives up to the hype at all, if AI fails to deliver and a market crash happens all the better since society will readily accept that as proof there needed to be a market correction on out of control labor costs for development, consolidation will occur and the labor of software development will be indefinitely and likely permanently devalued.
This should be clear as day to programmers but people who program for a living tend to think understanding programming is a shortcut to understanding everything and it leads to hilariously naive views from otherwise apparently very intelligent people.
Make no mistake this is the beginning of an awful era for game developers and software development.
Gamers be like “We don’t mind not owning our games as long as we don’t own them through the monopoly that we like, ok?”
Valve has a good track record, and you’ve never owned a game in your life. They’ve always been a license, with few exceptions. Even physical media.
The difference being that I can resell a physical media, even at a profit if there’s enough demand for it, and to most people that’s the definition of ownership.
Mostly yes, especially if you’re a big AAA publisher, so your game won’t get buried under cheap shovelware and the latest AAA slop. Also don’t forget that Steam barely does any moderation, especially once you become a power user, so hate groups will buy your game, leave a negative review, then refund it, because a YouTuber named Prof. Chud called it anti-white and anti-male…
If you’re talking about Steam, while it provides its own DRM system, games can be published on there without any DRM whatsoever, so you can do whatever you want with the downloaded files and then play the game without Steam.
I guess you could sell a literal copy, yeah. But ironically, the lack of DRM binding that copy to an account by a user makes a “proof of original ownership” harder, if that’s what you want.
That’s not how it works with digital goods, but that’s a limitation of digital goods really.
Ya I trust Steam more than Ubisoft. I feel like that’s pretty reasonable?
Sure that’s reasonable at the moment. And while it seems Gaben would never sell out, he is going to die at some point. What’s going to happen to steam / valve after that?
Lets fight the battles we’ve got, man.
The inner-circle at Valve might be tighter than we assume. The next three or four in line might be just as aligned with Gabe. There’s a chance they aren’t, but Gabe made it this far with the people he’s working with, I’d say he probably picks people he trusts.
You can get it through gog where it’s DRM free. So I would say, yes you can
Even the Stream version doesn’t require Steam. You can just run the executable. A few folks over on Reddit claim they’ve given the game to their friends just by copying the files from an external drive.
Yeah but is that technically purchasing the game, or just a license? Not that they have any means of enforcement if it’s DRM-free but you still might not technically own it.
All consumer software is only available as a license. That is how the law is written, if you hate that fact you need to lobby for changing the law.
First sale doctrine applies to some software and not to others(often having to do with possessing physical media). Their general argument that it doesn’t is when they say it’s a “license” but that license gets superseded by the first sale doctrine where applicable. It’s a general shit show.
Edit: an example of the shit show nature of this: “Can you modify a copyrighted work you were sold and then resell it without the copyright owner’s permission?” The courts are split on this with one saying yes and another saying no. And mind you that’s just pasting pictures onto things with no EULA involved. What happens if you modify a physical representation of software and resell it? If Nintendo or John Deer decided to place restrictions on the resale of consoles, forcing them to be above a certain value or in violation of their copyright license re the software inside the console/tractor, would that violate the first sale doctrine? Who knows.
EU is similarly confused about first sale doctrine as the US is. Steam was ordered to allow games reselling by a French court but eventually got it reversed on appeal, for example. https://www.bfmtv.com/amp/tech/gaming/la-justice-se-prononce-contre-le-droit-de-revendre-ses-jeux-video-dematerialises_AN-202210240308.html
This is despite the first sale doctrine being established as part of digital media in the EU with https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=A87D18058F3F93DB5719943E51D3B25F?text=&docid=121981&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=6657274
My favorite thing is Ubisoft blaming something and then gaming companies going, “Uh no? That’s just you.”
It’s all a distraction from the truth that you already don’t own games.
It depends on your definition of ownership. If having perpetual access to a product is enough then yes. But we aren’t allowed to, say, disassemble a game and use it’s assets to make something of our own. As opposed to say a spoon. Nobody can tell me how I can and can’t use my spoon.
I know you didn’t ask, but may I volunteer a car engine instead of a spoon. There’s still IP involved in a car engine, but nobody is going to tell me I cant put my VW engine in Honda and sell it.
It’s not realistic to demand to own games in the same way as a spoon any time soon. It is, however, pretty reasonable to demand you own games like you’d own a book. You can chop up a book and use it to make a paper maché dog, but you can’t chop up the words within to make a new derivative book (or just copy them as its to get another copy of the same book except for a single backup that you’re not allowed to transfer to someone else unless you also give them the original). The important things you can do with a book but not a game under the current system, even with Gog, are things like selling it on or giving it away when you’re done with it and lending it out like a library.
About a hundred years ago, book publishers tried using licence agreements in books to restrict them in similar ways to how games and other software are restricted today, but courts decided that was completely unreasonable, and put a stop to it. In the US, that’s called the First Sale Doctrine, but it has other names elsewhere or didn’t even need naming. All the arguments that applied to books apply equally well to software, so consumers should demand the same rights.
