I wish more people would buy stuff on GOG, although some games there still have some sort of DRM, Kalypso published games come to mind.
Still, way, way better in terms of ownership than what other platforms offer.
I thought they had on several occasions dropped games from the store because they had DRM. Which DRM titles does GOG still have?
Last game I paid good money for was on GOG. Everything added to my steam account in the last few years has either been part of a humble bundle or a freebie from somewhere.
GOG sometimes fails to keep some offline installers up to date with what Galaxy installs, some people consider that a DRM, I consider it a service failure.
You can also find some reports checking this thread - the post in question says Beat Hazard 2 won’t run after a clean offline install on a computer without internet. Not DRM per se, as that check only happens once and it creates a savefile
The third item, while it fits the narrative, was a quote directed more towards the option of subscription services. It wasn’t really directed to gamers, but to shareholders to explain low Ubisoft+ numbers, basically saying people may need time to warm up to the idea.
Considering how many interesting indies I’ve played on Game Pass (and, ever since Tango was murdered, PS+) I think there’s merit to that (just not on Ubisoft’s platform). There’s probably dozens of old PS1 classics we never would have tried out if our local Blockbuster hadn’t had them available for rent. I mean heck, $60 was a LOT back then for those polygons.
I wish people were THAT passionate about REAL life/world problems/ injustices and make fun of the real people in power, who allow Ubisoft to do such things…
But they’re not even that passionate about this. Shitty game companies continue to be rewarded by players.
- If you try to remind GAYMURS of industry abuses after Hypernormalisation has kicked in for them, they’ll call you names.
My dream is an “internet archive” for all video games, modded to run offline. If the game becomes unavailable for purchase, the archive opens that game and makes it available for all.
The next step is for this kind of release to become law, and supported by manufacturers.
That sounds like a great plan for all types of media. We would better document our history and make so much human creativity accessible to those who cannot afford to indulge in what’s currently for sale.
Why do we not do this? Oh wait, it’s MONEY? Pfft, it will never happen.
Libraries are communist or something and ESA fights hard for games to stay out of them.
Education? Sounds very communist!
Translations of big text from left to right: “Our country should be most educated and cultural country”, “Study and work! Work and study!”, “To have more you should produce more, to produce more you should know more”.
Do this with books too. How much we’ve lost.
+1 for Anna’s Archive. It’s an amazing resource for students too, since they keep research papers and textbooks.
And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.
If you ever need to get research for free, you can usually email the researchers directly and they’ll be happy to share it for free; They hate the journals too, (because like I said earlier, they have to pay the journal thousands of dollars,) but feel obligated to use them to publish.
Even worse, that research and journal publishing was often funded by public funds and research grants. So the journal is paywalling research that taxpayers already paid for, and should be free to access.
And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.
What you’re describing here is called predatory publishing and is not the norm. It’s the “fake news” of scientific journals. I’m not “up in arms” about the original topic of making info available to the public whatsoever, just wanted to correct this part.
Some respected, high impact journals also charge for submitting.
Lower quality journals charge more and almost guarantee publication.
I just donated to them. :)
Good human.
The fast downloads 🏎🏎🏎
Underdogs was such a great site
And lots of gamers praise Microsoft for GamePass, because it’s cheap. When Microsoft’s goal with GamePass is the same as Ubisoft’s. Ms would love that you rent your games from them indefinitely. Wouldn’t surprise me that in 10-15 years you can’t buy the games made by Microsoft anymore only rent through GamePass and the subscription fee would be five times higher than now
I mean depending on your gaming style it might be cheaper.
If you play a game for a few hours and then buy the next new shiny 3A game then the game pass is cheaper.
If you buy one game and then send thousands of hours into it then obviously it is not cheap
I hear about people getting Minecraft on game pass. Those people don’t play Minecraft like I play Minecraft
Make it 5 years.
It’s already becoming low quality crap. The GamePass model doesn’t work well with expensive games since they are going for quantity. Hi Fi Rush’s devs have been taken down along with a couple more studios. I wonder if that will make a difference, though. Gamers want it cheap, companies want max profit. I’m imagining shovelware in 5 years and many games taken off of it.
I don’t mind paying full price for a game, as long as I own it in the end and that the game is not ridiculously short.
Paying 70 euros for a game with less than 7hrs of playtime to get to the end, and artificially padded with collectibles around a open world is a ripoff especially when the game requires licensing servers to be online to play, even for single-player.
The single most problematic thing where you should start to notice how bad gamepass can be is when you unsubscribe and decide to buy one of the games you’ve played only to have your savegames in gamepass gulag.
Is that true? PC, Xbox, or both?
It was on Xbox. See my other reply for the specifics. Very shitty experience and the dealbreaker around game pass since I’ve managed not finish multiple games before they dropped out of the service.
You can’t move the files?
I tried to get the save game for yakuza like a dragon and first I had to hack myself into getting permission to access the specific folders ON MY PC. When I managed that I saw that the are in some weird format that supposedly doesn’t transfer to steam for example.
I’m confused. You tell me you had to “hack into your own PC” for the files (which makes absolute no sense at all), while telling someone else this was all on Xbox. Lol which is it?
Sorry it got mixed up, it was in PC. It’s the xboxapps folder or something like that, which windows locks down as a system folder.
I really hope you’re being sarcastic.
If you’re not, and you seriously are this unable to (checking notes) move files from one folder to another… You should probably stay on that Xbox you’re now saying you don’t have.
You are really making a mountain of a mole hill, to get my save from Outer Worlds gamepass to use on steam’s version was as easy as just copy pasting the files in another folder
They absolutely are not and you are lucky you were able to get your save game out. The majority of games have their config and save files encrypted and are completely unusable as far as any other platform goes.
There are some exceptions, mainly games that have official mod support tend to have areas you can access but the majority of others won’t.
I really don’t know what to say, I did this both with Outer Worlds and Code Vein. Just went to PCgamingwiki’s entries of the 2 games, saw where the save folders are, and dropped each from the microsoft one to the steam one.
Ah, PC Gaming Wiki, what a fantastic resource. Made realize how many games in my libraries are actually DRM-free
Well it might depend on specific games, but for like a dragon it did not work out in the end.
Wish someone cracked the game with modded p2p online servers.
That does happen sometimes, but doesn’t fix the underlying problem.
Okay.
(Work in progress)
https://discord.com/invite/gUczTkphGEWow this is great! There is similar online server emulator for this old amazing game, Blur.
2010 blur? You can play it using pseudo lan network softwares. Me and my mates still play it.
Yeah I used to play via RadminVPN.
Which lan software do you use though?
Also, check out online emulator for Blur here: https://amax-emu.com/
Oh shit, I gotta find a copy of BLUR. That game was my.jam on 360.
Blur had got discontinued, so you can get it from these discord servers.
Blur discord: https://discord.gg/blur-community-537045170743541781
Blur Amax Emulator discord: https://discord.gg/pbt6DzQPGY
Or from this archive link: https://archive.org/details/blur-2010-video-game
i hate them because they remove anything that makes their games unique and make all their games have the same features until they’re all completely interchangable gray sludge.
The depressing thing is that this grey sludge is exactly what most people want. It’s the same for any form of entertainment. Pandering to the lowest common denominator is what’s most profitable.
Yeah, the problem is that game publishers are trying to reach the broadest audience possible, which means niche games with unique features and gameplay are dying out. Why bother spending millions of dollars on developing a unique game which might not sell well, when you can churn out another open world lite-RPG with grassy stealth spots and counter/parry based combat which you know will sell well.
Ubisoft is the CBS of the game industry.
How’s the lawsuit in Australia doing by the way?
Right now? Brother, they’ve been on my shit list for over a decade.
I purchased Rayman Legends on a big Steam sale because it is a great game and I wanted to play it again. I installed it. I hit play. It tried to install the Ubisoft launcher. I uninstalled it and refunded.
Fuck off, Ubisoft.
The really awful part is that there’s not really any regulation that can stop this. If you ban taking away games people bought then they’ll just switch to a subscription which is even worse
If you had reasonable copyright terms like 5 years and a requirement to release code/digital artifacts for library archival once it becomes public commons?
Except that’s not a problem in many countries so I don’t know why it has to be this way. US media ownership laws are among the worst in the world in that they are basically non-existent. It’s always been like this because we lack imagination and the companies are greedy as hell.
Like people act like this is a new problem with digital media, but it is actually the case with physical media too - there are all sorts of restrictions about what you can and can’t do with it. We basically don’t own anything media-wise, we never have. The difference is now they can enforce it more strategically and effectively with digital downloads.
Ubisoft has done a fantastic job of convincing me to never buy a Ubisoft game ever again.
Not sure that’s how a company is supposed to work, but they sure seem to think so.
Well, they aren’t alone. Blizzard and Activision is on my blacklist. As well as pretty much any studio own by Microsoft at this point… Oh, and Sony! Can’t forget about them.
The list is long.
Nintendon’t!
It’s better than what Bungie did with Destiny 2… just gutted 1/2 the content from the game, including all the story missions and the first several paid expansions.
They wanted to attract new players with a smaller download size, but the new players come in and go “WTF is going on?”
Both of those things are shitty; it’s just one of them is worse.
Whoa, wtf? How did I miss that drama, haha holy shit. I definitely remember downloading it a few years ago and being aghast at its absurd size (think it was around 120GB? which nowadays that’s pretty par for the course because fuck optimization). But gutting half your content just to save space… have they not heard of compression? Like what the hell were they thinking haha
They didn’t just remove story missions and quests and things, they removed entire PLANETS from the game. It was crazy!
That’s the most baffling MMO decision I’ve seen, tbh. WoW has plenty of issues but at least they aren’t just deleting the continent of Northrend to save on install space or anything
Bungie’s problem is they don’t really want to make a story based looter shooter, they want a free to play PvP gacha engine.
I would’ve been fine with that if that’s how they launched it. It wasn’t. I stopped when they sunset a bunch of shit the first time in the first game. I figured the second would be more of the same, but sunsetting entire DLCs is nuts.
