121–130 of 543 posts
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I would be interested in knowing if that would be legal. As might you technically have purchased your license?
Copyright violation is a tort, not a crime. If you were sued for it, they'd have a hard time proving damages given that you have paid for a valid license.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
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> Don't copyrights preclude meaningful competition here? No. The game developer, who owns the copyright, decides what channels it gets sold through. If game developers knew that people wouldn't buy their games through channels that didn't give good guarantees of ownership and access, they wouldn't sell through those channels.
This sounds great on paper but I really don't think that feedback channel is effective in practice. First of all, when a game or a platform does poorly, the reason for that can be very hard to discern (unless there's some kind of coordinated vocal protest). "The customers are disagreeing with the fine print of our end-user license agreement" usually isn't high up on the list of reasons. Secondly, there are many degre…
Ultimately, people get the market they create through their buying decisions. The reason these market inefficiencies and misaligned incentives exist is that game distributors know that people will spend a lot of money on games and won't pay much attention to the fact that they are actually not buying ownership but only a subscription. The only way to "fix" that, if it's a problem, is for people to change their buying behavior so it is no longer lucrative to distribute games on those terms.
> The distributor might also own the developer.
Yes, fair point, I had forgotten that Ubisoft in this case is both.
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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.
Is that really practical these days given the frequency of updates developers put out for their games?
Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.
People won't like this, but we at Ultra.io are trying to tackle this exact problem by deploying certificates of ownership to a decentralized ledger as proof of your owning a game. AKA, we want to mint NFTs for each game sold, which allows a user to prove they own it. People hate those words, but we think that the tech has real value and a use-case in the market for solving inequity between publishers and users. This…
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In the NFT scenario , what would prevent people from sharing licenses?
address signing. if you give someone your address in order to access the game, they are also accessing all of your digital items and can transfer them to their own address. this is risky enough for the user that they won't do that, or learn not to. there won't be a customer support to help them, you can try to build that kind of customer support if you want though. the system would check your signature and/or check f…
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Why is that? If you buy the game off Steam or something, this implies that the creators/publishers/platforms have gotten their due compensation. The cracks and files on ThePirateBay are done on a volunteer basis, meaning that it’s not costing the game developers any money.
It is costing a developer money — someone who downloads the pirated game would’ve otherwise bought it. Game devs make money on sales. However if you have already bought the game, and then download a pirated version, it isn’t.
I'm not blaming the owner of the email account, but maybe we need a technology which guarantees that emails won't get flagged as spam. Maybe even marked as important. For example Ubisoft could register with Google for a program where they fetch a token from Google's servers, insert that token into the email header, and when Google notices this token in the header, then the email won't get flagged as spam. Only for th…
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In the NFT scenario , what would prevent people from sharing licenses?
address signing. if you give someone your address in order to access the game, they are also accessing all of your digital items and can transfer them to their own address. this is risky enough for the user that they won't do that, or learn not to. there won't be a customer support to help them, you can try to build that kind of customer support if you want though. the system would check your signature and/or check f…
With online accounts you could prevent said identity from connecting to multiple online games at once but this is notably worse than old school physical games where you could have 3 games at 3 different friends houses while playing a fourth.
Makes me wonder if we should stop multiplying complexity beyond need and go back to cartridges except now they are $5 64GB usb drives.
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> there's not an alternative way to buy them that does give you that confidence That doesn't sound to me like a reason for legislation. It sounds to me like a reason for competition. But for there to be competition, customers have to be willing to put their money where their mouth is. If there were a competitor that charged, say, 20% more for a product that included the confidence you want, would you pay it?
This is a sort of reductionist viewpoint that's ignoring the realities of the market (in this case computer games) and how monopolies are created. Games aren't fungible with each other. If you want to play Dark Souls, you have to buy it from From software. You can't go to an alternative Dark Souls provider that offers you better terms. Likewise Ubisoft has IP that fans want access to. Therefore due to copyright etc t…
But they are; you yourself give an illustration:
> Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games
> These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.
In other words, the market forces favor game distributors who do the things you (rightly, IMO) call "anti-consumer bullshit"--not enough consumers are willing to do what you did to deter distributors from doing those things. That's a free market: the voluntary choices of buyers are determining the incentives faced by the sellers. The only way to change those incentives would be for many more people to do what you did.
(I'm even more extreme than you, btw; I have never bought a single online game distributed on these terms and never expect to. All the computer games I've ever played came on CDs or DVDs.)
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> Don't copyrights preclude meaningful competition here? No. The game developer, who owns the copyright, decides what channels it gets sold through. If game developers knew that people wouldn't buy their games through channels that didn't give good guarantees of ownership and access, they wouldn't sell through those channels.
In the case of the article Ubisoft is both the developer and owner of the store