>Closing the online services for some older games allows us to focus our resources on delivering great experiences for players who are playing newer or more popular titles.<p>Then release a container image of your last working server software so that anyone can host it privately. And release a patch to the games to allow pointing at a private server.
You don't own your games on steam, uplay, or any other drm filled service.<p>If you want to own your games, get used to either having old games and going to flea markets to find them, or buy from GOG. I've made a deliberate and purposeful shift to buy my games from GOG for this reason.<p>Except for a stupid prank ( <a href="https://www.criticalhit.net/gaming/breaking-gog-com-shuts-down-we-investigate/" rel="nofollow">https://www.criticalhit.net/gaming/breaking-gog-com-shuts-do...</a> ) that - to this day - I am a bit annoyed by, I've greatly appreciated their service.
I read a really excellent article once (which I think was about itunes or kindle) about how the modern content delivery business model relies on creating ambiguity between buying and licensing. Like for example, the seller wants to be sure that if you lose your game you have to "buy" it again rather than just prove your identity and continuing license to use, but they can still control what device it goes on and for how long.<p>So here we have Ubisoft taking away, I presume, some amount of single player downloaded content from people who "bought" it because they don't want to maintain the servers that confirm they continue to be licensed to use it.<p>Sure, the company needs to control their resource commitments, but this sort of exposes the whole shell game. It would have been smarter of them to just unlock the downloadables when the servers go offline. It would be cheap goodwill.
The company named 2K pulls this every year where they disable the multiplayer and even single-player story-mode of their NBA 2K games that are less than 2 years old (they turned off NBA 2K20 servers in Dec 2021)
Call me old fashioned but I expect games to come on physical media, be able to enjoy multiplayer on a LAN and be able to enjoy them long after the company who created them is gone.
ubisoft be like "you know that game we released 3 years ago and are still selling for $20? yeah you won't be able to play it after September"<p>Also... can we talk about the fact that they're killing off these old games because of, supposedly, the maintenance burden... but they're keeping the remastered versions. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just use the same game server in the first place?!
There's a mixed bag of articles surrounding this. If you've bought the game on Steam or other platform of choice, you will retain access to that game. Online game play and DLC that requires the on-line component is going to be retired.<p>PC Gamer published and updated this article soon after:
<a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisofts-online-decommissioning-may-render-three-games-unplayable-for-people-who-bought-them/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisofts-online-decommissioning-may-...</a><p>Ubisoft's FAQ:
<a href="https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/help/gameplay/article/decommissioning-of-online-services-september-2022/000102396" rel="nofollow">https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/help/gameplay/article/decommis...</a>
<p><pre><code> Additionally, the remastered versions of listed games will be retaining online features.
</code></pre>
This is the summum of the fraud, they can deprecate and then resell to you what you have already paid for to continue playing the same game for a marginal cost to them.
Same as Fortnite on iOS. Epic couldn’t upgrade but at least it was playable as an old version. Then one day Apple removed the app from the purchased history so you can’t download it anymore. Unless you had it on your device or you have the ipa file on your computer.
Are they going to provide the code to run private servers or is the goal to get people to stop playing older games and spend more on new games? Is the deadpool timer ticking on GhostRecon and all the other FarCry games?
I'm a big fan of mandatory source release after a period of time. That line of belief isn't specific to this situation, but it definitely has overlap.
The author is correct about centralized NFTs not being what you expect them to be. They are wrong that NFTs are debunked. A true web3 game will never have the servers shut down. Everyone collectively pays for the server costs. Every time you do something in the game, you pay for your little slice of server time.
They make mention of Overwatch towards the end - that's sort of happening later this year. Blizzard has stated that when Overwatch 2 is released, Overwatch 1 will no longer be accessible.<p>The do say that "player unlocked content will transfer over" but you'll lose the game dynamics of the first game forever...<p>Edit - grammar
Spoiler: you didn't buy them. You just licensed/leased/borrowed them to play.<p>If you had bought them, they would be on a DVD, in your home, and they couldn't take them away.
Adobe Creative suite (photoshop.illustrator etc) started this ownership ambiguity back in the CS4 era, the last version you could buy on DVDs. There are an awful lot of people running old mac os's to keep using this version. It does phone home and has some suspicious bugs that may be associated with that so some are paranoid enough to keep their dedicated CS4 computer offline.<p>This is high cost software that people rely on for business but since that era our phones and macs update all the time in the background, rendering sw we thought we owned non operational and requiring 'upgrade$'.<p>It's insidious and has created a whole generation who feel 'ownership' is ephemeral and at the whim of the sw creator, while being encouraged to think of products like creative suite as pay as you go, pay to play rental services.<p>We really need to get some user rights laws back in place around the idea that if you buy something you own it permanently because vehicles are rapidly evolving to be rental software cash cows too.
<i>scnr</i> - I'm going to be devils advocate here:<p>First: I don't like this click bait headline. Ubisoft does not take away the game I bought, Ubisoft deactivates the online feature.<p>But saying that I totally agree with you that this is a bitch move.<p>But hey, let's think about "the system" here:<p>The internet and digital products changed some basic capitalistic processes: If you bought a conventional good, a chair or shoes, you were never able to just copy them. You have this one unit.<p>If you bought some piece of software, you could easily duplicate it and give it away. That is this great pain point that "the industry" is facing since the internet emerges (it's not the internet, I know, I'm just simplifying things here).<p>Now "the industry" tries to find a way out of this dilemma - and that is totally fair. The concept of "buying" a piece of software, a product, does not fit to the conventional concept of buying goods. A shoe is a shoe. You used it and at some point you throw it away. A software needs to be maintained. Someone needs to maintain it. It's just not comparable to a physical good and therefore the buying process cannot be applied.<p>Sure, Ubisoft could help the customer to get over it: Offer a server that you host for your own. I'm pretty sure: At some point in the future they will.<p>I don't like the concept of paying a monthly fee to use a software. Like probably most of us. But keep in mind: You cannot compare a piece of source code to a pair of shoes. So eventually we have to accept different business models like that.
> Ubisoft about to take away games you bought<p>The headline seems click-baity, and strictly speaking it's wrong - they're taking away one (online-only) game, the others are losing online features. Ubisoft pulling online support for multiple games would have been a more adequate title.
> It's worth remembering that every live service game will one day stop getting official support and eventually shut down<p>Obviously yes, and it was as obvious when those games were launched and sold.<p>> This mass decommissioning also demonstrates the preservation issues inherent to walled garden online services<p>Many game companies are not aspiring to build some everlasting cultural artifacts, but to provide entertainment today. Preservation is not some intrinsic moral obligation
As much as I don't like a company taking something away that you paid for, where is the line when it comes to online games? Most of the games on that list are from 2009-2013 which makes them all 9-12 years old at this point. At what point can you say the company has done enough, because keeping the servers running indefinitely is clearly unsustainable.