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- cross-posted to:
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If paying full price and obtaining a digital copy isn’t ownership, then taking that digital copy without paying can’t be stealing can it?
I legit wonder what would happen if this argument is used ( in a professional way by a professional lawyer ) in a court of law. Like, could this legit be argued to be the same?
I don’t see it going well but I’d love to see it happen. “One rule for ye, another for me” and all that
Ye, same haha
NAL but technically speaking Ubisoft would lose because they would be unable to prove that they were deprived of anything or anything was appropriated from them with their current stance. Realistically they would just pivot and find some other nonsense to try, like claiming a theft of their computer server’s processing power everytime a pirated game accessed their lobby or some other nonsense that would barely fly, but fly none the less.
What if the game was purely offline? Also, how can a pirated game access online lobbies? The last time I pirated a game was because Epic had a BL3 exclusive. And I couldn’t matchmake.
I wonder who would have to prove what. Ubi, that they missed profit (because you’d want to buy the game and didn’t) or the player (who’d argue he wouldn’t ever buy it anyway).
Well the moving party has to prove their allegations, aka Ubisoft moving to sue you means they have to prove everything they say. Since their stated public position is that they are sole owner at all times irregardless of circumstances, they would be legally barred (estoppel) from arguing that any one could hurt their possessory interest (rights and share of ownership). They essentially would have to shift the argument over, similar to a theft of service argument (not paying a train fare is a crime but you didn’t steal a train or turnstile). The question then becomes what service does ubisoft provide? Online servers that do content distribution seem to be the only thing. If you got it on the high seas you never hit their network, so all I see left with my hypothetical napkin math is all that random network traffic ubisoft games seem to always have (even offline).
Thanks, interesting, I am almost tempted to taunt Ubi that I pirated their game and try to get sued lmao.
Bravo.
There’s a number of cracked games now with online play enabled, you just need to make a burner Steam (etc) account to use it so your main one with purchases doesn’t get nuked if they catch on.
Piracy is never stealing.
Piracy by definition is stealing.
No. It is not. If you’d like a crime to compare it to, forgery would be more accurate.
Forgery usually involves submitting what you faked to some other entity in order to do something. Maybe if you illegally copied and sold that music. Regardless the penalties are similar anyway.
the unauthorized use of another’s production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
Piracy can often invovle legally obtained items or even bypassing item bans.
You pirate a movie by taking a real copy and sharing it with others over the internet by making more copies or by making it copyable.
Stealing a movie would be taking the real copy without paying for it.
You could both steal and pirate the movie, but in the context of modern media, the source material is usually obtained legally.
That’s why most torrents usually have the source in the title to show what it was taken from (DVD, BluRay, WEBRiP, WEB-DL, etc).
Piracy by definition is sharing
Incorrect. Last I checked, theft is depriving the original owner of their product or service. When it comes down to it, piracy is essentially making an illegal copy, meaning the original is still there.
I’m not sure how you drew this conclusion, since most people I know consider paying full price to obtain a digital copy to be extremely close to ownership.
I liked Telltale’s Law and Order series. They can’t sell it anymore, but I can still download my digital copy because I bought it full price.
The whole argument in the article is about monthly subscription rentals.
When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.
Audible is open about it. Well, if you dig through the fine print. Easy enough to rip copies but I’d say most people only realise they need to when they loose access. Maybe not, but $30 for an audiobook seems like pretty shity value if you’re only renting it untill you cancel your subscription.
E: I might be misinformed/ outdated.
You keep the audiobooks you’ve paid for directly with credits when you cancel.
Oh I’m very comfortable with it. In fact I haven’t owned a Ubisoft game in many, many years, and I wasn’t about to change that.
They should get comfortable with me downloading cracked versions of their games.
The developers that come out and tell people “pirate our game and if you like it consider buying when you can” will always get my money.
Developers who tell us we own nothing and should be pleased about it can get my steel and cannonballs, cause this ship is ready to set sail.
A-fucken-hoy matey! 🏴☠️ May the seas bless your sails today.
They actually used cracked versions of their games years ago. Rockstar were also caught red-handed using cracked EXEs.
Why not?
I don’t protest it, it’s just funny to see the companies act hypocritical.
If your games are on steam, you’re already not owning them. The only difference seems to be that steam doesn’t demand a monthly subscription cost, yet
We already have game pass so it’s not like this is something completely new either.
If this makes money, other big publishers will join and in 10 years it’s the norm.
Personally, I’ll try my best to keep buying on GOG and itch.io where I get to actually own my games.
Agree, I own a lot of games in Steam but most come from bundles or were not bought a full price. I do buy full price games on GOG because I can have a backup offline.
The only difference is a huge difference though. Pay once for a game that you can access anytime versus paying continuously for the rest of your life to keep access to a game.
Some games are not worth keeping access to and subscription may end up being cheaper, but it is trading one benefit for another.
The only difference seems to be that steam doesn’t demand a monthly subscription cost, yet
Which Ubisoft isn’t doing either. This is just Ubisoft’s gamepass style subscription, which has been available for a few years now, it’s just getting a 2 tier pricing model.
I’m not enough of a Linux user to inconvenience myself so I’m just using Steam. The cloud sync is the killer feature for me - if GOG had something like it even if I have to pay extra, I’d so use it.
If your games are on steam, you’re already not owning them
Almost as if all the “evil” in the game’s industry Valve started.
We did it guys, we found the source of corporate greed!
G*mers will do anything to avoid saying anything bad about Lord Gaben
Oh, fear not Ubisoft, I’m perfectly comfortable never owning any of your games again. Ever. Eat shit.
Well I’m comfortable not buying any of theirs. They’re in my steam ignore list along with EA 🖕🖕
Ubisoft disable multiplayer in games like splinter cell and then have the nerve to charge you 20 ducats for a 10 year old game with only half the gameplay requiring a shitty launcher and with glaring bugs that they just didn’t bother to address.
As for the future. There is still emulation. So stock up 😉
I’m comfortable with not “owning” the games I pirate.
Your move, Ubisoft.
We already don’t own our games, because we can’t sell them. We used to be able to sell and exchange games, but with digital platforms like steam, we don’t have the right to sell them anymore, meaning we only bought the right to play the game, not owning it.
Not that there are many pro NFT folks here, but even with that approach it’s still just a transferrable license that they can change to be meaningless.
You still can, that’s why - outside of a few exceptions - I only buy console games on disc, and sell them later
Can’t sell your organs either… Well, not easily.
I want ubisoft to be comfortable with me not playing their games.
What Ubi wants means fuck all to me. Yall wanted us to buy NFT guns too, see how that worked out…
They already fucked me on this years ago. One day I logged into Uplay and Battlefield 3 and my 2 other games were just fucking gone. Haven’t touched them with a 10 foot pole since.
This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.
GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.
Piracy is a very noble endeavor to keep alive. Thank you Ubisoft for keeping us on our toes instead of being complacent with trusting digital platforms. Piracy is the true preservation and ownership.
I’ve been quite comfortable with not owning any new Ubisoft games for a few years now
One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.
I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:
2021 - 23 million
2022 - 25 million
2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.
If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?
It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.
I use gamepass. I’ve definitely saved money with the amount of games my household has played.
I buy games I really like and just try them on gamepass.
The reason people I know tend to give for not using GamePass is you’re essentially paying for demos (which still exist on PC pretty often. I just bought Roboquest because of the demo.)
EDIT: Also, $12/month is a huge amount of money for me to spend on something like that. Just shy of 150/year for games that aren’t good enough to own, but are good enough to play, doesn’t strike me as valuable.
2 other people play on my account from sub accounts on the console. They each play multiple games per month. $12 is less than $60, so even a single new game each month saves me money.
Paying for demos? I’m not sure why you think there aren’t any good games on there. Halo, Starfield, Fallout, Cities Skylines, Forza, Mass Effect, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Assassins Creed, Yakuza, Dead Space, blah blah blah.
And that’s not including all the smaller games my kids have found. Human Fall Flat, Rubber Bandits, Donut County, Frog Detective are all games we found that we otherwise would never have spent money on.
I don’t support subscription only models, but that doesn’t mean some aspects aren’t a good value.
If the games stayed I’d check it out, but having a game for a few months isn’t something I find value in, which tends to be what people I’ve spoken with about it. Especially since you don’t choose the games.
Also, seriously the PC app is absolutely awful. The games work worse on it than on steam. It crashes, has terrible performance, and break installs constantly.
You also can’t mod a lot of these games, which particularly on PC is a pretty large missing piece.
That’s also not to mention the cost has doubled in two years.
You’re allowed to enjoy it, but I think it’s also clear why it isn’t taking off.
My issue with getting into indie gaming is I have no idea where to start. I always end up with some frantic platformer that doesn’t do anything for me. But I just want games that aren’t a mess on release and everyone says to go indie.
I just go by reviews, usually from people I know. The only real difference between AA/A and Indie titles now really is marketing budget and size of team. Not much else is different. You also run into issues about what counts as indie now: it used to mean without a publisher, but it seems to have morphed into ‘a smaller company.’
But yeah, just look up reviews. Games like FTL, Hades, and so on tend to become known by word of mouth.
All my friends have it. They just want to play the game once and move on
All of my cousins and friends have this, becaude they don’t care if they own the games.
I think.that most peple like it, I don’t have ultimate, because I.like to own my games.
