[HN Gopher] Assassin's Creed Liberation delisted, unplayable eve...
___________________________________________________________________
Assassin's Creed Liberation delisted, unplayable even to owners
starting Sept 1
Author : josephcsible
Score : 115 points
Date : 2022-07-10 21:58 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mp1st.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mp1st.com)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I think this is unprecendented with Steam. I have heard of games
| being delisted but I can't recall Valve ever removing them from
| peoples' libraries.
|
| If I owned a copy of this game on Steam I'd be requesting a
| refund immediately; they have been known to make exceptions to
| the standard 2-hours rule under special circumstances.
|
| Also, Steam has a game files backup feature, it might be a good
| idea to use that and wait for someone to figure out how to
| disable Steam DRM
| Shank wrote:
| It's not Steam's DRM -- the game relies on a server system
| hosted by Ubisoft, which is being shut down on September 1st.
| You'll still technically be able to download and execute the
| game binary on Steam but it won't connect and won't let you in
| to actually play.
| LegitShady wrote:
| its not steam, its ubisoft DRM servers
| smileybarry wrote:
| This is almost definitely because Ubisoft shipped this with
| some SecuROM-alike DRM and doesn't want to keep paying
| _pennies_ for activation servers. If we're lucky, they probably
| even opted out of offline machine keys (because "piracy") so
| that the game will stop running because reactivation will fail.
| ConstantVigil wrote:
| What will likely end up happening is the more dedicated fans of
| the series will do what others have done with old MMO's and make
| their own servers and such to ensure the game stays playable.
|
| There may be some legal issues, but once Ubisoft does this on
| Sep. 1st, there are some technicalities surrounding vaporware and
| such that make it legal to 'own' the game without ever paying for
| it, etc and so forth. Running servers to make it playable again
| as well would also be fair-game as well as I understand it.
|
| But I am not a lawyer, so if anyone knows better please by all
| means say so; but keep in mind I speak from the Canadian side of
| the law. So there may be differences that matter.
| keyle wrote:
| What annoys me about this the most is the message from Steam,
| that sort of plays along with this.
|
| "This game is no longer available for sale on Steam". No big
| deal, right.
|
| Ok, fine, but it doesn't imply the servers going down and the
| title becoming unplayable...
|
| Then 2nd message:
|
| "Please note this title won't be accessible from <date>..."
|
| Once again, accessible doesn't imply "the game won't start,
| thanks for the monies".
|
| It's a bloody shame that I can start any games from the 90s on an
| emulator and they run just as fine, even content heavy. While
| these titles are completely riddled with DRM _and_ screw you over
| after X years.
|
| Publishers need to come clean, and after years of milking the
| cow, they must have a plan allowing _paying_ customers to play
| the title they 've been enjoying all these years. Otherwise, they
| _should be forced_ to include the verbiage at release date "This
| title will stop working as of <date in the future>".
|
| This kind of nonsense only promotes cracked games.
| Victerius wrote:
| Games were already cracked before companies like Valve started
| pulling them from players' libraries. If games are cracked
| anyway, why would studios and publishers care one way or
| another?
| the_af wrote:
| I think in many cases, movies and video games piracy is a
| matter of convenience. If pirated media is more convenient --
| not just as in "free", but because it's less encumbered and
| doesn't pull this crap on you -- then paying for legal media
| will become less appealing.
|
| There's a baseline of piracy, sure, but there's also making
| the lives of paying customers more difficult so that piracy
| becomes the preferred option.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Whats the matter? Don't you like interpreting PR-speak? \s
| everdrive wrote:
| Don't buy Ubisoft games, clearly. Games which require servers to
| work at all (vs. just the mulitplayer components working) are
| also a big no. This is likely a good thing: it will educate
| gamers about unnecessary DRM.
| lousken wrote:
| That's why games like these should have dedicated servers as an
| option. Why is this acceptable in the cloud era where everyone
| can spin up their own server for a few bucks?
| cmckn wrote:
| I think it's a nice idea, but it just won't happen.
|
| The game companies won't offer managed game servers, because
| it's a totally new, small-market line of business outside their
| core competency. They won't open-source the server and let
| users run it themselves, because myriad licensing/IP/legalese
| reasons. Even if they did open source it, the stack likely
| isn't designed to scale down to a few bucks a month on the
| public cloud -- most users interested in running their own
| server wouldn't be happy with the actual cost of doing so. The
| handful of folks willing to pay for it won't move the needle.
| josephcsible wrote:
| You make it sound like this is a hard problem that studios
| don't know how to solve, but it's been solved for decades.
| There's still a bunch of third-party Quake III Arena servers
| you can play on, for example.
| toyg wrote:
| There should be a law: if you sell an entertainment experience
| with significant online elements, and you shut down such
| elements, you should be forced to opensource the server. Just
| like that, dump the code wholesale on the internet somewhere.
| Victerius wrote:
| Source code is often reused in other products. Corporate
| studios would balk.
| toyg wrote:
| And? They'd figure it out. Millions of businesses have to
| deal with changes in law every day.
|
| In fact, there is a good chance this would result in
| standardising the most basic aspects of online activity
| (license checks etc) into free opensource libraries, saving
| such corporations a decent amount of money in the long run.
| josephcsible wrote:
| We'd need a way to handle all of the companies who'd say "oops
| we lost the source".
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Escrow.
| the_biot wrote:
| No, there should not be a law that forces anyone to give away
| their property. That's just complete nonsense.
|
| You should draw your own conclusion as to what you spend your
| money on, and possibly you might conclude that "buying" online
| games that can be taken away from you at any time is a waste of
| money. But you can't go from there to "we must take away
| intellectual property from these capitalist swine!".
| toyg wrote:
| Is patent expiration "taking away IP from capitalist
| swines"...? Obviously not. IP itself is not a natural right -
| it's a legal construct with clear limits.
|
| The nonsense is thinking that requiring certain interests to
| follow rules that benefit society, is "taking away
| intellectual property". Any such law would obviously not be
| retroactive, so any publisher could decide whether they want
| to produce any such online element going forward. If they do,
| they will know their work will have to be disclosed on a free
| license at the end - effectively working in the same way as
| patents.
| the_biot wrote:
| I think the solution to this terrible behavior by Ubisoft,
| EA etc is what I said -- people need to stop putting up
| with it by not buying these games in the first place. You
| can't throw a law at every shenanigan these companies throw
| at their customers.
| toyg wrote:
| Oh yes, you absolutely can. Commercial law is so vast
| precisely because people have always misbehaved in
| pursuit of profit.
|
| _> people need to stop putting up with it_
|
| What I'm going to say might sound paternalistic to you,
| but it's the truth: most people don't really think that
| hard, generally speaking, and certainly not when it comes
| to satisfying their entertainment needs. That's why we
| have laws to protect the general public from predatory
| behavior in finance, hospitality, etc etc.
|
| This is predatory behavior, and it's now enacted at a
| scale that makes it parasitical - fleecing more and more
| money from the general consumer. A public response would
| be absolutely justified, in the same way it's absolutely
| justified what we're currently seeing going down with
| Apple's and Google's appstores.
|
| Otherwise we will continue to sleepwalk in the cyberpunk
| dystopia where corporations own our lives in practice,
| while being 'free to choose' purely in theory.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Right now, the law forces you, the consumer, to give away
| your property, the copy of Assassin's Creed Liberation that
| you bought. (Don't believe me? Go ask a lawyer if it's legal
| to crack your copy's DRM to keep it working after they do
| this.)
| dbetteridge wrote:
| https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/full-federal-court-con...
|
| Sounds illegal if anyone is based in Australia and feels like
| giving the ACCC a nudge.
|
| "This case sets an important precedent that overseas-based
| companies that sell to Australians must abide by our law. All
| goods come with automatic consumer guarantees that they are of
| acceptable quality and fit for the purpose for which they were
| sold, even if the business is based overseas,"
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Hm, sounds as ironic as when Amazon was taking away ebook copies
| of _1984._
| toyg wrote:
| RMS had predicted all this, as usual.
| sylware wrote:
| We know ubisoft has been a sidekick of microsoft (in my country
| they are the same ppl). But removing that big game from PC, very
| weird: maybe they don't want to maintain technically the game
| anymore, or go to epic.
| [deleted]
| zac23or wrote:
| That's theft. The theft pure and simple, ancient, which has been
| around forever. Nothing new.
| shbooms wrote:
| Unfortunately, per Steam's TOS, you do not own anything you
| "purchase" on their platform. Instead you "subscribe" to access
| of whatever games/other content you've paid for:
|
| _...the rights to access and /or use any Content and Services
| accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as
| "Subscriptions."
|
| ... The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your
| license confers no title or ownership in the Content and
| Services._
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement
|
| To me, that's their business if they want to operate that way
| and folks can choose to accept that and be a customer if they
| so desire. I think what's really wrong is that nowhere on their
| store pages do they use the word "Subscription" and instead
| they use the word "Purchase". This should not be allowed and is
| false advertising, plain and simple.
| donatj wrote:
| Given how decent a company Valve is, and the rules they put on
| things for sale in their store, I'm honestly surprised that Valve
| even has store terms that allow this kind of shenanigans.
|
| If I was them I would lock that down, because this is a bad look.
| chrysoprace wrote:
| Wouldn't be surprised if the ACCC (Australian Competition &
| Consumer Commission) went after them. This is almost certainly
| breaking the ACL, and all customers would be eligible for a
| refund.
| smileybarry wrote:
| > Do note that this doesn't appear to be affecting the Remastered
| rerelease, though keep in mind that would require an additional
| purchase as the original release does not grant you access to it.
|
| Ah, great. So poor little Ubisoft doesn't want to pay for the
| activation servers of Liberation HD _and_ Liberation HD++. How
| nice of them to drop just the older, original version and not
| even offer the working remastered version to existing owners.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > not even offer the working remastered version to existing
| owners
|
| I can't believe they're not doing this. The remastered version
| is frequently on sale for just $20, and revoking access is
| clearly a PR nightmare.
|
| If Ubisoft so dearly needs to shut down these servers, why not
| just gift existing owners the upgrade?
| toyg wrote:
| Probably because the cost of the PR nightmare is either not
| easily quantifiable, or simply an acceptable loss; wheras the
| potential "forced profits" by people having to buy the
| remaster are fairly easy to predict.
| olodus wrote:
| When something like this happens they should be required to hand
| over the server software. Even better would be to have to open
| source the code but atleast give out the server. Then the company
| would have a choice; either you pay for the server but can keep
| the game harder locked down for Intellectual property reason or
| whatever. Or you can cut the server cost but risk loosing a bit
| of your control over it.
| yomkippur wrote:
| so there's no way to get a refund???!!
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe with more punctuation there will.
| jrh206 wrote:
| Why?
| hatsuseno wrote:
| Publisher is financially incentivized to kill the servers,
| maintenance, and bugfix time for this title since single
| purchase licenses and long term online infrastructure
| requirements are financially incompatible.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| There is a whole single-player game in there that doesn't
| need online connectivity.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Yeah. It's bizzare and insanely cheap of Ubisoft to not at
| least patch the game to work single player offline for
| people that already bought the game.
|
| I'm pretty sure my older Vita cartridge of Liberation will
| keep on trucking too...
| toyg wrote:
| Ah, but if you're playing offline, obviously you're a
| filthy pirate.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Ubisoft will disable online services and paid DLC for other games
| too.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/95177-ubisoft-disable-
| online-f...
| glotchimo wrote:
| > To play the solo campaign, you will have to set your console
| into offline mode.
|
| I'd like to think this would be an easy patch to at least let
| people down easy, but I don't know much if anything at all in
| this context.
|
| Why couldn't they just release an "flick a switch off" update?
| And why would this be required in the first place?
| yomkippur wrote:
| think their office in Quebec is losing talent too after they
| enacted that bill mandating French language. English speaking
| engineers are leaving Montreal.
| mikl wrote:
| Is this even legal everywhere? Can they just pull the game people
| had paid for, without providing a refund in countries with
| consumer protection laws?
| oblak wrote:
| EA has been routinely shutting down game servers for almost 20
| years now. Legal or not, I cannot say.
|
| In any cause, the usual targets seem to be games with annual
| releases. Apparently, people love buying the same games over
| and over. While it sucks, this is clearly not on the same level
| as Blizzard shutting down StarCraft battle-net servers. Lots of
| people would be rightfully furious.
| the_af wrote:
| Game servers require a cost to operate (in money and people)
| and I don't expect them to stay up forever.
|
| What's the excuse for forcibly shutting down the single
| player experience though?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Shutting down servers is 1 thing. Breaking the single player
| game is another.
| oblak wrote:
| Your biases may be showing here. I think shutting down
| servers is just as bad as removing single player games from
| people's libraries. The end result is quite the same for
| the customers: they can no longer use the products they
| paid for.
|
| In my case, the last Ubi game I purches, and played, was
| released back in 2003. Hopefully that clears my stance on
| this particular company
| shbooms wrote:
| Steam's TOS pretty clearly states that everything you
| "purchase" is basically just a licensed subscription to that
| content.
|
| [0] _...the rights to access and /or use any Content and
| Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this
| Agreement as "Subscriptions."
|
| ... The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your
| license confers no title or ownership in the Content and
| Services._
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement
| alexklarjr wrote:
| pffft, just download it from torrent, as you do for any
| abandonware and Nintendo games, it had been cracked for 10 years,
| what you are expecting, windows backward compatibility or
| respecting your rights by Steam, created by former Micro$oft
| employee?
| bnj wrote:
| If platform licensing arrangements don't protect customers from
| losing access to purchases, they should be forced to advertise
| them as rentals or leases and not something the consumer is
| buying.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| France tried
| https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-09-19-french-cou...
|
| Then steam said you don't own the games they are selling to you
|
| So you buy games that you don't really own with a 30% tax on
| the developer's paycheck on top of his local taxes, thanks
| Valve!
| convolvatron wrote:
| its really puzzling how a technology so perfect for lowering
| cost of entry and promoting disintermediation has done the
| exact opposite.
| tuxie_ wrote:
| The tech did its part, the costs are lower, just that the
| margins of profit are much bigger now.
| choward wrote:
| They keep using this word "own" throughout the article. I do not
| think it means what they think it means.
| rvz wrote:
| You will own nothing and you will be happy. All your digital
| games gone like I said before. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970488
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This is why I purchase all of my games physical.
|
| Edit: To clarify I have stopped buying any big titles on PC. I
| may splurge $2-5 on a key site but that's about it. I own console
| games because I want to leave my grandkids something.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I do not understand focus on digital delivery platform. Seems a
| red herring.
|
| If you bought this very same game on DVD, would it not still
| require same activation servers? It's my understanding this is
| ubisoft the publisher activation thing, not steam the delivery
| platform thing.
| throw7 wrote:
| My "moment" came after purchasing Batman Arkham Asylum and
| being hit with a request to create a Games for Windows Live
| Account. You could skip the GfWL account creation and I did.
| Soon thereafter was an update. I updated and found all of my
| save games were lost. Ohh, you didn't create a GfWL account,
| too bad you didn't create a GfWL... that's the supported
| configuration.
|
| I stopped following and playing most AAA games at this point,
| but I was already getting older anyway. I still play video
| games, but I'm much more careful about the above such things.
| smileybarry wrote:
| GfWL tying your saves to a profile was extremely mean
| spirited. They justified it by "you need a profile to save
| games" as if you're on a Xbox 360 designed with that
| requirement. Which amounted to a folder with your account ID
| + saves encrypted with your account key.
|
| Offline profiles were added at some point to alleviate this
| but, they could've just started with null profiles and saved
| all that, clearly GfWL adoption was more important.
| tenryuu wrote:
| Assassins creed games as far back as AC2 on PC had uplay
| bundled on their game discs. Physical copies don't get around
| DRM, only distribution
| cardanome wrote:
| Physical games can still have DRM.
|
| The best way is to buy at https://www.gog.com/
|
| They offer lot's of DRM-free games, even newer titles so you
| can actually own the games and back them up wherever and
| however you want.
| smileybarry wrote:
| On PC you're actually at a disadvantage if you do. At best it's
| just the same as digital (boxed Steam key), at worst it's some
| alternative DRM that stops working _much_ before Steam
| /Origin/uPlay does, e.g. SecuROM, Games For Windows LIVE, etc.
| josephcsible wrote:
| That doesn't help though. Consider the Orange Box (HL2, TF2,
| and Portal). You could buy this on DVDs from a brick-and-mortar
| store, but playing it required you to set up a Steam account
| and activate it there.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| I distinctly recall buying HL2 from a store named "Game"
| shortly after release, only to find it required some shit
| called Steam, and the Steam key had already been redeemed.
|
| Eventually got a working key after returning to the store and
| complaining vigorously, and then had to wait approximately a
| million hours for the game to update itself over our shit
| tier dialup connection and eventually become playable.
| brians wrote:
| That's a good start! But it doesn't always help; I have plenty
| of physical copies of games that won't work without Ubisoft
| servers.
| scoot wrote:
| If only it were that simple. A physical DVD simply reduces the
| download time. It typically still copies onto the console HD
| (the DVD being used as an annoying proof of ownership.), and
| still depends on online services.
| trentnix wrote:
| Does it? I had an 80+ GB practically-day-one-download waiting
| when I bought Forza Horizon 5 for my XBox. The disc might as
| well have been a blank.
| scoot wrote:
| Which is why I said typically. It's still an annoying
| dongle though.
| klyrs wrote:
| DVDs can hold up to 8.5GB of DRM client software.
| the_af wrote:
| > _" This is yet another reason why owning digital games is
| frowned upon by some consumer groups, as you technically never
| own the game themselves given this thing can happen."_
|
| I think things like GOG or Humble Bundle are better, because they
| don't "phone home" when you try to play games you bought there
| (unless, of course, they are actually Steam keys).
|
| They could get delisted, but if you backed up the game you can
| still play it.
|
| That said: what a crappy situation. Are they at least giving the
| money back to customers?
| Shadonototra wrote:
| looks like there are some people at ubisoft willing to do
| everything to lower the stock price
|
| looks like they'll get purchased soon, microsoft behind the scene
| perhaps?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-10 23:00 UTC)