Ubisoft Teaches Customers They Don’t Own All That DLC They ‘Bought’
from the you-be-tricked dept
While we were just discussing how everyone occasionally gets reminded that for many digital goods these days you simply don’t actually own what you’ve bought, all thanks to Sony disappearing a bunch of purchased movies and shows from its PlayStation platform, this conversation has been going on for a long, long time. Whereas the expectation by many people is that buying a digital good carries similar ownership rights as it would a physical good, instead there are discussions of “licensing” buried in the Ts and Cs that almost nobody reads. The end result is a massive disconnect between what people think they’re paying for and what they actually are paying for.
Take Ubisoft DLC for instance. Lots of people bought DLC for titles like Assassin’s Creed 3 or Far Cry 3 for the PC versions of those games… and recently found out that all that purchased DLC is simply going away with Ubisoft shutting game servers down.
According to Ubisoft’s announcement, “the installation and access to downloadable content (DLC) will be unavailable” on the PC versions of the following games as of September 1, 2022:
Assassin’s Creed 3
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
Driver San Francisco
Far Cry 3
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Silent Hunter 5
DLC for the console versions of these games (which is verified through the console platform stores and not Ubisoft’s UPlay platform) will be unaffected, when applicable. Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 3 are also available on PC in remastered re-releases that will not be affected by this server shutdown (though the remastered “Classic Edition” of Far Cry 3 is currently unavailable for purchase from Ubisoft’s own website).
A notable addition to all of this is that the full version of Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD was on sale merely days ago on Steam’s Summer Sale, but that title is going to disappear from Steam entirely on September 1st as well. Read that again. The public bought a game title on Steam for 75% off, thinking it was a great deal, only to subsequently learn that they have 60 days to play the damned thing before it becomes unplayable.
This is not tenable. The consumer can only be jerked around so much before a clapback occurs and losing purchased assets based on the whim of the company that sold them isn’t going to be tolerated forever. And while I’m loathe to be one of the “there should be a law!” guys, well, there should be legal ramifications for this sort of thing. There are other options out there that would not remove purchased items from people, be it local installations, allowing fans in the public to host their own servers, etc.
Instead, Ubisoft appears to be joining a list of companies that believes it can sell you something and then take it away, all while including that same something in some bundled release afterwards.
Filed Under: dlc, ownership, video games
Companies: ubisoft
Comments on “Ubisoft Teaches Customers They Don’t Own All That DLC They ‘Bought’”
I already will not buy downloadable content, be that movies, music, nor games. Music sellers such as Microsoft and Rio taught me that lesson and it’s one that holds true today.
Since there are no guarantees for most downloads, barring places like GoG, there is no need to waste my money on something sure to go down sometime in the future. Be that lack of profit, or the wish to double down on sales, or licensing squabbles, shutting down servers that authorize your purchase to be used again.
Now when I see an on line purchase of such, first thing that pops in my mind is “NO SALE”.
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What guarantee does GoG have? Even they could potentially one day shut down their servers with your game library on them.
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GoG’s games come as DRM-free, downloadable installers that don’t need activation. You are free to make as many backup copies of the installer as you want.
And yet Sony, Ubisoft et al. wonder why people pirate their wares…
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They know why. They don’t care.
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Considering the DRM they use, I think they do care. They’re just clueless as to what the solution actually is.
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Considering the comment you made, you’re clueless as to what was said by the previous two commenters.
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Game DRM in the modern Era is made with the understanding that it will eventually be broken if the game is any good at all. They mostly just want to extend the period where the new game is selling for $60 and isn’t cracked. So many of their sales are in that initial release window, and if the game is cracked in the first weekend they’re convinced it will eat heavily into their sales.
Of course, it’s still a bad justification to lock games down with DRM, especially given the DRM in use. But that’s why they act the way they do, even though they know that DRM will eventually be cracked.
Customers, boot your flash drives. You bought it, you should get to keep it.
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It only reinforces my want to make all games I buy portable.
“The consumer can only be jerked around so much before a clapback occurs”
Oh come on now, I know you’ve heard of Nintendo…
Ubisoft has decided to tell them to hold their saki.
Why not give it all away at this point?
So I’m not at all familiar with gaming, so this might just be naivety on my part. If they are no longer going to be selling DLC for these games, why not just make all the DLC free to everyone and allow it to be downloaded locally? Is that just to consumer friendly or are they still trying to make money off the DLC?
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Mainly it’s because of the 3M principle;
“MINE! MINE! MINE!”
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Because then they would have pissed off the people who paid them to unlock the content, so it makes much more sense to take it away. (I know it hurts the brain, but this is how they think. I mean they sold a game & didn’t warn the buyers that they were turning off the servers for it in a month… thats REAL smart.)
Given how various companies have been taking away with 1 hand just before rolling out something “newer better” (thats absolute crap) I would not be shocked to see them roll out some newer remastered version that requires a full purchase of the new old product & to purchase the “remastered” dlc sometime in the near future.
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I don’t know for sure but I think they have maybe three options: spend time and money updating the servers to automatically approve DLC requests and spend more money keeping them running; spend time and money updating and re-releasing the DLC to not require server side approval; or shut down the servers. So you can see why they’re going with option 3.
A bit confused
Steam games are downloaded and installed locally. They don’t just magically disappear once pulled from the store.
So why won’t these games continue to work after delisting?
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I can see you’ve not been reading Techdirt for long. Steam has an online requirement for all its games, which is what’s pushed customers to other platforms.
Nah.
If the industry hasn’t already conditioned them to accept this state of affaors (something that wevall should ve vigilant about), they don’t care enough to make a fuss.
People don’t care enough to make a fuss outside of complaining on the social media of their choice. And they’ll still take the assfucking they were given.
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People don’t care enough to make a fuss outside of complaining on the social media of their choice. And they’ll still take the assfucking they were given.
You… haven’t read the comments on any of the various posts about this issue, have you? Please go and do so, then come back and comment again once you’ve seen people talking about why DRM on Steam is the reason they buy from GOG or itch.io, for example.
It's Hard Being A Prophet
I’ve been taking flak for years, from EVERYBODY EVERYWHERE, about my continued preference for physical possession of physical media — from records and tapes, to CDs and CD-ROMs, to DVDs and DVD-ROMs — over merely the ability to ACCESS media through one or another streaming service, website, or similar platform. My stated reason for this is PRECISELY that “I don’t want somebody else suddenly deciding to remove content that I’m counting on being able to access.” That is to say, I spotted the problem with non-physical media RIGHT AWAY, the second it first started to become a phenomenon. It never fails to amaze me that pretty much the WHOLE REST OF THE WORLD takes somewhere between five and thirty YEARS to spot the same problems — often, not until the problems ACTUALLY HAPPEN, at which point it’s often way, way too late to do much about them.
That said, I do have a subscription to Netflix, but other than that I rely on free streaming services and the continuing availability (thus far, anyway) of the option to buy the stuff I REALLY like, on physical media. Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope they keep making players, and TVs, and …