It’s 2024 and somehow gamers can still be shocked when a developer or publisher does something to remind them that they don’t own the games which they purchased. That the video game industry is mostly an anti-consumer one. At least, when it comes to the majority of larger developers and publishers. The latest example revolves around Ubisoft which recently closed down The Crew and not only removed it from their store but have been removing The Crew from gamers’ libraries. Unfortunately, gamers can’t get mad over Ubisoft’s latest action for one simple reason.
You don’t own the majority of games you purchase.
Over the past two decades the video game industry has been slowly stripping consumer ownership away until it has been almost-completely removed. All done under the flimsy excuse that companies needed to combat piracy. While some DRM measures, such as CD Keys, made sense, this method was quickly utilized to make those physical copies worthless. CD keys went from unlimited installations to a limited amount of times to use resulting in the physical game becoming worthless once the limit had been reached.
Sadly, the industry changed for the worse, in regards to consumer rights, when Valve Corporation released its digital distribution platform Steam that was tied into the highly anticipated Half-Life 2. It was a brilliantly horrific move by Valve to force their fans to buy a single player game that now required an online activation on top of the CD Key just so they could play it. While reasons for the creation of Steam such as easier to patch games and to prevent piracy, were sound ones, it came at the cost of consumer ownership of the video games they purchased.
However, Valve took measures to lessen the sting of the erasure of consumer ownerships by unlimited downloads if you owned the game, offering a plethora of features through the Steam platform, and saying they wouldn’t remove games from a player’s library even if a developer of publisher stopped selling the game and had it removed from the Steam Store. But there seemed to be an exception to the last offer which was contingent upon if the developer or publisher wanted a title removed from players’ libraries. Which gamers experienced with the multiplayer add-on Order of War: Challenge when Square Enix shut down the servers and announced that it would be removed from users’ libraries.
But no matter how palatable Valve has made Steam for consumers – it still doesn’t negate the fact that gamers own almost-nothing.
Ubisoft, on the other hand, has never been pro-consumer.
In fact, the developer/publisher has been egregiously anti-consumer for a long time with a history of lying about simple things such as releasing a game with DRM. Multiple times Ubisoft publicly said that Ubisoft’s draconian DRM was removed prior to a game’s release such as R.U.S.E. and From Dust only for consumers to find out that it was a lie. Why they made these declarations was most likely because game sales had dropped over the years due to the publisher’s DRM which required an always-online connection for single-player titles. A lie that was said just to trick people into buying their games. Eventually, Ubisoft went full blown stupid when the company announced that it would be dropping DRM and launching its own digital distribution platform which is, for anyone with half a brain, online-only DRM.
It isn’t cognitive dissonance when it comes to Ubisoft and its anti-consumer decisions. It is deliberate malice and deception on their part and their willingness to say anything and do anything in pursuit of the Benjamins. It’s a violation of consumer rights which they have never truly been taken to task for.
But they should have been.
As they should still be taken to court as Ubisoft continues to lie about its products. The most recent example is the ludicrous claim by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot that Skull and Bones was a “Quadruple-A” title to justify its $60 price tag. Which it isn’t. It’s not even a double-A title in our opinion.
So who is responsible for gamers no longer owning the games they purchased and who can’t get made over The Crew being removed from their game libraries?
You are.
Every time you purchased a game like Diablo 3, any Ubisoft game, SimCity, Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare, Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, paying for PlayStation Plus, and more. You bought the games at full price without caring about your rights as a consumer. Your purchases told developers and publishers that it was okay that they took away ownership from you.
Your silence made you complicit and your purchases made you subservient.
You rewarded them for spitting on you.
Especially every Ubisoft fantard who kept buying their games from a company that is on the forefront of anti-consumerism. Ubisoft, time and time again, has pushed out low-quality products because they want money and don’t care about the quality of their games or what their consumers want. And you are why Ubisoft keeps getting away with it.
Now, if you have been buying Ubisoft games and are now crying about The Crew – then stop. You have no right to complain because you are complicit in advancing the very issue you are now complaining about.
So stop crying, stop buying, and start taking steps to win back consumer rights and game ownership.
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