It's fake. He claimed he bought a Gold Edition for $94,99. There was no Gold Edition of the first game. The price tag suggest he would need to buy various DLC over a long period of time. Who refund a game you played for a month or even more?
The Crew player allegedly gets refund 9 years after buying game, following Ubisoft's server takedown
Some hope this will cause Ubisoft to walk back on its decision.dotesports.com
Quite. When a company succeeds or fails on how well they please the customer, that leads to improvements in service and quality as well as competitive pricing.
Sometimes games as a service makes sense. MMOs are the main one for me, partly because they've always been like that but mostly because a huge part of the game is running on servers that have significant ongoing costs. That makes sense to me, I'm paying directly for the costs of keeping the game running in it's current state.
It's an answer, even if you don't like it. But companies aren't going to alter their behaviour themselves, and customers really have very little ability to encourage changes in behaviour when the future of the game is unclear at purchase. Nobody knew what was going to happen with GT Sport at EOL for a long, long time, and there was reasonable reasons for thinking that it might just become a coaster. At the very least a regulation requiring clear statements around what happens at the end of life for a game would seem reasonable so that consumers can make an informed purchase.
That's what happens now. Government is bought and paid for in any number of areas. It hardly seems like a reason to avoid regulation in this particular area.
I mean, it works for me. Though I did pick up F1 2010 for $4 about a decade ago just so I'd have a reason to play the kids' XBox. (Note: they've played it more than I did, I think I've done three ten lap races and forgot about it until they cleaned up their playroom one day.)
The duration of copyright and trademark protections is excessive, and ridiculous, and excessively ridiculous, and ridiculously excessive.
www.eurogamer.net
Slightly different industry, but I as a consumer didn't certainly ask for Sony to hoover up nearly all of the American anime distribution companies in the span of 5 years, including buying out an entire distribution platform that started before I was born, banishing all of the content on it that in many cases was the only avenue available to buy it legitimately in the US, then making it clear that they only bought it seemingly purely to shut it down in favor of migrating people towards the bigger one they bought a the year prior. And tying it even closer to this thread, I certainly didn't ask for Sony to consolidate their entire operation under a single vertically stacked organization and tell people who had already invested in an existing ecosystem they bought to basically 🤬 off because they don't think the negative attention they knew it would draw really matters. What alternative do I actually have as a consumer, not someone who pirates things out of spite but someone who has money and is willing to engage in commerce and has bought thousands of dollars of stuff related to this industry, if a major international technology conglomerate is willing to throw billions of dollars to have complete vertical integration of an entire market that used to have many players on it? Go on the internet and publicly hope that Sony doesn't get involved with it; and that Netflix gets it instead so maybe it gets a physical release? Consider me not terribly impressed with "well the government may not always be 100% fair with every application of regulation for consumer's rights" as an argument vs "just let media companies do whatever they want because if they go too far consumers will push back;" as if there isn't a massively laughable power imbalance at play for that. As if companies like Sony or Ubisoft don't run cost/benefit analysis to see how many people they can actively screw over and attract negative press but still come out ahead on when they force people to Consume Product.
An unintended side-effect of going back to physical (for me, at least) was not being overwhelmed by choice - it's great having millions of shows at your fingertips, but it's easy to get lost mindlessly scrolling through options.
Yes, I also voted for Johnson in 2016.
I provided a specific example of a major corporate entity buying their way into vertical integration for an entire form of media for an entire region of the world and demonstrably making it worse, up to and including taking purchased items away from people after they had been purchased because they knew they could just ignore the bad press from doing so. You want to try justifying why someone who might have had thousands of dollars of Funimation digital titles (luckily I only had 4-ish and if I cared to make a Crunchyroll account they were all Dragonball movies) should care about poor Ubisoft's rights to only allow people to use content they sold to people so long Ubisoft allows them to have it? Or why that person should believe because any attempt at government regulation, even something as benign as requiring companies to provide a roadmap for what their long term goals for a piece of media are as was already suggested in this thread (and pointedly ignored by you), could potentially theoretically maybe lead to abuse by the government that they should just be happy that the companies are allowed unfettered ability to shovel 🤬 into their face instead?
I'd assume for a sentiment similar to what I typed, but if so why if you don't actually believe it?
If you're going to try to intentionally slant the rules to your favor, you shouldn't be surprised if someone else tries to do the same. It's that simple.
No streaming service can deliver real 4k HDR.
I mean, that seems like it describes a lot of modern problems. We already know that the justice system does not apply equally to all. It never has. So rights have never been equally protected, yet they still seem to be useful. Because at least attempting to protect rights is better than no protections at all.
Piracy was popular way back when because people were willing to pay, they just weren't willing to pay the extortionate prices that publishers were demanding. When digital stores and streaming came online, piracy went way down because people were absolutely willing to pay a reasonable price for their entertainment.
This is the most realistic response (in my mind) yet.
You are very correct. I would be MUCH happier if I knew that the game would have a VERY certain life. Buying a hard copy, to me, says that I want to access it whenever I choose to. So, putting it as a subscription would help me decide how much I want to get it.
It's true that society can run even if some of the gears are grinding, though I still find it concerning if people openly ask for more bias to fix existing biases. Protecting something is better than protecting nothing, but ambivalence to the preservation of rights of other people isn't really conductive to the former. And if we're going to allow that the people with the backing of money and the ability to closely coordinate with others of similar mind are probably going to excel at manipulating the system.
Ideas can't be owned, but if someone is in possession of an idea they can set the terms under which they will share it. If they want to offer that idea for something in return the terms can be negotiated. This is essentially what's being attempted by creating consumer protection laws, but that still doesn't justify dictating what a corporation (in this case) can or can't do when it comes to business. I think the goal should be to find a set of mutually agreeable terms.
