Gaming

They ran Ass cRee into the ground and launched Uplay with privacy violations.

I boycotted them after thinking they were one of the few good AAA companies.

Now they're going to die.

Great. Maybe a better studio can reboot Ass cRee and make it wothwhile. Or you know, just leave it the fuck alone.

Not sure what you mean. They needed more NFTs and AI from what I can tell! /s

Honestly though whenever I hear big companies like this fail, it keeps making me go back to the Steve Jobs interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM

More like, company keeps pushing for short-term profits, runs out of goodwill built up in the past.

Imagine, about five years ago, they peaked at $82.

It was also during that time when they talked about getting into Crypto, NFTs, and all sorts of other get rich quick schemes.

Now look at them.

Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.

They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.

Management will destroy this world.

Farm labor is complicated and specialized.

Pretty much. The leadership team all have a golden parachute and will be integrated back into an industry and fuck that up too.

I get needing to log in to CoD because you’re playing online

That shouldn’t be needed either. A PSN or Steam account should be enough.

That’s why I only buy from the fitgirl store.

Unfortunately, that's not how this works.

This is late stage capitalism, execs are judged on how much money they managed to squeeze out before the company died. They'll be hired immediately specifically to do it again somewhere else.

The company dying in incidental.

Love this game and that is why I have a pirate copy that doesn't do any of that crap. I completed it again last year and it was good fun still!

I'm legitimately at the point where I hope they don't pivot and are just forced to sell off their IP. There's just too many reasons to not like them.

Not just Uplay, but also their activation servers. Their games make calls to their endpoints to authenticate if you own/access the game and DLC. If those activation servers are decommissioned without a replacement, your game won’t activate and you’ll lose access to DLC.

They announced they would do this for legacy games several years ago, and I was going to lose access to all the DLC I paid for with my Splinter Cell Blacklist game that I physically owned on a Wii U disc way back in 2013. Bought all the DLC because I loved the game. After enough gamer backlash, Ubisoft backpedaled and the activation servers remain for now. However, the concern is still there that I’ll lose the stuff I paid for when they decide they can’t serve it anymore or if they go bankrupt. Without them updating the game code or open sourcing it, I lose updates, DLC, etc.

We need digital ownership reform, or else it’s piracy time again. This will especially be critical when Gabe steps down from Steam and new owners are appointed, or if Steam goes public.

That's not what they meant. The person who said it was "director of subscriptions." They meant gamers need to get used to all games being SaaS because they are of the opinion that that's what's going to happen. SaaS is capable of generating magnitudes more money than any other paradigm, so this is of course the wet dream of the bean counters.

The problem with the statement, of course, is threefold:

1. People don't like being told things that sound a lot like "just hand over your money and like it, dumbasses"
2. SaaS is also capable of failing spectacularly
3. (most important) In no conceivable world would it be possible to have every single game be a subscription service

Shit, the world can't even support half a dozen streaming video subscription services, but they think everybody's going to gladly pay monthly fees for every game they play?