Baldur's Gate 3 publishing chief calls out Ubisoft's 'broken strategy': If gamers need to get used to not owning games, 'developers must get used to not having jobs'

Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.

But personally, the phrase "the devs should" never bothers me. It's pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the "developer": the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.

As a huge KCD fan (donated to the Kickstarter!) I have very, very low hopes for KCD2.

It will have Denuvo. Warhorse is awesome, but they are already not great at optimization. KCD on launch was rough. Amazing, fun, but rough.

Adding Denuvo is just asking for exceptionally poor performance.

Worst part is, they got acquired the year after release, so even if KC:D 2 is good, their games in the more distant future are bound to be enshittified.

The studios owned by the devs almost uniformly don't put out complete gacha cash grab bullshit

Yeah I'm really glad I didn't get on that track even though it had been a childhood dream

Nice, thanks.

Yeah but is that technically purchasing the game, or just a license? Not that they have any means of enforcement if it’s DRM-free but you still might not technically own it.

Point me to the EU law which clearly states this, please.

First sale doctrine applies to some software and not to others(often having to do with possessing physical media). Their general argument that it doesn't is when they say it's a "license" but that license gets superseded by the first sale doctrine where applicable. It's a general shit show.

Edit: an example of the shit show nature of this: "Can you modify a copyrighted work you were sold and then resell it without the copyright owner's permission?" The courts are split on this with one saying yes and another saying no. And mind you that's just pasting pictures onto things with no EULA involved. What happens if you modify a physical representation of software and resell it? If Nintendo or John Deer decided to place restrictions on the resale of consoles, forcing them to be above a certain value or in violation of their copyright license re the software inside the console/tractor, would that violate the first sale doctrine? Who knows.

It depends on your definition of ownership. If having perpetual access to a product is enough then yes. But we aren't allowed to, say, disassemble a game and use it's assets to make something of our own. As opposed to say a spoon. Nobody can tell me how I can and can't use my spoon.

And baldur's gate 3 is one such game, it only runs the steam service (which includes a check that you actually can play the game either through ownership or family sharing) when steam is actually running so you can join multiplayer properly.

Oh so you can resell your used copy?

Sure that's reasonable at the moment. And while it seems Gaben would never sell out, he is going to die at some point. What's going to happen to steam / valve after that?

Just pointing out the hypocrisy

The difference being that I can resell a physical media, even at a profit if there's enough demand for it, and to most people that's the definition of ownership.

Mostly yes, especially if you're a big AAA publisher, so your game won't get buried under cheap shovelware and the latest AAA slop. Also don't forget that Steam barely does any moderation, especially once you become a power user, so hate groups will buy your game, leave a negative review, then refund it, because a YouTuber named Prof. Chud called it anti-white and anti-male...

Yes I do and yes one platform is in a monopolistic position and people keep defending them.

Let me guess, Windows also not a monopoly, because Linux exist, and it's just a loud minority that doesn't like their data monitored by third parties for "ad" purposes.