this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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I don't even see how greed motivates this. I can't think of anyone that would go back to Ubisoft games after being locked out. Even assuming they were the scummiest of publishers, how does this give them anything other than bad press and sworn-off customers?
They're hoping this will actually entice people to come back. Following that "get people in the door first and then worry about what you'll sell them" business model, it's the same logical reason that Costco has super cheap hot dogs that they lose money on, and Epic Games has free games every week. It's just to get you to into a position where you can be marketed to.
That's the more "amicable" business strategy though. The more sinister possibility is, well, a constantly running app (the Ubisoft launcher is configured to start on boot by default, and even if you turn that off it spawns a background process as soon as you click on it at least till you reboot), always online with full user permissions and filesystem access is a very powerful thing, you've gotten yourself a pretty capable Trojan virus that people are willingly installing and granting whatever permissions you need! Plenty of Windows users are also in the habit of using the admin user with system access for literally everything, which makes it even easier for them to exploit.
They can't even show me the store on a language I want to see it in. They just arbitrarily decide I should be looking at it in french. Despite having my profile specify English. Despite having my entire launcher on English. French is the only language I'm allowed to see the store in.
And they wonder why i never buy shit from their store....
Getting people to come inside and have a look is a good strategy if they can make sense of what you're selling and under which conditions. Entering a shop with shiny pictures and everything explained in Arabic means I won't be spending money there as I can't figure out under which conditions I'm buying anything.
I get this all the time in Switzerland, with just about every online portal / service.
It's pot-luck if I actually can get something in ENGLISH that the UI is set to.
SAMSUNG - Always in German Microsoft - Always in German EA - Always in French UBI - Always in French Netflix - Getting better, but most of the older content only has German subs / localisation.
Geolocalisation needs to fuck off, just as these corporate tosspots need to.
It's not like you, the end user, know which language you prefer.
I can get behind them doing an estimated guess based on location, but I'd rather have it as a pop up when I enter the site.
" Hey, we see you're coming from Switzerland so we've set the language to German. Click continue to proceed in the German or click one or the other languages to switch!
Thanks for visiting".
I honestly don't understand why they make it so hard. And every time it looks like they fixed it. A few months after somebody decided it's working a little too well and reverts it back. Because screw the minorities ( multi lingual countries ) where it doesn't work.
Ironically I've heard that in Brussels they get everything in Flemish by default, and in flanders we get everything in French. It's like they're deliberately getting it wrong.