Another reason to not buy digital games.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
876 points (98.7% liked)
Games
32696 readers
1972 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
This is why I'm a big supporter of physical media if possible. Sure the actual game may not be on there or something because it's too big or whatnot, however with what the hell is going on with digital companies in the modern videogaming world, yeah no they simply just can not be trusted much with the amount of power they hold. This includes but not limited to: Ubisoft, Steam, EA, Epic Games, etc.
EDIT: Yeah GOG is fine apologies for that, however the well majority of games in the digital world are simply just licenses that these companies have control of.
load more comments
(2 replies)
If I liked their games, I'd be quite upset, I'm sure.
More garbage decisions from a garbage company
here I read they do not erase account like this. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/help/account/article/closure-of-inactive-ubisoft-accounts/000079595 where is the truth?
load more comments
(4 replies)
It's always ethical to pirate Ubisoft games
Not surprised, coming from Ubisoft. Didn't they try taking down the DRM servers for some of their games, effectively making them impossible to use, until public outcry forced them to relent?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Makes me wonder, how much data does it take to hold every users account info and library details? Not the games themselves, no profile pictures or anything, just the data that they must have in order too know who owns what. That has to be a huge consideration when you build an online store, right?
Did they run out of space? Are they deleting "old" accounts to free up servers for the absolute flood of new Ubisoft accounts that they're massively inundated with every day?
But seriously, what would an actual real world reason be for needing to delete accounts after X amount of time?
Totally negligible. All you need to keep is a line in a database with the person's email, hashed and salted password, and a unique identifier for each game they own - that's an amount of space that won't even register on any service nowadays. There might be other optional stuff that takes more space, like display pics, cloud saves etc but you can delete those without deleting the whole account.
Napkin maths to illustrate the point: Steam's game IDs are short numbers, typically close to 5 digits long. ASCII characters are one byte each, so let's assume 5 bytes plus one more for a separator character per game. If you wanted to store 8 billion accounts with 50 games each then the IDs would be about 2.4 TB, so a consumer hard drive worth ~$100 would do the job at least in the raw terms of data capacity
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Why do so many people, usually children, think digital games are a good idea? Absolute scam, and it's only going to get worse. Next gen of consoles will probably be all digital. You will lose access to games for seemingly no reason, everything will be $70, no trading, no selling, and no one but the big guys making a dime from the sale.
Please shop at your local game stores, don't buy digital. You are not only ripping yourself off, but helping to enable a future where you don't even really own the games you buy. Look at ubisoft right now. You bought those games. You own them. They're literally stealing games just to try and force you to buy another copy.
Con artists.
Because game store doesn't exist in my country and international shipping costs much as the game itself
load more comments
(1 replies)
Are you like 12\s :D ?
The reason digital games took off is because it was a hundred times better in every possible way. In 2006 if you didn't live in a capital of a country in Europe. (Which is most people), buying games was a fucking pain in the ass.
First of all games had a short shelf life. Like insanely short. 3-6 months MAYBE. After that go fuck yourself. If it sold superb well maybe it got a platinum rerelease, but honestly most games that platinum-d, you probably had already, because they were the must have-s for the console, and those were basically the games you could buy in your tiny video game store / supermarket(s). (What I mean is they had a very narrow selection of the most popular games, and budget games). The idea that your budget games were older bigger titles didn't exist. You had awful budget games instead. Notice those are all but gone? Thank digital distribution. Makes no sense to stop selling a game. Also owning a more obscure console like the Saturn, was pretty much out of question, because there were even less stuff for it. Also in these stores no game, unless it was LITERALLY unplayable was marked down much. There was a very real cost associated with a physical game. It was perfectly possible to lose money on a real copy, unlike a digital one.
Also more experimental games were a huge risk for a publisher. Especially lower budget ones. Distribution and cartridge printing was awfully expensive. This did get better with CD based consoles a little.
Also the way games are distributed since the 90-s is optical media. Optical media is a huge PITA. The disks get damaged real easy, often without noticeable damage to the surface, they take up a lot a of space, and the optical drive is the single biggest point of failure on any period device. Laptops consoles, desktops. The first thing that always broke was the ODD. This resulted in a costly difficult and with more exotic devices impossible repair. I have a stack of like 20 PS2-s (I know I know), that I got for effectively free, because they were useless to their owners, because they don't read disks anymore.
So this is why digital distribution took off as hard as it did. Because people remember when games were an expensive pain in the ass, and dd made it incomparably cheaper, more convenient, and let's be real here, more long lasting.
Digital software delivery is perfectly fine.
DRM is intolerable.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Thanks for the heads up, 10 year old account was almost gone, phew!
EA's Origin closes your account after two years of inactivity since it exists, not sadly Ubisoft dose the same shit! :/
I boycott ubisoft and EA. They can both go suck a lemon.
Sounds like a great way to get sued.
have some dlc there. had. no big deal, came with Assassin's Creed on PS3 I think. gave it to kids years ago. $20 maybe. got too old for games. can barely type
A part of me wants to start spreading a #PirateUbisoftGames hashtag.
...but another part of me doesn't want to bother because it's just Ubisoft games lol
Sony did this to me I'd bought quite a few vita games digitally. Left it alone a few months and then saw an email where they said to keep the account log in now. Tried to log in but they'd already wiped it.
Not falling for digital again.
It's probably different on consoles but on PC buying a "physical" copy these days is usually just a box with a code in it to download the game, no discs anymore.
Thanks. I’ve been considering buying more console games digitally. Going to hang onto physical as long as possible.
This proves why we need to regulate that digital or not, games we purchase are considered our property. Not at the mercy of deletion for zero reason. Otherwise, pirate away for all I care guys. If they treat us like this, fuck'em and their sales.