Larian director of publishing Michael Douse, never one to be shy about speaking his mind, has spoken his mind about Ubisoft’s decision to disband the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown development team, saying it’s the result of a “broken strategy” that prioritizes subscriptions over sales.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer’s Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it “a slow burn to a fault” in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on “other projects that will benefit from their expertise.”
This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft’s focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole “feeling comfortable with not owning your game” thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.
I mean given the massive industry layoffs over the past few years developers are already pretty used to not having jobs.
I hate how developers are the ones attributed to game industry problems. Decisions like this almost never fall on the developers shoulders, specifically the ownership quote was from their subscription service director. You know… the guy whose job depends on you not wanting to own games.
Agreed, I’m always saddened by quotes like “well the devs should have” when it’s almost certainly “the execs should have.” Unless a studio is owned by its devs, or they make up some of its leadership, which are few and far between, the devs don’t have the say on the shitty things that happen to the product they’re working on, and often when the devs have more say you end up with like Kingdom Come Deliverance from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhorse_Studios. One of my favorite games, was supported by the studio for long after it came out, and now they’re working on a promising sequel
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.
Even worse that acquisition links back to the Embracer Group. Hopefully KC:D 2 makes it out the door before Embracer full fucks up Warhorse.
In the past decade, game companies have been releasing devs after a game is finished. I have a few friends in the gaming industry, and it’s brutal as a software engineer.
Yeah, this is classic class warfare and the trajectory of these things has been moving away from developers having any say for a long time, the difference now is that business majors have finally found a killer app to convince society it is ok to destroy software development as a decent career… it is called AI and it doesn’t actually matter if it works or not, the point is to convince people it is only natural and right to treat software devs like worthless commodified contract labor that is just around the corner from being entirely obsolete.
I find it darkly hilarious how confident so many people who work in the software industry are that they aren’t about to have their future crushed by the rich. Again it really doesn’t matter if AI lives up to the hype at all, if AI fails to deliver and a market crash happens all the better since society will readily accept that as proof there needed to be a market correction on out of control labor costs for development, consolidation will occur and the labor of software development will be indefinitely and likely permanently devalued.
This should be clear as day to programmers but people who program for a living tend to think understanding programming is a shortcut to understanding everything and it leads to hilariously naive views from otherwise apparently very intelligent people.
Make no mistake this is the beginning of an awful era for game developers and software development.
My favorite thing is Ubisoft blaming something and then gaming companies going, “Uh no? That’s just you.”
That’s every publisher’s wet dream. AI’s almost ready, right?
god I wanna see them fail so badly.
You can get it through gog where it’s DRM free. So I would say, yes you can
Even the Stream version doesn’t require Steam. You can just run the executable. A few folks over on Reddit claim they’ve given the game to their friends just by copying the files from an external drive.
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.
All consumer software is only available as a license. That is how the law is written, if you hate that fact you need to lobby for changing the law.
EU is similarly confused about first sale doctrine as the US is. Steam was ordered to allow games reselling by a French court but eventually got it reversed on appeal, for example. https://www.bfmtv.com/amp/tech/gaming/la-justice-se-prononce-contre-le-droit-de-revendre-ses-jeux-video-dematerialises_AN-202210240308.html
This is despite the first sale doctrine being established as part of digital media in the EU with https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=A87D18058F3F93DB5719943E51D3B25F?text=&docid=121981&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=6657274
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? Who knows.
lol ubisoft publishes a good game once in a blue moon and when they do they disband the team that does it. seriously these motherfuckers need to be jailed.
