Linus is Comfortable Not Owning Ubisoft Games 

If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

For a company, who just screwed over their customers by pulling the plug on a game that had no business being online only, to then tell people that they should trust them. Ubisoft has no shame.

My little sister was devastated when she lost all of the worlds she had created over time in little big planet. We are not comfortable with not owning our media!

Ubisoft is taking an unconventional marketing strategy of deliberately trying to prevent people from remembering what their app is called

This always happens with subscription services. They start off kinda centralized, then every studio decides they need to get their own service, and then you gotta pick and choose which service to use. This will make pirating worse tbh.

Ubisoft peaked with Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Rayman Legends, over 10 years ago. I've had 0 interest in their games since then, and by the looks of it that's not likely to change. 😂

Something that didn't get mentioned about music vs movie streaming. Music streaming services have largely the same collections, so the competition is relatively strong. Movie streaming is a far more fragmented experience and much more common for content to become completely unavailable or exclusive to one service

Im 29 and I still have my Minecraft maps from when I was 16, gamers are not boomers, were more than capable of backing up our save data without some cloud server that will inevitably go offline.

The problem with subscription games is the same as subscription movies now. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Netflix used to be amazing until the studios decided to make their own subscription. Music works because it’s still under one service no matter what service you choose

There is a MAJOR difference between "not owning a game collection" and "losing access to owned games." The CD collection comparison is ridiculous. It's not the same thing.

*If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing* ;3

I've been extremely happy not having the craptastic Ubi junk store launcher on my PC for over 5 years now. It was byfar the worst storefront.

This is like buying the rights to use a blender that is going to stay at your friend's house and you can only use it when he let's you. Are you seeing how stupit that sounds?

Remember online games used to be able to allow you to host your own servers? That was a great time.

Only 7:15 into the episode, so it might be addressed. But I think Linus is missing a big underlying tone of the statement that people should be more comfortable not owning games. We have spotify and netflix for music and movies, yes. But those services do not prevent you from going out and buying physical copies of your favorite artist or film for you to watch or use at your own convenience. The way that the Ubisoft person talked about game ownership was about removing the option for people to buy the games they want to buy in favor of a subscription model. And for anyone that is even slightly into the hobby, being able to own the game you want and play whenever or however you'd like is very important. And on top of all of that, we already have massive games that you can't own. Everything live service. You pay for access to a game, not to purchase the game itself.

Ubisoft should get comfortable with game piracy

Linus, not owning music, I get that the vinyl community is fairly small, but there are still large portions of people that like to own all their music on vinyl.

Regarding movie/show streaming services, Lois Rossman had a video about this, the tech companies force you to use android boxes and such devices to enable the eventual feed of ads. So netflix/amazon prime/etc., on Windows with any browser only deliver 1080p. On Linux with any browser, it's not even HD, it's less than 720p. I've noticed this personally with prime video and netflix on both windows and linux mint & debian on a brand new 4k TV. I was so dissappointed as a paying customer.

Keep On Digging Ubisoft.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.

I think we need to seriously consider banning streaming services from producing their own movies, and putting harsh restrictions on exclusivity deals, and doing something similar with games. If media is made to be watched/played, instead of bulking out a streaming catalogue, and services need to complete on the quality of the service, not as many films/games they can monopolise, a lot of the issues with subscriptions would disappear.

Funny how the towers to uncover the map were so overused for a short time period that many people aren't even aware that the last Far Cry that really embraced them was FC4 from 2014. FC3 had them, FC Blood Dragon didn't, FC4 as mentioned, Primal had a light version of them and FC5 had two basically as a reference, FC6 doesn't have them

I bought one album from Google play music (i would have gotten physical but it was sold out & didn't want to wait) & those tracks are still some of the most crisp audio files i have ever heard. When they shut down i was able to download them & its a bit jarring to heard those same songs on RU-vid after getting use to the downloaded quality.

Buying a game with GoG is without DRM. So if you keep the installation file, it keeps working. That only works for single player games though.

"director of subscription" sounds like a parody.

Sometimes pirating is the only real option some music or movies you just can't find on streaming and often the physical copies are hard to find or really expensive.

3:15 " Nu-uh, Assassin's Creed at this point is basically a Far Cry derivative" Well… yeah. One can argue which franchise exactly is the origin, but they all are in one and the same bowl of blandness today. Not that hot a take.

12:16 - removing online services for a game is a different issue to subscriptions vs hard copies. If the online servers are shutdown, you can't play online regardless of the medium. All the games listed on the page Linus references can still be bought/downloaded, they just can't be played online. Entirely different issue.

"I don't wanna have unnecessary plastic in my house" -the guy who literally has nes cartridges in his house

6:17 That's because you are not listening to music. Music for you is just fun background....

You may not need a CD collection, but I have multiple MP3s saved to my devices that I can play when I want without internet access if needed.

16:30 But if Ubi goes bankrupt, the games you already own won't be made public. Ubi will be bought by some loanshark company and they will milk every last drop out of its corpse before laying everyone off.

Ubisoft: how can we solve the issue were people are getting mad if we remove the support of their older games so they cant play them any more Ubisoft : make it so that people don't own their games any more so they cant complain about us removing support from games they dont own

8:10 Spotify also allows this but the process is a little hacky. If you add a local media song to a playlist and then download the playlist on another device it'll sync the file over from your other device if they're both online. Only for premium users of course but it works surprisingly seamlessly considering that it feels like a glitch or a bug to be able to do that

I do not have a cd collection. But I am not comfortable with not owning my favourite shows/ movies/ audiobooks/ music. That's why I have a digital archive which cannot be taken from me when a subscription ends or a company decides that a license is too expensive for them.

I think with games it's a different story because not only do you need access to a copy of the game whether physically or digitally, but games also require specific hardware to be played. With a movie or with music, as long as you have a TV, computer, phone, or any other device capable of executing a file, you can run it and consume it. Games though, are software that actively run and interact with the hardware. Unless I'm missing some critical knowledge here, game ownership is more important because the hardware needed to run them is much more specific and limited.

15:40 That is the next big thing I'd like EU regulators to to take a stab at: Software, or services more broadly, that are to be made obsolete by shutting down the supporting software those services rely on, need to have that software made open source.

when subscriptions for music and movies came out, they were ridiculously cheaper than buying the actual products. One cd's cost is between 5 and 20 and that was the price of the subscription for access to tens of thousands of albums

Some CDs have been "remastered" into worse versions with stupid low dynamic range and the good ones aren't avilable anymore.

As long as games exist they will exist in a file on some server somewhere, If companies think this is the best option they are in for a rude awakening when the day one cracks turn into day one security breaches with dozens of hacking groups infiltrating their servers all at once not only stealing games but whatever other data existed on that server. All they are doing is changing the motivation from removing DRM like denuvo to infiltrating corporate networks to steal the raw files for a game.

What game are they talking about at 26:00? FF VI?

Handing tools over to the community or a smaller company when the original publisher wants to shut down the service is something that has happened with some MMOs, like Ultima Online and Dark Ages of Camelot, so there IS precedent.

I am not realy comfortable with not owning anything from Steam. BI make this reality easier for myself by stricktly not buying ANY game when it costs me more then 20 bucks in their collectors or complete editions. And 30 is my hard limit when it comes to game-dlc-stuff bundles where EVERYTHING related to this game is included.

Linus: You own a CD collection to rip it to your server, then stream your own music from now until the Internet breaks forever without having to worry about services going down, services losing the license, or an ever-increasing monthly fee. Best decision I ever made with my media was going off of streaming entirely and buying Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs for my server. I won't ever subscribe to an online movie service again. RU-vid Premium is the only streaming service I pay for and it feels fantastic.

The only thing I regret is that I can't boycott Ubisoft's games, because I already don't buy them.

I just wanted to say that many years ago I switched from using physical cd's for music to using spotify. However, recently many songs that I have had in my playlists for years have been removed from spotify so I can no longer listen to them. This is not a big problem for me, however, the thought of doing this with video games and potentially just losing the ability to play certain games makes me very unfcomfortable with a subcription model. I bought Skyrim in 2012 and still play it, if i just suddenly lost it from my library and couldnt play it anymore, I would be pretty upset.

I have a huge DVD/CD collection. I ripped them all to my NAS and run Plex on it. I also get a lot of music as digital files from Bandcamp. The result is I have my own streaming service that I'm in total control of. It's not cheap, no, but following all the assorted streaming services isn't cheap either, and their costs add up while my server was a one-time cost.

As a Team Fortress 2 player this is the issue we are currently battling. Valve has abandoned the game's development. And while from a balance at the gameplay perspective the game is in an okay position. Cheaters bots and people abusing exploits run rampant. And with nobody at the wheel to implement fixes for these problems they continued to spiral and make the actual game itself nearly unplayable. The community has been arguing for years to just hand over the reins of development to the community. Leave us alone, let us run the ship and we promise not to break anything.

I used to collect movies (DVDs and some Blu Rays). Still have them but mainly switched to streaming. Then starting noticing low bitrate, color banding, etc. Just bought a 4k blu ray player. I’m definitely getting back on the physical media band wagon. Having an OLED TV only to see terrible color banding in dark scenes is stupid

I feel like everyone forgets the Asian market still exists. And they never gave up on physical media. Cds, albums, blue rays and other physical forms of purchases are still wildly popular

And as services for games disappear, you can still host a game of Quake or Unreal Tournament on LAN or over the internet and play with friends. The only thing that disappeared was the server browser, but some people host third party ones. I pretty much all my music so I can listen anywhere, with or without a connection to the internet. I do not and will resist to the best of my ability to EVER PAY FOR GAMES AS A SERVICE.

I haven't purchased a Ubisoft game since 2018 and Ubisoft has done nothing to persuade me that this was a bad choice.

I wish every discontinued product would become open source kind of like what happened to stalker. Not only I still play this 2007 game in its vanilla form every once in a while, it’s modded and community supported version, gamma now, looks and feels on par or better with the modern titles, it is mind blowing.

1080p BluRay looks way better than 4k netflix stream

I still buy blu-rays of the movies I really like, because I hate streams of them so much. The compression artifacts of bright red in particular in a lot of stuff just drives me nuts.

I love random digressions. I don't have the time to watch the entire show, but snippets of random conversations are still fun.

When they shut down the online services for games, they should give the software for hosting to the community for those who want to keep supporting and playing the games online

I was CONSIDERING buying Prince Of Persia, but when I installed the demo from Epic Games, it asked for admin privileges 6 times, downloaded, installed and updated ANOTHER launcher, and then asked me for admin SEVERAL MORE TIMES, I am no longer considering it. This kind of frustrating, depressing product will not make my life better at all.

Ok, so in the future we gonna subscribe to a couple things... Ubisoft, Namco, Activision, Sega, WB Games, Epic, Netflix, HBO, Prime, Disney, AppleTV, Discord Nitro, RU-vid Premium, FloatPlane, Pateron, a phone bill, and your internet service... A few among other things. Am I supposed to starve to death just so some schmuck can buy a yacht from all his subscribers? F that, I'm going back to piratebay.

Yeah, I really don't care about Ubisoft games anymore. Their anti-ownership BS is the final nail in the coffin for me.

Bg3 is the kinda game you have a hard time pacing yourself i got the game on a whim being unsure of what level of enjoyment i would have then proceeded to invest 120 hours into it in the span of a week on one play though never getting bored just challenged it has been over a decade sense a game has grabbed me in such a way

on the cd collection i'm with luke, and i especially love buying an artists album to support them directly if i like them, also nsp and dan avidan sign a lot of their cds lmao

Similar to what Linus was describing for Google Play Music, Apple Music supports uploading your own files to the cloud to listen to alongside their catalog and it works really well to fill in the gaps, especially in niches like video game soundtracks.

I bought a significant amount of music from the Google Play Music and lost it all when they deprecated years ago. Since then I try to buy as much of my music in the form of CDs from Half-Priced books.

in general there is toooooo much streaming service(streaming tv service included), i miss the old CD with the booklet. i prefert own thing i get a lot of CD not anvailable on streaming.

imagine when record companies start making their own streaming services and start removing their songs from the standard ones 🙃...

last ubisoft game i bought was Rocksmith 2014 edition. when they made the new Rocksmith game a subscription only model, centered around a stupid mobile app, the deal was sealed anyway. still own a physical copy of farcry 2 and 3, that's about enough ubisoft for me.

Streaming services become progressively worse as an option the more niche is the music you listen to and the more precious it is to you to have access to it always.

I buy dvds because the movies shift around to the other services and get pulled randomly, but spotify has never pulled any music (at least to the point of me noticing, led alone being annoyed by it)

The thing I dislike is that along with the online services being shut down the deactivated the dlc as well. Eg. In ACII the family tomb is no longer available even if you have the dlc downloaded.

If youtube music has a stub of removed music I have never seen it. You don't get notified about removed stuff. I've determined something was missing when I haven't heard it in the shuffle in a while and got to know it's no longer there

I love to play the OG version of AOE2 at a LAN. I love the definitive edition, but the feeling of the old version fits more the feeling of the LAN.

The problem isn't ubisoft, the problem is every other game company that is going to adopt this approach in order to increase revenues and please their investors. I remember skyrim golden horse armor, and look at where we are now with cosmetic microtransactions. The slippery slope is only a fallacy in the rigorous context of a formal debate, in real life it is almost a guarantee.

As someone who watches netflix on my 1080p monitor, while im gaming, its hard to tell the bad quality, but when its on a 4k tv its definitely apparent, which makes sense its really hard to stream 4k quality every second though wifi compared to a disc sending a direct signal to your tv, it also ruins the movie experience when your wifi fluctuates or the streaming traffic cant handle what your watching and the quality dips randomly

my honest take on the matter is that, if i bought a game that is either completely single player or has good portion of the game in single player. and then the publisher shuts down some online drm or some other crap, and suddenly i lose access to that single player game. then i have no pity towards them and i feel that i do nothing wrong if i download the game from pirated sources or apply some other DRM stripping methods to it.

Only 3 of the songs I have on CDs are available outside of those CDs, there's been hundreds of times I wanted to watch a film but it wasn't available to stream so I had to grab the DVD off my shelf, and there's been even more times I wanted to play a game while offline (both due to my own connection and host issues) so I had to insert the disc. Owning physical media is crucial to my life.

What games are they talking about at the end? 26:58 through 29:35

The move to Ubisoft Connect was horrendous in many ways. My main problem is that some Uplay-era games (AC Origins for example) had Uplay-integrated features that weren't added to Ubisoft Connect. AC Origins for example had basically the Director mode for GTA V, where you could play as different characters, add cheats, etc. That was controlled thru Uplay. It is no longer available in Ubisoft Connect.

The real problems with Ubisoft subscription compared to spotify are that first music doesn't have a save state to keep of, also Ubisoft aren't valve, and no one would subscribe to an app on which you can only listen to UMG artists

I would really prefer if you (editor) would crop out all the parts that aren't related to the topic. The extended discussion of why Linus doesn't like BG3 is not related or interesting.

I have a collection of over 300 games on steam, and paid for maybe 200 of them (some were free due to a special promotion or just free)... I was okay not owning my DVD's or CD's, but that was when it wasn't so ridiculous as now; why pay for Netflix to watch about 20 movies/shows (as I don't care for other stuff) only to have them remove them for months at a time, yet still pay for Netflix. I can buy the DVD's and upload them to my personal media server, and I can watch whatever I own for cheaper than paying for multiple streaming services. The subscription model was good, but they got greedy and instead of improving it so they could make sustainable profit, they have cut back heavily on quality for some short term gain.

+1 for mentioning Civ V. I still play that game time to time as well with my best friend. We were teenagers when it came out and now we're almost 30 lol

My problem with it is nobody listens to 5-6 songs in a year, and almost nobody watches 5-6 movies in a year; but it's common for casual gamers to only play 5-6 AAA games. Especially when most of those games are 40+ hours long. The value proposition just isn't there

Why are they talking about Bluray in the middle of a "clip". I mean I agree with him but this thing is 30 g-dang minutes, wrap it up! haha

mind, Netflix also has some terrible anti-piracy measures as well. you basically have to build an EXACT PC to THEIR SPECIFICATIONS otherwise you get nothing above 720p

I keep a CD collection of specifically Eurovision CDs, because the licensing around them is a nightmare (~40 songs, each from a different country and artist every year). The couple of occasions when I have also purchased the digital album (I think it was released ahead of the physical media for a few years), most of the songs are gone from the digital version of the album (WHICH I PAID FOR) within a few years after purchasing. This is also the primary reason that I use RU-vid Music (and not just because it comes free with RU-vid Premium), because you can upload up to 50k of your own archived tracks and stream them like they're any other track on the platform (you just can't share them with people on other accounts).

7:50 Spotify does this, the sea of stars OST had a song pulled due to some issue with a missing layer or channel. it turned into a stub and I needed to go to their profile and save the new version

99% of media I stream but I archive the 1% I really like. I do buy CDs or DRM free copy of music. Same with movies, I wanted to see something simple and I didnt want to subscribe to random streaming service to see a movie I see a lot. Also there is some older anime thats like dvd only which I do keep.

16:57 that's a problem with every graph. that's where the fake quote from Churchill comes from "I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself"

I sometimes keep some physical media. sometimes when the power goes out I use my game boy and cd player that run off AA batteries to not waist my phone.

Man, I got Jebaited by that title. I was worried that if Linus was pro not owning our games that I'd have to leave him behind.

I watch like 2-3 movies in a month(sometimes 1 in theatre), listen to probably 5-6 hours of music and play games for like 5 hours at best(mostly indie stuff with some AAA), so not owning my media isn’t gonna be a deal breaker for me. I used to pirate movies and shows that weren’t available on streaming services, but at this point I just watch whatever’s on Netflix or prime without thinking too much about. It is definitely more convenient than DVDs were.

I would need a lot more than a promise in writing. I'd need them to not only release the server software and whatever else necessary for any games they've discontinued over the past decade, but also for them to *continue to do that* for years going on. I don't believe a damn word any of these companies say, whether they're legally obligated to abide by them or not, I need to see them actually commit.

10:30 Louis Rossman did a video about how he paid to have HD streaming, and he was only getting 720.

I remember the whole, "future of gaming is streaming" statement and my first thought was, "From the minds that brought us Uplay"

RU-vid Music still allows uploads but refuses to play them (or even purchased titles/albums) at all through Google Home, without you running it through the app itself. It demands a subscribtion and will ignore your own uploads all together through voice commands in Google Home. Google Music didn´t have these issues and was therefore superiour in its use for me.

The way you talk about the difference between watching netflix and a bluray (and I agree with you) .... the same can be said about/with streaming music and having to listen to a CD. I OWN my medias and I like to listen to my music from my CDs

Funny Luke mentioned Civ V. I still play it weekly. I own it on Steam because my cousin wrecked my Civ 4 discs (3/5 of them). Steam removing Windows 7 support has me considering going back to disks. I was still running XP when I bought the game. Even if that computer were still working, I couldnt play on it anymore. Valve isn't so much the good guy anymore.

That quote from Sven is why I wasn’t surprised or mad at all about the tweets from the BG3 launch. Because he outright says that what they are able to do and accomplish as one of the only still independent developers of decent size(remembering that the size of the company is a recent development) is not the norm. Most of those devs from Sony and such of comparable size or resources are completely beholden to shareholders and cost benefit analysis and such. Sven wanting to stay out of that side of the industry is extremely laudable. But also an outlier of how the game dev industry works. And that isn’t likely to change. No matter how many more millions of copies his company sells. Cost benefit analysis and all the other metrics that go along with it just are too ingrained into how things work.

fyi, you can add 'local files' to spofity, but you need a PC i believe