See you all in Black Flag before we lose that one too, yeah? - E UPDATE: Seems that Ubi has pushed back the date for SOME of their game closures until October first. Jump in to all of them if you have them, while you still can!!!
I think Ellen said it all when she said, "We're not entitled to the games that we buy." This is an extremely worrying trend in digital media in general, but especially in gaming, where games are being sold as a product, but treated as a service that can be terminated at the sole discretion of the provider. With gamers more often than not needing to rebuy rather than upgrade games for new platforms which don't support older versions, how long will it be before they're forced to essentially "subscribe" to games they've already bought at full price and pay perpetually for the privilege of accessing them?
I have bad news....that's kind of already a thing. To play older Playstation games on ps4 and 5 you have to subscribe to Playstation Now or one of the higher tiers of Playstation Plus
This is the reason why I avoid paying full price and also avoid games where you have to buy the game, DLCs, and monthly Sub. It is either pay for the game & DLC w/sever free or pay for the monthly sub w/ the game & DLC free.
@@meghangildelamadrid5869 Not really. This was talking about MMOs and not single player. So even if they had a hard copy, the severs would still be gone.
As awful as this development is, I just wanted to say that Ellen knocked it out of the park on this video! Love the style, love the substance, love the personality. This was a bold direction to take for a "list video" and I'm thoroughly impressed with how it all came out. Kudos to Oxtra, Boos to Ubisoft!
I just really like how it flowed. I liked the use of memes and graphics you don't regularly see in OXBOXTRA videos. I also like how Ellen clearly backed up all of her statements with specific examples. At one point I found myself saying, "can we REALLY expect them to keep servers for these games open indefinitely?" and the video immediately pivoted to show gameplay from other online properties that HAVE kept their servers open. That shows a really good sense of how the conversation would flow if it were more organic. It's just a really well done video. You can tell it's a passionate subject yet it's still just as funny and cheeky as anything else. Plus, I just love the touch of sass.
Games need to be made with an "end-of-life" plan to make sure they can still be accessed after servers are shut down, even if they're multiplayer. It's increasingly unlikely they will be though, because it doesn't make money. And Ubisoft is a master at not making plans like this.
They all started a competition of who is the worst company. EA had a strong start but Ubisoft really wants that crown and with the last actions from Activision Blizzard they had to push hard to get it.
I don’t know if Ellen will see this but I want to say thank you, it’s nice to see you keeping the industry accountable, you guys are always professional when you talk about people, but it’s nice to see your love of games is more of a priority than saveing face with developers!
It's also nice to know that I'm not the only one who wanted the Assassin's Creed multiplayer to work out more than Ubisoft did. I'm still heart broken that it's been dead, long before Ubisoft decided to pull the plug.
Don't forget that Ubisoft are not 'Developers' They are a production corporation that owns many studios of actual game developers. Just like Disney doesn't make any films now they do not make games they publish them. That makes a massive difference because it means that all the publisher is interested in is short term profit and the bottom line of sales, they couldn't care less about customer satisfaction so long as they can push the next product.
@@Neil_Hyman so true. That's why I have no plans of buying anymore of these IP's that feel like they have lost they're soul. I'm done with CoD, Diablo, Halo, Assassin's Creed, Soul Calibur, and several others that I loved growing up. This is now an industry standard.
Ross Scott at Accursed Farms has been talking about this for a while, as well. It's a huge issue not just because it takes away a whole lot of options, but it's also ruining digital art preservation. Preferably, we'd either have a centralized data warehouse, like the Library of Congress, or force companies who've decided not to support and profit off of this to release the code in to the wild and allow others to try and preserve it.
Somehow, though I have described video games as an art medium before _and_ have training in art conservation, I had never thought of the question of preserving games as art before. Thank you!
This goes back to the same problem as dozens of other game publishers; copyright. After a game stops producing, after the console loses support, you STILL can’t alter the game or pirate it, despite not losing the company any money. Nintendo is the worst with this, but it’s still terrible on other studios.
i also came to mention this. I hate that this is a thing. I pay for a game, and ten minutes after i start playing it goes bye bye, and there's no way to save it. the only hope is pirates most of the time, and hey. all the game companies are shutting them down for daring to care more about their games than they do.
I do understand that they have to shut down servers EVENTUALLY. They cannot just run servers for every game they've ever made forever, that would be prohibitively expensive. But they DEFINITELY should be required to ensure single player campaign options still function. Always online was always the absolute worst and should be yeeted into the ocean.
@@LastnameIchose any sort of multi-player that isn't local is going to require a server. Sure there are models out there with player hosted servers, but that isn't feasible for your average player.
@@LadyOrpheus For games that are not persistent peer to peer is totally viable, but the companies don't like doing it because it makes it easier for people to cheat. If they want to maintain fan loyalty maybe they could have p2p features built in, just don't enable them until they sunset the game, in which case i doubt anyone would care about cheaters anymore as the window for them to make money off new copies is far past. I'm old enough to remember Mplayer and Gamespy and all those matchmaking services. If I have to have a Uplay account to play my games anyway, just make it possible to host for your friends. Their auth server handles the logistics of getting everyone connected and after that its just up to the players' connections and machines to run the game.
@@lacrossev It's a Hard Problem to solve. "Dedicated servers" was a big selling point for games around the era that these games were made. I believe a Halo reveal trailer in the XB1 era actually had a "DEDICATED SERVERS" title card, it was such a known quantity. It meant you had a much more reliable experience, especially as consoles were mostly on Wi-Fi and people's Wi-Fi routers were, in a word, bad. (Many still are!) If the match is hosted in a data centre instead of on Billy's bad wifi, only Billy has a bad experience rather than everyone. P2P networking also makes regional proximity much more important, as everyone needs to be close to each other, rather than everyone being within striking distance of the server. Dedicated servers often handle extra calculations that the consoles would be required to do, also. Consoles were (are) quite CPU limited. Multiplayer took a generational leap once it was no longer constrained by people's home connections and equipment. Now here we are 10 years on and we're seeing the downsides. But at the time it was considered good if a company actually invested in hosting multiplayer servers rather than simply dumping the code into the title and letting us suffer with whatever experience we got.
This truly is a monumental loss for game preservation, and a giant boon for piracy. Crazy to me how this can even be allowed, seeing as you're losing access to something you paid for, but I still don't think Ubisoft's gonna go back on it if they haven't already, with how much negative press they've been getting to this point.
"If the people do not have a legal means to redress their injuries then they will resort of illegal ones." Everything the video game industry is doing is just making piracy look more and more like not only the only sane option but the only actual option.
Yeah. Piracy wins again. Thanks Ubisoft for making that popular and making money spenders look like fools. I mean they can't even make a safe work environment for many of their workers.
@@quietone610 it's about taking away choice, and that's naturally bad. Preservation is important, not this cynical cash grab mentality. Makes the most miserable of us look right and the gaming industry deserving of closure.
@@quietone610 Yeah losing servers is a part of life. Not when you need these servers to access basic content, though. Back then, servers were for going online and playing with friends, not for being allowed to play the game.
Piracy will exist no matter what... but this gives it a good bunch of Morally Justified points. Something Publishers sure as hell shouldnt want. For Multiplayer, Custom Servers could probably be made... but yeah those are sketchy on the legal front as well
Ya know, this makes me sad, but also laugh. Companies HATE piracy, but this is such a fantastic example of how people become encouraged to pirate in the first place. Congratulations Ubisoft! :)
This feels like reverse piracy to ne. Aye, you bought all nice an legal like, but we're not going to allow you use it anymore, because we get to keep more money that way.
This is one of those things that I wish governments would step in to and say, "Yeah, no." Every game developer that makes server side content mandatory to play their games should be required to release a final patch that would allow that content to be hosted locally, either as a black box executable that provided server emulation or as the files directly being placed in your install directory.
I like this idea. could bed a fantastic middle ground so that companies can focus resources elsewhere and continue to make new content while players can take the games they purchased and run their own servers independently.
i love this idea but its sadly not possible in many cases, some games the company is gone and the one pulling the plug on the servers is whoever their publisher is and no one has the code or experience to patch together something like that by the time the shutdown happens, gravity rush 2 is a case of that, the first game had nothing notable in tis online so nothing needed tweaks, but the second game has huge chunks of gameplay and unlocks lost forever because the servers were shutdown after only a few years, but by then the studio had been dissolved so no final patch was possible
@Nickolas Wilcox Well there are two issues in your statement, the first is the idea that the quantity of server side content effects the feasibility of anything. There are largely speaking two types of server side content. The first is just that, content or game assets that resides on the server and has to be downloaded on the fly when you play. For most games this is nothing more than a DRM measure and the size of the final patch is irrelevant to the effort required to make that patch. It's just raw files that can be dropped in place on your system. For some games it's a little more complex (such as MMOs that have to keep track of where people are and their interactions), however you have to remember that there's nothing special about a server. It is just a computer running an executable and there is no reason why that executable cannot be run locally. As a programmer (not for games) and as someone who has spoken to game programmers I can assure you the amount of effort it would take to make this final patch for the vast majority of games is beyond minimal. However, no studio has any incentive to do this because they can do a re-re-re-re-release and get more cash instead of supporting a game they've already gotten your money from. This is why I do think the government needs to step in and establish laws that state that any commercially released game must include as part of its lifecycle the final patch for any server side content. And honestly in the US we already have the framework to require such a law, but no one has brought up the case to take it to court yet to press the issue.
@@LifeWithMatthew im suspicious you are tearing into someone else, but if not then you may have missed my point im not saying it would be hard or easy, NOTHING in your comment even has anything to do with the difficulty i brought up, what im saying is that there are cases where the people who would do it arent there anymore and in such cases much of the code needed to do it is often lost when the studio went bust, and even if you still have the servers at that point you still need to modify the game in a stable way to accept the new code dump and thats assuming anyone even cares to take the responsibility for it, which in the case of a bankrupt or otherwise lost studio is iffy at best i am agreeing with your point as a whole, just pointing out that its not always possible, why would someone else willingly accept responsibility for something a competitor made
If a company no longer wants to pay to host servers for a game, they should release an update allowing people to host their own servers. Edit: and they should do an update to remove the DRM too obviously. If the company wants to abandon the game it should be made available to everyone, not made it so no one can play it.
Enh, from a legal standpoint, this may not be feasible. If the company plans to use the IP, well they need to keep control of it. also... if they don't wholly own it, they need to ask the others involved to agree to this. Which is not going to be easy if possible at all.
@@marhawkman303 Oh yeah, fair point- other entities might have the right to music etc., and the publisher still have the rights to the brand name. Asking the developer to modify old code to implement new features is not something that would ever happen either, but still, it's hard to blame customers that paid for a product for being bitter at that they can no longer use it- that's all they can do at this point after all.
Losing access to the DLC and Rewards that you "own" is in a word, criminal. Ubisoft forced these games to need online verification and now they are essentially saying thanks for your money and goodbye. As for games like Splinter Cell Blacklist, they shoehorned coop multiplayer into the campaign, so you lose access to some missions in the campaign even. We should be pushing back and demanding that the decision be reversed, at least until they give us access to the content we are losing.
Oof, I thought you wouldn't be able to install the DLCs if you don't already have them. Losing access to them when they were already installed and verified, that's a huge oof. They definitely should remove the online requirement to these games rather than just throwing everything in the fire and calling it a day.
Almost all of them, it is fairly rare for a triple-A game studio to actually recognize an issue correctly... and even more rare for them to actually fix it properly without tearing a hundred new holes
@@lawrencelopez9839 because that takes ressources and effort... which in return costs money... and they don't invest in something that does not promise any return :/
this sounds somewhat like what HBO/Warner Bros are doing with some of the content on their streaming services and it's definitely a concerning trend, for the fans but especially for creators who worked so hard on these products just for them to disappear
@@callumdonington2227 Yep, exactly what I was thinking. I've only seen half of season 3 and probably never going to be able to see the rest.... And I have season 4 on the pvr, but haven't seen it.
For someone who has spent more money on the DLC of AC than I'd honestly like to admit, Multiplayer included. I am actually very sad to hear about this. And yes, this is the first time I heard about this. I hope that like with Arkham Origins Multiplayer, there will be people who will launch some servers of themselves that anyone can access. Sadly this is only a PC option but it's better than nothing at all. As for not having any access to DLC that's meant for SINGLE PLAYER. That's just downright disgusting. Especially considering I *just* bought the games on my PC because I wanted to relive them now that my PS3 finally died on me. And they're not exactly cheap, still. (Black Flag still sells for about 40 quid. For instance.)
You're sad when you should be angry... and vocal (unless that was their plan, hoping for a vocal uprising as PR for them "see people like our games, what Jim R. Didriksen says and thinks isn't true"... or something like that.)
The worse thing is that you can pirate them and be able to play the content you paid for. They were still selling the DLC recently with nothing stating they were doing this. Also Ubisoft could do like other companies and have steam be the authenticator which would probably be easy but why support the players that kept purchasing their games?
This is why gaming companies want to do away with physical copies: eventually they’ll be able to block access to entire titles, not just certain aspects, and bar you from playing them at all You don’t actually own any game you don’t have a physical copy of. At any time it can be taken away from you and you can’t do anything about it except repurchase it from the same people who took it away It’s straight up racketeering
@@chrismanuel9768 Some even are not even the full game on the disc. Most will just have the basic stuff and there is already GBs of downloads on Day One.
Even with physical media, all you have is a license to the content on the disk and associated with the title. They locked that down legally back with DVD.
@@starflier but when was the last time a movie studio went in your house and confiscated a DVD? If everything’s digital they can do that without having to set foot in your home
@@chrismanuel9768 that's more of a PC problem tbh, now most PC games just redirect you to steam instead of having the game on disk. Consoles have it better but there's the risk of having to be always online which sucks
I'm of an age where if you wanted to play multiplayer games there was often an option to set up your own server if the game's company either didn't have a local server or you wanted to set one up for a LAN party. Those days are now long gone, which is a shame, but this was before the days of commonly used internet attack vectors, and idiots who think that cheat add-ons are clever. Mind you, this isn't the first time that Unisoft have pulled a stunt like this (they have been known to kill off servers for games that were still well used), and I doubt that this will be their last time. As for PC DLC, I think that there could be an interesting test case here.
In any other situation it would be considered theft to take away something someone has paid for. I don't see why digital property should be treated any differently.
Then: "Your games must be online always or connect to a database for security reasons" Now: "sorry, no one plays these games anymore" Us: "then who are you apologizing to?"
Always online is one of the most anti consumer practices out there. Getting spit in the Face every Time you boot up the game would be more respectful to the player.
Ironically the "Us" section is apparently the same people who gave ubisoft their money in the first place, knowing the game was always online and the inevitable consequences. Yet now they pull the surprised pikachu face lol.
The fact Ubisoft requires even single player games to have an account in order to play, such as Fenyx Immortal Rising, is a hassle. Why not let people just play the game they bought?
I'm not a big multiplayer fan (bad Internet growing up) but I'm worried about the precedent this could have for AAA Games. Always Online is already bad enough but with the Purge of older servers we could see a rise in Planned Obsolescence for Video Games. Like we already joke how lots of Franchises like CoD or FIFA are basically the same game every year with minor artistic changes, but now imagine how bad it could be if companies just decided to shut down the previous games through DRM and force you to buy the new one. That would be horrible
Ubisoft is basically pushing their playerbase into piracy since, from what I hear, the pirated copies will still work, even with the official servers down. Way to go Ubisoft, giving the pirates a helping hand while you shoot yourselves in the foot!
@@thatguyonyoutube989 Even though it's free, this is precisely the reason I don't like Path of Exile. It's kind of ironic for a company to claim that they're giving players a "Diablo II-like" experience while keeping the internet requirement of Diablo III. IIRC, people loved Diablo II precisely because _you could play it offline_ unlike Diablo III. It's why I like the Van Helsing games better than PoE.
Ross Scott, the creator of the Series Freeman's Mind (a Michinima about what Gorden Freeman is thinking while playing through the games) is a big critic of the fact that companies call kill their game, whenever they want, regardless of whether you bought it not. One of the reasons he considers EA to be one of the most Evil companies out there, is because they've been killing their games for years, because they love to make them all reqiure always online functionality. But, of course, that means when they decide it's not profitable enough to keep it going, it's gonna die.
I really appreciate Ellen taking the time to research this and inform us about it. I'm not big on online play or Ubisoft games, but a) I recognise that this is an issue for people who are and b) am leery about what this means for the future of gaming. We have been sliding futher and further from physical ownership to digital rental, to the point where we can no longer rely on the idea that we own the games we purchase. It's deeply worrying and I am hoping that there's enough backlash to Ubisoft's decision here to stop other major developers leaning harder into this trend.
What a shame. I wish there was a way to create some kind of legacy limited server access so these older games could still be played. But as far as they're concerned, if it ain't making mobile game levels of money, it ain't worth it to maintain. Sigh.
Gameranger hosts servers for a variety of old games. You should check its compatibility list to see if your favorite games are on them. Otherwise you'd probably have to wait for the GoG release.
They can’t afford to maintain this stuff because of all the money they are hemorrhaging due to only making one game for the last decade and putting different coats of paint on it. Even there newest “original” game, Skull and Bones, is just black flag, but without the interesting plot of Assassin’s Creed. We loved these old games because they were different, but Ubisoft has decided that being different is too risky for them now.
If they let players create their own dedicated servers it would be great. Ubisoft wants people to buy new games and just wants the cash and control over the players.
It's nice to see more attention being brought to this issue. There is no reason why a digital product's lifespan should be finite. If a game has a mandatory online component, patch it to be peer-to-peer. While we're at it, let's stop pretending that the whole world has 24/7 access to an internet connection.
I've been saying that for a decade...if a game's multiplayer is going to be shut down, at least put a last patch in that let's it be played offline/local/peer-to-peer. Nevermind games I bought that I can't play if I'm ofline/have no internet.
Unfortunately a lot of these games were designed with a lot of "account auth" stuff all built in. It'd be a pretty substantial effort to patch that stuff out, if they even have the tools and environment to build new binaries (which is a real problem for old software). There are some less-involved options (like releasing the client and server code -- but not game assets -- as-is, as open source like id Software often does), but a lot of companies reject many of those possibilities for ideological (i.e., capitalist) reasons.
@@alicia9290 The arguments for intrusive DRM are, like much of capitalist bullshit, also practically religious in nature. They're complete nonsense. Easily cracked within days (or even before launch in some hilarious cases), makes the game worse for paying players than pirates, barely has any positive impact on sales, if at all... They just do it because they buy fully into some kind of insane magical thinking that it will secure launch day or something.
Personally, I think maybe some regulation should be passed on this requiring DRM be ripped out and tools for locally hosting servers be released before servers are shut down
Really appreciate the more risky video topic - I'm sure Ubisoft won't be happy, but they definitely deserved to be called out. Also props for mentioning the Prince of Persia delays! 😢😢😢
The precedent that you do not own content you purchased is already the case for some streaming services, like Amazon Prime. A purchase on Amazon Prime Video can only be viewed on that service, it cannot be transferred between accounts, and if you cancel your account, you also lose access to that product. As more video games move to digital only, stuff like this was bound to happen.
Technically, that should be considered theft by the producer. If you pay for a product, you pay to keep a copy of said product. What this precedent says is "Oh, no, no. You only paid to merely have _access_ to this product. We're not letting you keep it."
Beautifully stated and fairly explained, Ellen! Your passion shines through & your points are excellent. I’d argue this whole idea harkens back to something lost in games now: modes. Just, fun modes being there & in the game forever. Damn shame that’s gone & apparently won’t ever be back :/
Like others have mentioned. I never knew there was MP in Brotherhood, Revelations. It's sad they are removing the servers. However dropping DLC too is so messed up! How dare you Ubisoft!
I think I'd heard of the multiplayer (probably from other OX videos), but I haven't played. Haven't played any AC to be honest.... but the multiplayer actually sounds fun.
What you said around 10:22 is exactly the reason so many AAA games have been crashing and burning as of late. Investors are so risk averse that the devs are now putting out half finished products to see if they'll be liked, and when they inevitably aren't, the plug is pulled and they move on to the next title
this is criminal behaviour. keeping the servers online costs money, so I understand there comes a time when they need to shut them down, but they have options. they should be required to patch the game to allow non multiplayer aspects to function offline. for games that dont have a single player component, either patch it to run peer to peer, or release the dedicated server software for fans to run their own servers. if neither of these options are taken, they should be forced to provide customers a refund. just because a lot of games are digital these days does not give companies the right to steal from you. its not like toyota decides its been 8 years, sorry but we are disabling the fuel injection in your engine now, sorry not sorry.
There's very much a tendency with digital components of products to treat users like they don't own shit. Samsung keeps making random permanent changes to my UI and its like, I BOUGHT THIS PHONE FOR THE FUNCTIONS THAT IT HAD (example: chose it because it had an in-built option to hide the front camera, now it doesn't). It should absolutely not be legal to permanently remove a function like this. I love the idea of enabling players to run their own servers, people who like these games for more than their ability to spontaneously play cash register noises at some company's headquarters would be thrilled to have the ability to keep them going.
@@SirStanleytheStumbler that's legally true but morally bankrupt so I feel like we're allowed to call it bullshit. And plenty of people own hard copies, especially of the older games released before gaming computers gave up on optical drives
@@SirStanleytheStumbler That is only true until you drag a company into court. Once you get into court the company can argue until its blue in the face that you signed an agreement, and you're lawyer only has to point out that at no point were you given any sort of decision making ability other than "accept your terms or not use the product you already paid for." Literally nothing about a click through agreement is defensible in court.
And so after all those Tweets, we finally get to see the culmination of it all in video format - wasn't expecting anything less from Ellen! Reminds me of a certain KoA video too 😆
And I thought I was absolutely in love with Ellen *before* this amazingly accurate and wonderfully passionate video. We need to find a way to get more representatives like her into gaming studios asap. I believe money can still be made while still preserving these unique experiences, but we need passionate voices to prove it.
The fact that they're making it so I can't download a product I paid for anymore is the reason why I won't be buying Ubisoft for a while. Shame too, because I actually enjoyed their games and didn't mind paying a little extra here and there for the little bits of story the DLC provided.
Honestly I think Ubi’s days are numbered. Unless they pull a rabbit out of a hat and disappear all that ill will sent their way, I don’t think they’re long for this world. I genuinely see a second Dark Age to gaming because this kind of shoddy anti-consumer practice that’s run rampant is the reason the video game mark collapsed the first time
It should be outright illegal for video games to require servers to function. It doesn't matter if it's singleplayer, multiplayer, MMO, whatever, a game should be designed to still be able to function without any servers or other players at all, even if it's better with them.
The option of doing LAN play for multiplayer seems so straightforward. Even age of empires 2, a *25 year old game*, still has a strong player base and it came with LAN at the time. Someone installed it on our school computers so that was my first experience in finding out how bad i am at multiplayer RTS 😅
@@whocares9033...umm...this isn't about the USA, ubisoft is a european publisher, but for some things the usa have far too many laws (uteruses for example), and other things (labour rights and financial accountability of massive corporations) there are far too few.
Yeah, I think it’s Ross over at Accursed Farms that says this sort of thing should be illegal. If you pay for a game some company with a server shouldn’t be allowed to just shut it off.
Honestly, I feel like the best thing to do would be to try and figure out an easy way for fans to create and connect to servers. I know that the DS era pokemon games still have servers, because someone went and made them. Instead of making fans sneak their way through obsolete safeguards or lose out entirely, some kind of update that allows that kind of compatibility would be a way to let people play the games they bought, without having to maintain ancient servers. Stealing their DLC abilities is not an acceptable thing to do though. Like, that feels like stealing from the fans.
As someone who never really got into the AC multiplayer - tried it a couple of times, just didn't click with it - I still massively agree with all of this. Game preservation is important, and if they're not willing to maintain the servers, they should at least open things up for fans to run their own if they choose But as they've shown with that bizarre "set your system to offline" requirement instead of, say, patching the game one last time simply to deactivate the DRM, they clearly care about their customers as much as they do their staff, ie. not at all
Okay, me neither. Just lost Brotherhood. And seeing as I hoped to replay that game in a few years, it actually makes me a bit angry. I will not be buying Valhalla nor Oddyssee.
Yeah, the industry has quietly been shifting to a "games as a service" model for years. I love downloading/digital copies, but those are the most at risk of just not being available some day
You can sue in civil court. Not sure that you can win, or that you can prove enough damages to make it worth the effort. But that is how you convince companies like Ubisoft to care about their customers.
As Aaron Dull said, legally you never _"owned"_ the games in the first place. You only sorta rented the ability to download and play them. This also goes for virtually *every* game that anyone *ever* bought online in a digital market place. The *only* exception _(so far)_ has been GOG, were you can download the games installer _(conditions may apply)_ and install the games from them anytime you want.
I wonder if we'll see some sort of class action against publishers for behaviours like this. I'm sure they technically cover themselves against this sort of thing in their EULA, but it seems like blatantly false advertising when single player features come with a hidden expiry date that you are not clearly informed of at time of purchase. While I'm not happy about it, I can understand shutting down multiplayer servers for games on old platforms which probably have a miniscule player count, though I believe this is why good multiplayer games should always provide the option of self hosting so that the community can preserve them beyond their support by the publisher/developer.
To make a point about how not talked about the multiplayers for these AC games were, I OWNED ALL THESE GAMES, and didn't even know they had multiplayer until oxboxtra mentioned it
As opposed to games like Call of Duty where you have people who are surprised there's a single player campaign because they only buy them for the online multiplayer
It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy - Ubi barely mentions their multiplayer, few people use it, Ubi don't take care of the servers, then shut it down because noone uses it (probably while making a shocked Pikachu face). That is bad for players, but also shooting themselves in the foot for wasting time and money making something they told nobody about and then shut down.
@@toratio8547 That makes me think of the Digimon games in the west. They don't localize pretty much any of them because they don't have as good sales here, but the issue is that they don't advertise them. Basically news for them you actively have to search for and it's all geared towards people who are already fans of Digimon.
Let me get this straight, if someone pirated some of the Assassin's Creed with all DLC they can still play it, but if you own a legit copy you're screwed. Literally a pirated version offers more features than the official thing, lol I could understand the logic behind shutting down the multiplayer if barely anyone plays anymore but disabling singleplayer content and DLCs is just extra levels of dumb.
Great video! Games preservation is so important, especially when companies seem to only view games as a profit making endeavour and not as an art form. This medium is so young and future developers and fans will want to experience the history of games, see how they have grown and changed for better and worse. Art preservation extends to games but these companies will never care about that because it doesn't make money. Similar to film preservation, it seems like piracy is one of the few tools future historians will have to see the art of today and yesterday.
Bless you and this video! Something has to be done to preserve games, and it's not just Ubisoft - this is why I still a certain way about digital games, but even having the disks aren't enough if the services aren't alive to keep things running.
Wow, never thought I'd see this kind of video from Outside crew. Fantastic work! If more youtube creators got out there to tell Ubisoft and other industries that shutting out gamers is NEVER okay, we might be able to make a change.
The AC Multiplayer was amazing. Two reasons I stopped playing it were, 1: everyone was running round and not actually playing it like they should and, 2: No games found..... Also its funny that Ubisoft should be mentioned since playing Star Trek Bridge crew online is a nightmare, even when trying to find randoms. Since the cross platform invite system doesn't work and even when you do find a crew you love playing with the quick join function will throw you in with EVERYONE ELSE BUT THEM
@@AdderTude or they can give more points out for how good of an assassin your kill is or both/ staying undetected. That's why I mean the balance was bad.
Excellent video, Ellen! More people need to talk about this because as you stated, it's a multifaceted issue that encompasses game preservation and consumer ownership rights. It's funny how less than a decade ago, we couldn't imagine servers being shut down for certain games, but time marches on and it becomes an inevitable reality. It's going to be very interesting when other Ubisoft games like The Division finally shut down because this series has a sizable player base and DLCs (expansions that added to the world). Players from day one have been urging the devs to have an exit strategy not if, but when the day comes the servers shut down that would include patching the game to allow offline functionality (DRM issue). The sad part is a lot of these Live Service games are not designed to be played offline with vital elements being server-side only... Like the water simulation in Sea of Thieves, for example.
I was browsing through my "almost platinum" games on PS4 two years ago. I stumbled upon Disneys Infinity 2.0 and 3.0. You know these little games you spent 1,000 Euros to get all characters. Turns out they shut down the servers the hard way. The main feature of creating your toy boxes and sharing them with your friends went away. You cannot even invite your friends to show them your boxes. Even when playing in forced offline mode and inviting your friends to your house, you can not put any texts in anymore because the bad word filter was an online feature as well. Some of the achievements required for platinum include multiplayer features making these inaccessible for players who buy used sets of the game. The game itself wasn't too much of a revelation, but it had its moments. Disney could have fixed it by changing the online only features to local rotations and pairing with friends and removing the bad word filter. It would have preserved a small community of fans that way. I hope this makes it onto a commenters edition.
I wish they wouldn't tie achievements/trophies to online components in mostly single-player games, make it so they can be achieved splitscreen. Fair enough in some games that aren't single player, and are purely online multiplayer like TF2/CSGO etc.
The AC Multiplayer was *phenomenal*, but even when it was new Ubisoft made it feel like this unimportant tacked-on thing that was there because everyone else was doing multiplayer modes. Though if we start going through the numerous missteps Ubi has made, we'd be here a long while...
The guy on the accursed farm channel is pretty vocal against these servers shutdown and I'm agreeing with him. All these companies are stealing from us our ownership and right to play the games.
I am especially upset that the AC multiplayer is pretty much gone when half of the games that have it are gone too. If anything, they should make a completely separate game that combines all the MP content and add more for those that want it, like myself.
Oh man the memories!! Getting back from school, arranging myself a good snack and logging in to play AC multiplayer with the squad all day long…. These games were literally my childhood/adolescence
Shutting down servers for multiplayer games with a low user base is fair. It takes effort and money to keep those running securely. What I think is completely unjustified is the removal of single player content, especially the ability to download the thing you paid for, even if the company has stopped selling. Re DRM, they just don't want to put in the effort to remove the DRM check in an update.
I don't have an answer for multiplayer but if you insist on drm, you should also release a patch that allows single player and all dlc to be fully unlocked and gifted to all players for free (they are no longer srllingnug do they wong lose anything) when you close them down
The question I want answered is what happens to the "Day One" patch which most modern games require to iron out the post "going gold" bugs found in so many titles these days. Yes I'm looking at you Unity, or I was but now I've gone and turned to stone again. I hate when that happens.
One more problem. MULTIPLAYER ACHIEVEMENTS. No servers = no more ability to get the multiplayer achievements, even though they will still be on the list. always there. taunting you. reminding you of what could have been if only you had picked the game up sooner.
A few months ago, I bought Ghost Recon Breakpoint on PC. I love tactical military shooters and the game was on a deep, deep sale so I thought, why not? I was actually enjoying the game playing entirely single player until one day the servers went down and I wasn't able to access the game for a whole day, not even the single player components of it. I decided then that I probably won't touch another Ubisoft game for the foreseeable future. Always online requirements in a single player experience is a big no from me. And as others have said here, at the very least, Ubisoft should update these games to remove DRM and allow people to host their own servers for the multiplayer games if they're going to abandon them.
@@AdderTude I played Wildlands too and I really enjoyed it. I didn't know they had removed the Predator tie-in. I bought the game quite a long time after its release and the Predator missions were still in there when I played it.
It's a darn shame. Thanks for making a thoughtful and informative video about it. I hope Ubisoft and other studios listen to the argument for future games. In addition to all the WAY more important things you mentioned we're losing, I'd also just like to add this for the enthusiasts like myself; we're also losing the ability to 100% a lot of these games. For example, all of those AC games have achievements and trophies for multi-player, and some have unlocks related to them. So even if you go back and play what you can of these games, you'll be unable to platinum and/or 100% most of them. Like I said; it's a darn shame.
Thank you for giving a voice to this issue, I always had the horrible feeling that remasters of games just wasn't the same as playing it back in its heyday. It's not just Ubisoft titles games like COD Modern Warfare (2019) just feel awful now because it seems to scream "PLAY THE NEWEST COD NOW!!!" everytime I start it
I have for decades said that I will not buy any games I love at release until publishers make a solemn promise by partnering with some sort of non-profit foundation where, in the case that they decide to stop offering services, they will release the source code and binaries for server-side processes (incl. updates throughout time) to a non-profit foundation which only has the goal of preserving digital legacies and which can only begin to publish and utilize these resources after a company has seized offering the full scala of game features offered. To me, it was always the next obvious step after DRM blew up and entered the public eye, but people just don't seem to care. I stopped giving money to DRM and I stopped giving money to preorders, but that's hardly the most effective thing in existence... I wish influential gaming organisations would band together and kickstart such a foundation, because without industry leverage, publishers will only laugh you out of the room, whereas you all have not only leverage but the ability to reward such behaviour later on. Promote the foundation a bit, have it offer a 'shutdown-proof' certificate, and the gaming world will be better in the long run.
I'm sorry, but saying that TF2 is going strong thanks to valve actively supporting it for years is quite far from the truth. TF2 is still there because it has unique features and an insanely dedicated community that kept up with zero major update for years
I fully agree with you, but I've to say that TF2 is still here for that (mad comunity support) and 3 other reasons 1) it's such a beautiful but minimal, complex yet simple and unique game you wont find anywhere else. 2) you can personalize your playstyle. fully. not talking about hat, either. every class have at least 2 playstyle and each playstyle can be personlized with the boatloads of equips. 3) the most important factor is: because you can play on comunity servers without third party software. start the game, click comunity server, find one and enjoy. if not for this TF2 would have died in the bot invasion. you STILL cant play on official server without half a dozen of bot showing up and wasting everyone game.
@@ignoto82dr Taht's what I meant by "unique features" but I didn't want to dwell on what these features are, because every tf2 player knows what makes it an amazing game and why we love it so much
lol Ubisoft. I can tell you 1 thing, since I am a MONTREAL Canadian that works in the corporate world: You have no idea how bad things are here. Never have faith in the “Good Will any of our friendly major corporations present you. They hate you & every employee. Believe that. Let Ubisoft rot, I don’t buy any game developed by any Montreal studio especially, they all abuse their employees.
While I agree with you guys in principle: those servers get expensive to maintain and/or upgrade; many of the games affected are either not very popular anymore, or have sequels that also have many of the same features, but better; and leaving them as-is can also leave them vulnerable to hackers and malware that can access/steal players' personal info.
"Which meant that new players didn't just get sniped from across the map" Literally my first death when I tried out that mode years ago was getting shot by a pistol across the map
Making dlc no longer accessible even after you purchased it makes no sense it is like if you bought apple juice from a grocery store and an orange, you pay for it and then 1 week later they then call you to say we want your orange back and you will not get a refund
You don't "own" them. You are paying for a license to play them. They're revoking that license. I'm not saying its morally right and I'm not defending them in the slightest. But that's where we're at.
I'm reminded somewhat of the situation where Sony closed the online servers for Gravity Rush 2 only about a year after its release (2017), and didn't offer any kind of workaround for the players who may later come to play the title. Granted, the online was only for virtual currency called Dusty Tokens that bought the player content that wasn't vital to the story or even affected being able to 100% for trophies, it was still a massive screw up on Sony's part to not offer some kind of free DLC that gave all players the necessary amount of tokens to get all the items and outfits, or even simply update the game with a patch that did the same automatically.
Capitalism’s negative effects are becoming more and more well known to all of us, but watching Ubisoft blow themselves up like this is painful. There goes the reputation of a long-standing company, the trust in the industry, and the loyalty of the consumers.
The topic of AC’s multiplayer mode always makes me smile. I remember starting off with Revelations and absolutely falling in love. And when I saw someone playing the Courtesan, I immediately went ahead and bought Brotherhood to unlock her in Revelations. But seeing the slow killing of the mode, with it’s last remnants being in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, makes me so sad.
I feel your pain, I was big into MMORPG's (starting with Everquest in 2003, bloody hell, that was 19 years ago!) Anyway, I saw so many MMO's get shut down and I still haven't forgiven NC Soft for shutting down City of Heroes/Villains, my all time fave online game.
I play almost exclusively on PC, and stopped bothering with Ubi a while back. I like their games, but hate dealing with their PC releases, especially launcher. They don't even keep half their stuff up to date to play half the time. Couldn't get FC2 or 3 working and got 0 help from them. Hopefully they change one day so I feel like I can buy FC6 or their classic games without just getting an unplayable mess, either because of the launcher or something else.
This definitely reminds me of Toontown Online’s tragedy in 2013. I didn’t know what would happen after it got shut down, so I had to rescue my toon by writing him into my silly stories I still wrote to this day. He’s still around in my stories to this day and is doing okay… despite being humanized while keeping his cartoony abilities
Thank you so much for making this video! I am so upset about the closing and am happy to hear they will be postponing it but it's just delaying the inevitable. I want to be able to access these games in the future. Also! I think an important point (maybe not one that everyone cares about) is the trophy/achievement list! Shutting down games with online required trophies is a HUGE slap in the face to trophy hunters like myself and our community. It makes the trophies in those games unobtainable and therefore less appealing to go back and play them in the future. I'm not saying trophies are the only reason I play a game but it does have a big impact on games I might play in the future.
Ubisoft feel like one of the most soulless companies in gaming. Even when they do manage a good game, it's so hollow and void of passion from concept to execution. Everything is for metrics and profits, and fan backlash to beloved franchises only shows how deaf they are to their fans.
