SonicKoala said:
2xDouble said:
Yes, I too enjoyed Assassin's Creed: Wind Waker and Super Mario Schaefer.
Ubisoft, like any entertainment company, has the unenviable responsibility to both please and rip off its customers like a housekeeper in a sitcom trying to do serious drama. Sometimes they skew towards the former, and we love them. Sometimes they skew towards the latter, and they love us. There will never be perfect balance and we all, both sides, must accept that. So long as the balance is maintained, we have little to worry about.
UPlay, however, can sod off.
Why should we accept a company ripping off the consumer? That's not the "responsibility" of a company, that's a choice made by the people who run the company. If they exhibit this kind of blatant, anti-consumer behaviour, we shouldn't respond by saying "oh well, you guys didn't used to suck so much, so I guess it's not all bad", we should respond by getting pissed and not buying anything they put out.
Name any business that doesn't make money from consumers. That includes charities and non-profit organizations, by the way... just because they don't
keep the money/value doesn't mean they aren't
getting money/value, does it? Are you seriously going to posit that companies be required to offer products and services that are worth more than what you're expected to pay for it? by all means, explain how losing money with every sale is a viable business strategy.
It is absolutely the responsibility of a company to squeeze as much value out of their products as possible. That includes exploiting its workers for "free" labor (if you've ever had a salary job... *shudder*), ripping off its consumers (ever heard of store markup? the "middle-man" so many adverts claim to "cut out" to "save you time and money"?), scamming its suppliers for the best prices possible (and who are, in turn, also ripping them off no matter what deals they offer), and making as many shortcuts and cheap substitutions as they can get away with in their product to reduce resource costs. Businesses call that "cost-effectiveness", and that's the only way to make money in a competitive environment. Funny thing is... you're doing it too. You're trying to get more value out of a company just as they are from you. The only difference is they're doing it on a much larger, more visible scale... and
they're better at it.
This is not a question of ethics, it's an issue of capitalism. They're not going to stop trying to make money, and you're not going to stop demanding expensive products and services without paying more for it. The market is going to sway back and forth so long as these forces are in opposition. That is something all must accept. You should not, however, condone sways in the balance away from yourself, else equilibrium (which is mutually beneficial) cannot be achieved.
TL;DR: Read that last bit again.