Ubisoft Prepares "Uplay Passport" - UPDATED

[Epona]

Their greed will kill the game industry, used games have been here from the beginning and has helped the industry grow. This ridiculous DRM and DLC will kill the industry. This has been a bad generation for consumers.

Consumer rights are a good thing, for all involved. Restricting consumer rights never ends well.

I wouldn't trust console publishers or manufacturers either to make gaming remotely cheap if they kill used games (which, again, they will next generation, mark my words). But it wouldn't cause a crash. Just because you won't lose 50% of the entire market by getting rid of used games. Used games make up around 50% of the market, some of those players would buy new without a used option and the others can go die in a skip somewhere as far as a publisher cares.

Plus the lack of used games doesn't have any negative effects on PC So at worst it'll be a console crash like in the 80's, gaming itself will carry on just fine. I've got no personal interest in whether or not console gaming dies, as long as gaming itself is fine

Fact is though, you can't cause a crash but cutting away something which doesn't generate money. People wont buy less new games because used games are gone, they'll buy more or the same amount. There are no negatives for companies with regards to killing second hand. That's why i can buy all the assassin creed games in a bundle for £15 on PC on steam in sales, it's a consequence of every PC sale generating money.

Are you sure the lack of a used PC market hasn't had any negative impact? Are you sure piracy doesn't play a role?

If there is one, it's not noticeable considering it hasn't existed for 10 years (and steam is awesome for sales anyway, you can get all games cheaper than used anyway in a steam sale, plus PC games are £30 as standard anyway, not £40/45), and piracy plays and still plays a role across all platforms. Consoles have to deal with second hand + piracy, so it's a double whammy.

The most galling thing for publishers is that second hand counts in the sales charts (From GAME and Gamestation in the UK at least, and i assume elsewhere), so they KNOW just how much money they should have been getting.

Since we don't have accurate piracy numbers before and after the demise of the used PC game market it's impossible to say but I think that piracy has likely increased alot since people can't buy used.

That could have been the case, but the used game market has been gone for 10 years now. Piracy was at a peak in 2006/2007 on PC, and has since slumped with the availability of games via steam ect. The increase in 2006 could have been attributed with used sales, but why 5 years later? personally, i think it was the advent of broadband as a mainstream thing that caused such rampant piracy in the west, once retailers started utilising digital distribution it was just as convenient, if not a lot more so, to just buy the game from steam. In the end, pirating just isn't as satisfying.

Piracy in the east (which makes up pretty much all PC piracy along with eastern europe - tracker downloads in places like the UK are insignificant amounts numbering in the few thousands) is so rampant, and always will be for the time being, is because of the lack of copyright protection in those countires, which is why most companies don't even bother shipping to there.

Where do your piracy numbers come from because as far I know, there is no way to track it reliably?

It doesn't matter anyway because everyone who buys and/or sells used games will tell you the same things. That money they gain from selling games usually goes right back into more games, sometimes new and that the ability to resell games makes them more likely to buy new. You get rid of the used market and there will be fewer new game bought because the risk will be higher. The console market doesn't have a Steam counterpart that has alot of sales.

Sometimes I wish the game industry would hurry up and cause the next crash so we can start fresh again.

 

[TheComfyChair]

Their greed will kill the game industry, used games have been here from the beginning and has helped the industry grow. This ridiculous DRM and DLC will kill the industry. This has been a bad generation for consumers.

Consumer rights are a good thing, for all involved. Restricting consumer rights never ends well.

I wouldn't trust console publishers or manufacturers either to make gaming remotely cheap if they kill used games (which, again, they will next generation, mark my words). But it wouldn't cause a crash. Just because you won't lose 50% of the entire market by getting rid of used games. Used games make up around 50% of the market, some of those players would buy new without a used option and the others can go die in a skip somewhere as far as a publisher cares.

Plus the lack of used games doesn't have any negative effects on PC So at worst it'll be a console crash like in the 80's, gaming itself will carry on just fine. I've got no personal interest in whether or not console gaming dies, as long as gaming itself is fine

Fact is though, you can't cause a crash but cutting away something which doesn't generate money. People wont buy less new games because used games are gone, they'll buy more or the same amount. There are no negatives for companies with regards to killing second hand. That's why i can buy all the assassin creed games in a bundle for £15 on PC on steam in sales, it's a consequence of every PC sale generating money.

Are you sure the lack of a used PC market hasn't had any negative impact? Are you sure piracy doesn't play a role?

If there is one, it's not noticeable considering it hasn't existed for 10 years (and steam is awesome for sales anyway, you can get all games cheaper than used anyway in a steam sale, plus PC games are £30 as standard anyway, not £40/45), and piracy plays and still plays a role across all platforms. Consoles have to deal with second hand + piracy, so it's a double whammy.

The most galling thing for publishers is that second hand counts in the sales charts (From GAME and Gamestation in the UK at least, and i assume elsewhere), so they KNOW just how much money they should have been getting.

Since we don't have accurate piracy numbers before and after the demise of the used PC game market it's impossible to say but I think that piracy has likely increased alot since people can't buy used.

That could have been the case, but the used game market has been gone for 10 years now. Piracy was at a peak in 2006/2007 on PC, and has since slumped with the availability of games via steam ect. The increase in 2006 could have been attributed with used sales, but why 5 years later? personally, i think it was the advent of broadband as a mainstream thing that caused such rampant piracy in the west, once retailers started utilising digital distribution it was just as convenient, if not a lot more so, to just buy the game from steam. In the end, pirating just isn't as satisfying.

Piracy in the east (which makes up pretty much all PC piracy along with eastern europe - tracker downloads in places like the UK are insignificant amounts numbering in the few thousands) is so rampant, and always will be for the time being, is because of the lack of copyright protection in those countires, which is why most companies don't even bother shipping to there.

Where do your piracy numbers come from because as far I know, there is no way to track it reliably?

It doesn't matter anyway because everyone who buys and/or sells used games will tell you the same things. That money they gain from selling games usually goes right back into more games, sometimes new and that the ability to resell games makes them more likely to buy new. You get rid of the used market and there will be fewer new game bought because the risk will be higher. The console market doesn't have a Steam counterpart that has alot of sales.

Sometimes I wish the game industry would hurry up and cause the next crash so we can start fresh again.

It seems quite sad that consoles even need to crash to actually make things better. Ironically, it was Activision (well, Atari, but Activision stemmed from them) that caused that crash too

Regardless, console gaming wont crash again like it did in the '80's, that's for certain. Some ventures (console) will end up collapsing under their own burden for over marketing ect. But that is just a result of console hardware being so stagnant that the only way to be different from everyone else is to spend millions upon millions on marketing. Meanwhile over in PC land we see ball-bustingly great games like the witcher 2 with next to no marketing budgets selling loads of copies digitally, so the profit margins for the developers are absolutely massive, and they deserve it for making a good game.

Consoles just seem to be strangling all innovation out of the industry because of the limited hardware and simply too expensive licensing and production costs. A game, now, costs £45-50 because of the £10 microsoft and sony slap on top. That's just too much for most people. PC hovers at around £30 or so, which is still a fair whack, but much more reasonable, add in steam sales and there's plenty of opportunity for gamers on a budget to buy games (PC gaming is actually really cheap! Especially if you build your PC when you needed to replace an old one anyway). The real kicker is that developers make far more from that £30 (digital) than the £45 on console.

So PC is set up entirely to allow innovation and exploring new ideas with very high profit margins on any sales made, no licensing fees and a much more open ended approach to game engines available ect. Developers can take risks, because if a game costs £10m to make on PC (and that's a lot of money, easily a AAA title), it only takes around half a million copies sold to turn a profit compared to the 1.5-2m copies required on a console. Now considering that most exclusive PC titles sell as well as comparable console exclusives, that's a lot of profit to gain and very low risk compared to making a console game. A decent game will easily sell half a million copies these days on any platform.

I'll be glad to see the back of this generation of consoles for a few reasons:

Assuming some magic is pulled and consoles are even remotely comparable to PC hardware (thermodynamics says they won't, but lets pretend) developers will have vastly more (~32x) more power to mess around with. We'll see some huge advancements in AI, interactivity and of course graphics.

More likely, and this is good or bad depending on whether you like gaming as a whole or just console gaming, the next generation consoles will fall flat on their face as a hardcore platform. Therefore all the core games will move over to the innovation-centred PC waters as opposed to the corporate copy-paste console cesspool, with consoles being able to focus on exploring the motion-esque controls further.

If neither of these happen and 'core' gaming remains console centric, then we will see a collapse and inevitably bankruptcy of all the major publishers bar Activision and maybe EA. At that point console gaming will be dead anyway.

 

[Epona]

I really think that all the gimmicks we have seen since the the DS are a sign of failure. The DS is great but what about the 3DS? I think they are out of ideas. Likewise, the Gamecube was great. It was a powerhouse in a small package and it had the best loading times of the three consoles that gen. However, the Wii is a gimmick and so is the Move and Kinect. Deep games don't exist where the primary control method is a gimmick. The 3DS is a part time handheld because even Nintendo tells you to take a break every few minutes. Why would they design a handheld like that unless they knew they had nothing else to offer?

Ask yourself, would you rather have Phantom Hourglass or Wind Waker? Would you prefer the Gamecube library or the Wii library? How do Kinect and Move games compare to controller driven PS3 and 360 games?

Thing is, what if Nintendo was right? What if a Game Boy Advance 2 or Gamecube 2 was not what the market wanted? What if gimmicks are all they have left to offer because we have improved every generation to a point where we can't go much further on current technology at an affordable price? Isn't that why Sony and Microsoft wanted a 10 year lifecycle, because they knew that it just can't get much better while still being affordable?


I'm rambling so I'll stop now but what if the gimmicks are all the industry has left? I believe a crash is coming and it will be caused by gamers getting angry and turning their backs on the game industry. They deserve it too, treating your customer like criminals and trying to destroy the market value of their products once bought is unacceptable. The gimmicks, yeah, people are tired of those too.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Wouldn't it be great if stores like gamestop made some sort of deal where they purchase these passes en mass at a cheaper price and pass the savings onto the consumer.

That's hilarious. It took me 10 mins to stop laughing...
Or are you serious.

I'm sure gamestop will still be selling used copies for $2 short of new because there will be plenty of suckers who will pay it.

Ubisoft games are so crappy online, that this really only encourages me to buy used...but still not from gamestop.
Actually, every time I hear about one of these schemes, it makes me want to only buy their games used. In fact, it seems that now-a-days I always buy new games unless someting like this is encouraging me to buy used out of spite.

Same with Mortal Kombat, why would I want to play that online? I want my opponent to be on my couch.

I completely agree with you. I could care less about having multiplayer online. However, I do think you will see used game retailers for the most part do something to get around this passport feature. Yes they will get a few people in the first little while but eventually people will start buying new because when games first come out there will be no point in buying used when it in fact costs 5 dollars more (new game=60$ used 55+10 dollar pass). I think I might have been a bit idealist when I said they pass the savings to us; but I bet you they will make a deal with these companies to sell these passes in the store. It only makes sense. Gamestop contacts ubisoft, ea whoever and says sell us these passes for 5 dollars or whatever, and they add it to the used game automatically. That way instead of taking a chance that the person will pay 10 dollars for an online pass they have a guarantee that all used games will bring in 5 dollars (a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush). Gamestop is not going to sit back and not react to these new online passes, it threatens their largest revenue; maybe not today but once this becomes common practice (and it will) people will know about the added costs of buying used.

For sure (or maybe fo-show) they'll have to do something eventually but I don't think it will be anything that will lower prices or benefit the consumer in any way. I just hope they keep doing this with games that I don't really want to play online.
The funny (but not ha ha funny) thing is that a lot of people use to play console games because it was a simple plug-n-play affair when compared to pc gaming. It seems that those days are behind us.

 

[stuhacking]

I'll stop buying 2nd hand when someone publishes a game worth buying. $50-$60 for 5 hours of content? There's your thief right there.

Of course, I'm not talking about buying 2nd hand on release week. There are plenty of good games already out there. I can wait months for yours.

 

[Briney-]

I know I don't mind waiting a few months to buy a new game at a reduced price. If I'm not sure that the game is going to keep me sufficiently entertained at a cost of $60, I wait for it to come down to $30-$35. That way, the publisher still gets my money (albeit less of it), and I'll have had enough time to make an informed decision on whether the game is right for me. I know this doesn't necessarily bode well for the publisher's initial bottom line, but I'd rather take a "wait and see" approach instead of blindly forking over money on release day for something I may not like.

I've been burned in the past by buying something that "looked good" on release day. And the idea of turning around and selling that product to a company like Gamestop for a fraction of what I paid for it ultimately leaves a sour taste in my mouth.