Ubisoft and preservation

 Or 'The shirked responsibility' 

Ubisoft is a joke. I think that much is a universal truth that the majority of the world has attuned itself roughly too. That very bell I've been ringing for years has finally caught on, and though they're presently gearing up to try and deliver that competitive multiplayer pirating game they've been teasing for the past 9 years; there's an aura of irremediability about their conduct which taints their every move and being. Even in the throes of their relief, people on Twitter are poking fun of the way in which the 'Skull and Bones' UI almost perfectly resembles the 'Elden Ring UX' joke tweet from earlier this year, proof that even the heights of hyperbole Ubisoft are the laughing stocks we see them as. In some ways it's a shame for this once promising and rising video company to be dragged down so much in the public eye; and in other ways they absolutely deserve it and will earn no quarter from me.

As times have gone on Ubisoft seems to have accepted it's slipping grasp on the hardcore mainstream gamers it struck a cord with so very long ago, and thus have relegated themselves to industry snake oil salesmen. How better would you describe avid proponents of NFTs at such a point where no one in the world can identify a single undeniable benefit of their existence? They were more than preponements- they were guinea pigs; sacrificing the last good will that 'Breakpoint' had to struggle to earn on the altar of cheap profits only to end up selling less NFTs than it cost to mint them on the blockchain in the first place. A resounding, and well deserved, failure on the part of a company that has totally lost step with it's audience and the sorts of experiences that they expect. So now that we've established what sort of company they are, it is any surprise that they've been spiralling down ever since?

Even with them riding the coat-tails of the remake age with their two currently running projects (both of which were announced without any representative footage, indicative of just how non-predetermined and trend chasing these projects are) there's suspicion surrounding every decision they make. And that's because Ubisoft kind of feels like it's in a state of running a big exit scheme out of the industry, where they throw all their weight into one last big grift to soak up as much capital as possible and just bounce from all responsibilities. That might seem like a drastic and extreme assumption, and it absolutely is; but how else am I going to take it when the company in question recently went out of it's way to attack one of the most sacred pillars of the speculative trust between consumers and providers; preservationism.

Now that isn't actually a word. But if it was, it would denote the act of preserving and keeping available access to gaming software in the hands of any who seek it. Because as I've stated before, retro gaming isn't as simple with old games as retro movies is for movie watchers. Software needs to be nurtured in very special ways in order to compatible with modern systems, and many games require whole rituals in order to get them working today that have to be workshopped by compassionate communities trying to keep these games alive. That is the basics of preservation, but there's an even bigger part of the world which intersects with the developers who publish and make these games; and that's where ownership rights lie when it comes to gaming.

Antiquated market laws dictate that currently, any software we purchase is granted through a license that can be revoked at anytime, which means that for digital game owners, we hold no recourse if a company wants to deprive our access to content we've paid money for. Amending such a gaping hole in mercantile code would require heavy and informed rewrites of transactional laws that no one wants to bother with, meaning that the crux of this issue has to rely on a limbo stand-off between consumers and publishers. We have to assume that even in situations where games are removed from sale, we can still access that which we've paid for, otherwise the precedent which becomes set is that all game purchases become a limited time subscription with no fixed date. Destroying faith in the foundations of our industry and putting faith and power in the pillars of piracy.

But since when did Ubisoft care about 'nurturing the industry'? That's what people felt over the current holidays when Ubisoft, in apparent celebration of their flagship Assassin's Creed franchise, put each game on sale directly before delisting a bunch of the older ones and disabling their online modes and DLCs. Fans of Assassin's Creed were in for a rude awakening during the start of these switch-offs when it was revealed that a whole game, Liberation, was going to not just be discontinued from sale, but according to an adjacent warning message, be made unavailable to all potential players; even those who already owned it. Now to be fair, Assassin's Creed Liberation is easily the worst game in the series, with the most boring protagonist and dull story slapped across a horrendous hybrid gameplay style between 3 and 2, but people still don't want things they payed for taken away from them. Even if the toy in question is a abomination upon man.

Now whether it was a miscommunication or a sudden shift in tone, Ubisoft have since come out to clarify that Liberation will still be playable to those who already own it, or who purchased it in the sale that the developer just promoted, and the second steam message about the game being 'unavailable' has mysteriously vanished. But this whole debacle has left an aura of uncertainty around the relationship between players, games and publishers. Ubisoft very well could have revoked that access, and had it been for a series that not so many people knew about they could have gotten away with it too. What would that make of our Steam libraries? This is a line too far for game's companies to cross, and that Ubisoft would even come close to toeing it is so utterly typical of pariah's like them, yet utterly repugnant at the same time. We cannot allow this equilibrium to be broken.

Someday this stalemate of ours is going to be truly tested, and the question of game preservation is going to become a hot button issue of debate. Remasters and remakes can only go so far, and sometimes the original running software or hardware holds very special places in people's hearts too. I hope there's a safe ultimatum we can reach, and one that doesn't involve NFTs, before that crowd starts nattering about the 'infallibility of the Blockchain and ownership there'. Ubisoft has dared to brush against that wall and had their hand bitten for their curiosity; who knows what company might be next to go whole hog. (I'm betting it's going to be a Netease game.) Until then enjoy your games and back them up if you can; you never know who's going to come for them.