Fearing Death

 

Oblivion lies at the end of the path. Always. Unchanging. There are those that run from the concept, failing ever to grasp the inevitable until it closes a paw around their fragile throat. There are those that accept the coming, living ever in the knowledge of who awaits around their last corner. Both are treated the same. There is not victory. And yet it is the folly of the mortal, of us, to always strive for the impossible, the eternal, that which exists only as a myth. The eternity of glory, of love, of memory, of friendship, of legacy. Immortality has been a false drug haunting man from their earliest waking memory of sentience. Some of our oldest stories, the story of Gilgamesh particularly, tells us the importance of that finish line, and why to be rid of it is to be rid of our very souls. Yet still, we wish for some sliver of feeling like our lives are one step to be continued tomorrow. Still, we wish to be the ones who owned something. So what does that make Ubisoft then, the grim freakin' reaper?

At this point I might as well declare myself the inaugural leader of the 'Ubisoft hate fan club', because I've pretty much declared myself in direct opposition to them as the boogey man of game development. But I just want to affirm that I'm not some crazed madman who thinks Ubisoft as a concept is a threat to all games... I think they are a threat to the very concept of art itself! Modern concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence abound, the threat of taking the 'human' out of 'art' and what would become of such a world, such content, would the point of art be lost absolutely? Well let me tell you've I've seen such a world! It's the same vile dystopia we peer at everytime the non-Euclidian mass of eldritch horror from Montreal claws a gash through space to deliver another dish of the most cookie-cutter, factory produced, personality drained, two-bit, lily-livered, finickal, three-suited, based, beggarly, bound, heir to a dog and a mongrel bitch, interactive video game slop their cadre of glue-sniffing troglodytes are capable of smashing together with the broken husks of soulless artists that make up their working staff.

It isn't fair to say that I hate Ubisoft. Because hate is an emotion we reserve for traditional concepts and people who wrong us. There's something else about Ubisoft. Something indiscriminately other about them. People like them, as totally creatively bankrupt as them, would be better served as loansharks, or bankers, or tyrants in some far-flung corner of the world leading a cruel reign over a battered people. But instead they choose to masquerade as real breathing humans walking this world with the rest of us. They breath our air, eat our food, attend our industry events and drip sweet poison into the ears of the impressionable about the 'future of NFTs in gaming' or 'The Metaverse collusion of the gaming industry!' or some other far flung nonsense. Like perhaps the 'people should get used to not owning their games', narrative.

Yeah, that's the lead I've been burying. We're actually talking about that. Because in their haste to try and ruin the industry actively, Ubisoft may have just triggered the consumer action to finally bite back at the slow dissolution of our game preservation efforts. Because Games are lost every other year. As servers fail and games slip from being buyable, and libraries deteriorate, and the industry chugs happily along ignoring all which came before like the heartless monsters they most certainly are. But Ubisoft are the one's who took an active role in declaring this as their desired future. Where games are given and taken at a whim, accessed by blood money drained out of us by corporate overlords in gimp suits with whips. I'm not sure if that's exactly the image they had in mind but it's the one their words conjured, the sick freaks!

A new game joined the graveyard of the unplayable and undownloadable, but this was not so far flung ancient piece of shovel ware on a long outdated console, nor a precious exclusive that made a bet on the wrong fledgling console- this was Ubisoft's The Crew. Their proposed 'light MMO' about street racing across an open map that covered all of America, albeit creatively shrunken to a few notable locations, whilst populating an open world peppered with police chases, grand stunts and a really hammy narrative about finding the guy who killed your street racing brother by infiltrating their car racing gang or such other trite. Personally I'll always remember The Crew as the street racing game in which the devs couldn't figure out how to code a starting line-up and so every race had to be initiated within a cinematic with control being handed to the player after the first few yards. This was a serious contender that Ubisoft pushed big time at release! 

So much so that they even ended up making a sequel with sea and air vehicles, which is probably where the issue lies. Now that most players have moved on to the sequel, Ubisoft thinks the original isn't worth jack anymore and are pulling the plug on it entirely. Removing online support, pulling the thing from stores and, reinforcing that Uplay is indeed the worst service in the entire industry, scrubbing the game from people's owned libraries. Which makes the game unplayable and removes all traces of the money they took from players in one neat swoop. What was the alternative, though? I mean, they could have patched in an offline mode but... that's effort. And we're talking about Ubisoft... they don't really go hand-in-hand, now do they?

This is a recent example of what happens when a game studio just can't be bothered to support their own living library anymore. That entire game, as well as all the hardwork that went into bringing it to life, has just been scrubbed from existence. Players cannot be the only people insulted by this! Imagine working for 4 years creating assets, drawing art, writing code, for software that is wiped from existence with prejudice because the company you work for just can't be asked! This is a genuine threat to the art form, as without the evidence of where we were, what we made and how it once was, how can we build upon what was? You see what I mean when I say Ubisoft are a genuine disgrace to the medium? They don't even try anymore!

Rumblings have sounded of late, old fans are disturbed by this conduct, and movements are starting to stir to try and rouse actual local governments to do something about video game preservation and hearing some of the statistics that are reported, such as how 90% of all video games ever made are in danger of being lost in the next few years, it's hard not to see this as a serious concern if you have any care for the video game industry whatsoever. Know that just because Ubisoft have the weakest spine out of everyone in the industry, that doesn't mean the others won't follow suit at some point if we don't make it clear just how not okay that sort of conduct is. Game preservation cannot be done alone, without assistance from developers and- given their unwillingness to even consider such things up till now- the hand of the law.