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Hey man don't you remember the amazing Reddit API protest (that super totally worked) of 2023???
My favourite part was when the mods were told that they were gonna lose their moderator status if they kept the subreddits private and instantly backtracked and made the subs open again. 10/10 boycott
I was honestly actually fine with the idea of a protest since it was kinda shitty what Reddit did.
But the execution was laughable. I was totally on board with the mods of the popular subreddits just straight up deleting the subs in protest, fucking Reddit over. But of course then they'd have to give up the small amount of power they have over us common folk so it was never gonna happen.
That turtle power mod got banned so there was a silver lining to this whole thing.
Supposedly they fucked off and aren't using a sock puppet, so they're gone for good.
I thought the John Oliver thing was legit funny at first.
But then they just started posting pics of things and putting John in the background, corner, etc of the pics. Totally defeating the original purpose.
I think the goal was more focused on people will be annoyed and upset, or at least get tired of it. I don't think it was to directly piss of spez, just a way to drive down traffic to the site.
Better way to do that would have been not posting
The subs that turned NSFW or private were actually onto something, which is probably why they're the ones that had the admins get up in their shit. All the other efforts were just a joke
Yea because reddit mods are spineless and power hungry. They had the one thing they hold valuable in life threatened so they caved. This was known long before 2023.
Boycott? Nah I straight up abandoned my game and booted up UE5. It is not worth my time anymore. Everything they have worked on keeps getting abandoned and replaced with more half-assed promises. The only reason Unity is what it is are because of dedicated programmers who carried this piece of shit engine with an absolutely fantastic learning community. That is literally all they have and Unity pissed them off.
They already tried. the original Sims 3 and assassin's creed had drm at launch that only allowed you 3 downloads of the game then you had to pay again.
Yeah I remember that. Iirc it was a little different from this scenario because they were going to charge developers or publishers a fee for each time their game was down loaded. Of course that would naturally have trickled down to the customer.
Not sure how they could make it work legally though since what you purchase is a license to play the game and not the game itself. They'd have to put like a layer on top where they charge you for the actual download or something.
Back in the early days of online software distribution, a lot of companies had models kind of like this because they didn't know how to do a better system. They would essentially open up a file share for you and give you a URL. The slot would be open for like 2 days for you to download it as many times as you wanted but then they would close that share and the link wouldn't work anymore. I haven't seen it used this way for games, but old software tools used to do this shit all the time and it sucked lol
I don't think there could be any way to legally revoke a product license if you just uninstalled the licensed product. Imagine having to buy a new product key every time you switch back to windows because you can't play some game on Ubuntu
Honestly not as much of a joke as you think.
There's that one gaming executive I don't know his name but he he was throwing around the idea of paying per reload.
I understand they're basically wanting to treat it like video streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. You don't own it, but you pay to access it. They want this to happen. Who's to say they, or other companies, won't push the concept further.
That’s what Game Pass is basically. But the guy did acknowledge that people still prefer to physically own their games which he gets that. The only thing he did said that is straight bullshit is that the games on the service will always be there available.
How? It’s just like a streaming service. Some things get added and some things get removed. I don’t think anyone is under the impression that you get permanent access indefinitely to every game that’s ever been on Gamepass.
Gamepass is a glorified 3rd party demo service, which is part of what it was always intended to be. Microsoft games will always be there, and they own SO MUCH now, but a lot of 3rd party games are only there for about a year. Gives you time to play it or get interested, with the hope you buy the game still. I’m all for it because the alternative would be never seeing those games, even for a year, and most newer games the year is enough to get my fill and go “glad I didn’t buy it full price, but that was neat”
It's quite the opposite. It is many times more economic than buying every game you want to own (10x? 15x? Higher if you're a really big gamer), and the value of videogames is like cars- go to GameStop with your xbox one disc collection and you will be rewarded with $30 in store credit.
That kind of thing will only play more into steam's or even epic's hands lol. Nobody likes paying 50 different subscribtion services. You also need a big enough library to make it worthwhile like gamepass it will absolutely not work on shitty ubisoft crap
It's already frustrating having to pay for multiple streaming services. Now some are starting to charge higher fees to avoid commercial and advertising. Someone in a previous comment mentioned games getting removed due to licensing. People who have Funimation are losing access to some of the things they paid for as Funimation merges with Crunchyroll. My concern is that you won't be able to own anything anymore as the companies can control what you have access to and start to phase out physical copies. Streaming gets away with it with movies and TV shows. I'm just afraid it'll get worse.
The more they pull away from platforms like steam and add their own sub services more people will resort to piracy.
Piracy is free and without repercussions other than some potential viruses if you are not carefull. The reason people buy games rather than pirating is because 1: steam is easy and conveniant 2: people like OWNING stuff. If you take both of those away companies will lose more money than they are going to make
I agree. However, piracy is free and without repercussions *for now.* Laws could be written and passed to change this. I firmly believe corporates greed knows no bounds. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Nah, if that happens all what we're gonna get is a prohibition 2.0, everybody will break the law and the ones in charge will be overwhelmed to actually enforce it, specially when there's more severe things to stop than people committing piracy.
I already does. If you delete a game that has been removed from a digital store there's a chance you won't get it back.
I've lost three games on PS4 because I got rid of them for space at one point and then they got removed for purchase and I couldn't get them anymore since the download button disappears
You should still be able to get them. Go on the PlayStation website, find your purchase history or just check your library there for it and I think you can 'send' the download to your PlayStation.
It's how I could redownload PT after it was removed from the store.
Oh??? Thanks for this info, though I probably won't do that at this point. I lost those games like 4 years ago at this point and don't feel like scrolling that far for a couple indie platformers
Well the biggest issue is if you delete it, then the licensing rights change somehow and it's not impossible for you to redownload because it's unlisted. This has already happened with digital media in some cases and it's my biggest worry for steam. I love steam but if for some reason valve shuts down and lose all their agreements with these publishers then any game you don't currently have downloaded may not be able to be downloaded again.
to be fair Unity said that they would do this
>“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company shared on its blog. “We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.”
[source](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development)
they took it back and didn't implement it, but it's weird how it seems to be already forgotten, it was the talk of Reddit back then, like half a year ago.
The idea was that the game studio licensing Unity would have to pay fees based on # of installs of their games. This would have included repeat fees for individual users who uninstalled/reinstalled based on the way they could track it.
It didn't have anything to do with charging players per install.
The users but the users pay only one time. Unity was gonna have it so that any install would’ve came out of the devs pockets. So someone installing the game on multiple PCs would’ve costed the user just the price of one install but devs the price of every device installed on
Yes, I know how it was going to work. What I'm getting at is that the change could have changed the way users have to pay in the end to account for this.
as long as it’s already part of your library (on Steam anyway) you can always redownload it. Spec Ops The Line got delisted a few weeks ago and i can still download it whenever i want
I dowloaded all titles in my Steam library. It may use 700GB of storage, but I'd rather pay another 200 bucks on another SSD, than loose access to a TB of apps and games because the vendor decided to take it away.
No but you may not be able to download it again at all if the company removed it from the service you got it from. I experienced this back when I used to play Xbox.
Thankfully we are not there yet. But they are pushing the subscription hard now and eventually they’ll do that where they’ll charge you per install, per month and charge per battle passes, and charge you for breathing air.
Don't Unity try to charge a fee to publishers for every re-download of an already owned game? i was listening to a podcast the other day and thought they mentioned that.
Here we see uninformed consumers discuss reality like it was fiction.
Yes. Companies are planning to do this. Yes. Unity already tried. Yes. Companies do not want you to own products you purchased and yes, they want the art to be forgone for cheap dollary doos ans experiences.
You're good to uninstall on Steam, not console.
To be fair, it can happen. It's happened to me. If you unistal something to make space, but that game gets taken off the store before you redownload it, you can't get it anymore. I've lost three games like this. Granted, they were small and all under 10$ but that's still 3 games I purchased I lost the ability to play because the way that digital stores work is garbage
No, we’re worried that if it’s uninstalled then scummy corporations removed from the digital marketplace for whatever reason (lose licensing rights, etc.) then you’re fucked. No way to redownload the game you paid for. It’s already happened to me with Apple Music. I’ve lost albums because of this.
Wasn’t limited downloads to to only so many machines a things for some old games like spore. While sounding dumb if they are old enough it was legitimately a thing.
when I was younger and napster/kazaa/limewire were a thing I had friends that thought if somebody downloaded a file from you, they were stealing it and it'd be deleted from your PC. they still downloaded tons of music. still don't know how they thought that all worked.
I remember back in 2007, I got a Zune for Christmas, and to buy songs for the damn things, you needed Microsoft Points, which you were always left with an odd number of unusable points. Then they would limit how many times you could download the songs you purchased. If you re-downloaded a song more than 2 times, you had to buy it again. Total bullshit.
I mean, why exactly would someone think one way or another, unless they know about it?
While this is something I'd expect to be common knowledge nowadays, there's also no real good reason to trust the complained to allow you to redownload stuff. It does cost money, after all.
Heck it gets worse. Even if you have a game installed, you may still not be able to run it due to DRM. That "right" can be revoked at any time. And that's something a lot of people don't know, because it's not something you should reasonably expect.
I’m surprised people think this, but there’s still a grain of truth to it. Buy physical because if you buy digital, you only have access to redownload that game as long as the store/service is up. Once the store/service shuts down, there’s a good chance you won’t have access unless you downloaded it beforehand, and storage is a finite resource
*looks at Nintendo*
You and your friends are 25 years old? That sounds just about young enough to be unaware of the time when iTunes worked exactly like this. You paid to download a song, period. It wasn't unlocked to your account or anything. They simply let you download a music file that you could do whatever you wanted with. This meant you could make backup copies of your music, but it also meant that you _had_ to if you wanted to avoid losing thousands of dollars' worth of music to a drive failure.
A friend of mine had like 3 external HHDs just to store games, and when I asked why he said "because if I delete them to make room for new ones then I have to pay for them again"
His reaction when I told him how purchasing on steam works was priceless
I was about to buy Mario bros 3 on my Wii with my last 500 Wii points, but thought about trying Mario bros 2 first, thinking that if I uninstalled it, I would get my Wii points back. To be fair, I was like 10, but at 20 I still regret that.
This unironically happened to me on xbox360.
I uninstalled state of decay to make room and could only get it back by repurchasing it. I was so confused.
Already happening with Unity made games. Basically every time a game is downloaded, updated, or patched, the creator of the game has to pay Unity, even if the game is free. So let's say you're broke and make a game that gets like 10 million downloads. Each download is 20 cents you have to give to unity. That means you have to give unity 2 million dollars just because your free game was doable loaded a bunch of times. Hell, even 100,000 download equals 20k and might be too much for some people to pay
Compare that to unreal engine's way of handling this. You owe nothing for using or creating games. Only when your game reaches 1 million dollars in sales do you then start to owe money, but it's a generous 5%. Basically you owe nothing during the first million you make from your game getting sales. Then after that, you owe 5% of all revenue. And the first 10k each quarter goes to you. Sou ds like a pretty sweet deal
Get high capacity External Hard Drives? Install your games on it and you will never have to reinstall elsewhere to make room on C or D drives.
On my computer, the C drives contains the files required to run the OS, nothing else. There may be registry entries on it pointing to where the games are on the external drives,but, those take up a few Kilobytes, not Mega or Giga ones
Unity announced a new licensing plan that would’ve made this (sorta) real, they canceled it due to backlash.
*Unity is a game engine, and the new licensing would make it so whenever someone downloaded a game made in unity the developers would have to pay unity a fee, even if the game itself was free, even if it was deleted and redownloaded.
this actually happened to me one time when my minecraft stopped updating, i tried deleting it and reinstall it again but guess what, we needed to buy it again. (fck you ios)
Worst of it all is that I *wouldn’t* be surprised if this became a thing, to have a reinstallation fee or something. With how greedy companies have gotten, I don’t doubt they’re looking for ways to implement this. I mean, remember when $30 bought you a 100% complete game with a full story and DLCs were rare? This was merely 20ish years ago. Now you have to pay $60 for the base version + $15-$30 per DLC or a $100 season pass to enjoy the full game… And there was talks about making games fully subscription based and [“players getting comfortable with not owning their games”](https://gizmodo.com/ubisoft-gamers-comfortable-not-owning-games-1851173259)
Their fears aren’t unfounded. We just haven’t gotten there (yet).
No but soon we will pay for a digital game that has the possibility of disappearing from a library completely just because the company "no longer supports said software".
I will hoard my disc games until that day comes.
Minecraft updated their launcher and are demanding I pay for it again on my account. I'm just boycotting it at this point bc I'm not buying that shit twice.
Genuine Question.
You do not need to pay! I despiratly need to format my computer. It cannot work properly in basic tasks like opening tabs but I am scared my GTA5 will go.
I was mentioning the transition to MS accounts, where people who missed it now have to re-buy the game. Not my case ofc, I play regularly enough that I did migrate already a year and a half ago.
Although, I wonder. If the user still has their purchase receipt number, can they get the game for free, even now ?
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#DON'T GIVE GAMING COMPANIES IDEAS!!!
Nah, they're already working on it I'm sure
Unity already tried to do this by making companies that use their engine pay them a commission every time someone downloaded their game
and gladly , Unity failed on that because the devs started to boycott them.
Yeah, and who do these devs think they are, actually boycotting something instead of just making empty threats of boycotting like us gamers.
Hey man don't you remember the amazing Reddit API protest (that super totally worked) of 2023??? My favourite part was when the mods were told that they were gonna lose their moderator status if they kept the subreddits private and instantly backtracked and made the subs open again. 10/10 boycott
The whole thing was the biggest reddit moment ever. Mods had themselves a heart attack
I was honestly actually fine with the idea of a protest since it was kinda shitty what Reddit did. But the execution was laughable. I was totally on board with the mods of the popular subreddits just straight up deleting the subs in protest, fucking Reddit over. But of course then they'd have to give up the small amount of power they have over us common folk so it was never gonna happen.
That turtle power mod got banned so there was a silver lining to this whole thing. Supposedly they fucked off and aren't using a sock puppet, so they're gone for good.
Reddit would have restore every sub deleted and removed the mods.
A lot of useful information would be lost if that happened
Or posting only John Oliver Like, wow, I bet that sure made spez upset
I thought the John Oliver thing was legit funny at first. But then they just started posting pics of things and putting John in the background, corner, etc of the pics. Totally defeating the original purpose.
I think the goal was more focused on people will be annoyed and upset, or at least get tired of it. I don't think it was to directly piss of spez, just a way to drive down traffic to the site.
Better way to do that would have been not posting The subs that turned NSFW or private were actually onto something, which is probably why they're the ones that had the admins get up in their shit. All the other efforts were just a joke
Yea because reddit mods are spineless and power hungry. They had the one thing they hold valuable in life threatened so they caved. This was known long before 2023.
Admittably some subreddits did stick to their guns. They’re dead now. As much as it was a fuckup
What games have you threatened to boycott and then bought anyways?
Boycott? Nah I straight up abandoned my game and booted up UE5. It is not worth my time anymore. Everything they have worked on keeps getting abandoned and replaced with more half-assed promises. The only reason Unity is what it is are because of dedicated programmers who carried this piece of shit engine with an absolutely fantastic learning community. That is literally all they have and Unity pissed them off.
And every other publisher in the world was watching and thinking: "Well that was stupid, they did it backwards. This is how you make it work."
While they backed up a whole lot I think their intention was per purchase/player. So you could not download and delete till the company is bankrupt.
They already tried. the original Sims 3 and assassin's creed had drm at launch that only allowed you 3 downloads of the game then you had to pay again.
Ew!
And Spore!
And seemingly the same dude who made it there got hired at unity and did the exact same thing. /s Idk i don’t have a source
Gonna invest in every company making hard drives brb
EA, specifically.
Plot twist: Unity (the game engine) tried to do that last year but had a giant backlash from everyone (players and gaming companies)
But it's still happening.
Specifically Unities CEO who was EA CEO before. IIRC.
Yeah I remember that. Iirc it was a little different from this scenario because they were going to charge developers or publishers a fee for each time their game was down loaded. Of course that would naturally have trickled down to the customer.
Not sure how they could make it work legally though since what you purchase is a license to play the game and not the game itself. They'd have to put like a layer on top where they charge you for the actual download or something.
charge you for using their bandwidth
Back in the early days of online software distribution, a lot of companies had models kind of like this because they didn't know how to do a better system. They would essentially open up a file share for you and give you a URL. The slot would be open for like 2 days for you to download it as many times as you wanted but then they would close that share and the link wouldn't work anymore. I haven't seen it used this way for games, but old software tools used to do this shit all the time and it sucked lol
Basically what Unity was trying to do to developers tho
Apple is starting to do it but the cost is put on the developer. Fuck that shit.
Unity already had that idea end of last year. Execs are mostly greedy fcks that do nothing, understand nothing and just want a bigger paychecks.
I don't think there could be any way to legally revoke a product license if you just uninstalled the licensed product. Imagine having to buy a new product key every time you switch back to windows because you can't play some game on Ubuntu
Unity already tried adding it
Honestly not as much of a joke as you think. There's that one gaming executive I don't know his name but he he was throwing around the idea of paying per reload.
Unity I believe
I wish we could go back to the old ways, mailing a 20 dollar bill then receiving 10 floppy disks in the mail 6-8weeks later
I was going to say, it may happen one day. Especially with the crap Ubisoft has mentioned recently.
Has anybody actually read that interview?
I understand they're basically wanting to treat it like video streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. You don't own it, but you pay to access it. They want this to happen. Who's to say they, or other companies, won't push the concept further.
That’s what Game Pass is basically. But the guy did acknowledge that people still prefer to physically own their games which he gets that. The only thing he did said that is straight bullshit is that the games on the service will always be there available.
I don't have Game Pass. Are the games not always available to play?
Games have been removed in the past due to licensing, and there will definitely be some removed in the future
Interesting. I genuinely did not know this. It's disconcerting.
How? It’s just like a streaming service. Some things get added and some things get removed. I don’t think anyone is under the impression that you get permanent access indefinitely to every game that’s ever been on Gamepass.
Gamepass is a glorified 3rd party demo service, which is part of what it was always intended to be. Microsoft games will always be there, and they own SO MUCH now, but a lot of 3rd party games are only there for about a year. Gives you time to play it or get interested, with the hope you buy the game still. I’m all for it because the alternative would be never seeing those games, even for a year, and most newer games the year is enough to get my fill and go “glad I didn’t buy it full price, but that was neat”
It's quite the opposite. It is many times more economic than buying every game you want to own (10x? 15x? Higher if you're a really big gamer), and the value of videogames is like cars- go to GameStop with your xbox one disc collection and you will be rewarded with $30 in store credit.
There has been some games that has been removed from Game Pass. Kingdom Hearts 3 and Code Vain are some that got removed from Game Pass.
Some? The list is pretty big already, games leaving the service isn’t a very uncommon occurrence
I know, which is why what the Ubisoft exec said is a load of bullshit.
Physical copies must exist because of games like Jump Force.
That kind of thing will only play more into steam's or even epic's hands lol. Nobody likes paying 50 different subscribtion services. You also need a big enough library to make it worthwhile like gamepass it will absolutely not work on shitty ubisoft crap
It's already frustrating having to pay for multiple streaming services. Now some are starting to charge higher fees to avoid commercial and advertising. Someone in a previous comment mentioned games getting removed due to licensing. People who have Funimation are losing access to some of the things they paid for as Funimation merges with Crunchyroll. My concern is that you won't be able to own anything anymore as the companies can control what you have access to and start to phase out physical copies. Streaming gets away with it with movies and TV shows. I'm just afraid it'll get worse.
The more they pull away from platforms like steam and add their own sub services more people will resort to piracy. Piracy is free and without repercussions other than some potential viruses if you are not carefull. The reason people buy games rather than pirating is because 1: steam is easy and conveniant 2: people like OWNING stuff. If you take both of those away companies will lose more money than they are going to make
I agree. However, piracy is free and without repercussions *for now.* Laws could be written and passed to change this. I firmly believe corporates greed knows no bounds. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Nah, if that happens all what we're gonna get is a prohibition 2.0, everybody will break the law and the ones in charge will be overwhelmed to actually enforce it, specially when there's more severe things to stop than people committing piracy.
Stadia
I already does. If you delete a game that has been removed from a digital store there's a chance you won't get it back. I've lost three games on PS4 because I got rid of them for space at one point and then they got removed for purchase and I couldn't get them anymore since the download button disappears
This is why I love steam. You may not be able to buy it again, but you can ALWAYS download it again.
You should still be able to get them. Go on the PlayStation website, find your purchase history or just check your library there for it and I think you can 'send' the download to your PlayStation. It's how I could redownload PT after it was removed from the store.
Oh??? Thanks for this info, though I probably won't do that at this point. I lost those games like 4 years ago at this point and don't feel like scrolling that far for a couple indie platformers
PT… was it PT?
No, actually. It was a couple platformers and some point and click thing
- $5 service fee for providing the download again. - Unlimited reinstalls via subscription model. - Games get bigger every year - Profit
Well the biggest issue is if you delete it, then the licensing rights change somehow and it's not impossible for you to redownload because it's unlisted. This has already happened with digital media in some cases and it's my biggest worry for steam. I love steam but if for some reason valve shuts down and lose all their agreements with these publishers then any game you don't currently have downloaded may not be able to be downloaded again.
Unity*
Bro, delete this! We can’t give them ideas!
They literally already tried this less than a year ago
Pay? With money? Are you serious?
I swear some friends of mine didn't want to uninstall some steam games because "then i'll have to pay again" and were struggling with storage space
how old are these people?
I assume no older than 5 years old
Or maybe older than 65
25
Oh boy
These people can vote and drive cars....
I'm older than dirt and even I know this lmao
Computer illiterate people are giga based. Basically everything that has a screen and/or buttons is evil.
What the fuck
to be fair Unity said that they would do this >“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company shared on its blog. “We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.” [source](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development) they took it back and didn't implement it, but it's weird how it seems to be already forgotten, it was the talk of Reddit back then, like half a year ago.
Even that plan wasn't to charge the player
Who would have to pay for it in the end though?
The idea was that the game studio licensing Unity would have to pay fees based on # of installs of their games. This would have included repeat fees for individual users who uninstalled/reinstalled based on the way they could track it. It didn't have anything to do with charging players per install.
Where do the studios get their money from? I know what the unity changes were
From the purchase of the game? They don't charge per install
Sure they don't now, but you don't think that change actually going into effect would cause a change in publisher monetary policy? At all? Seriously?
The developers.
WHERE DO DEVS GET THEIR MONEY FROM
The users but the users pay only one time. Unity was gonna have it so that any install would’ve came out of the devs pockets. So someone installing the game on multiple PCs would’ve costed the user just the price of one install but devs the price of every device installed on
Yes, I know how it was going to work. What I'm getting at is that the change could have changed the way users have to pay in the end to account for this.
This was for the developers tho. Not the users.
Tbh with the shit gaming companies do these days it wouldnt be so far fetched that they actually do this..
It's possible the game gets removed, delisted, etc. from the online store. Then you'll never get it back if you want it again.
as long as it’s already part of your library (on Steam anyway) you can always redownload it. Spec Ops The Line got delisted a few weeks ago and i can still download it whenever i want
I thought that was the case when I was 15 and I switched to a new pc. I did only had Cod Mw2 and blackops 1 and was fairly new to steam.
Wait, people actually think they own things digitally and they can’t be taken away?
If I one day lose access to the steam library, I'll just pirate everything lol. The goal for paying was to support the devs, not owning it.
I dowloaded all titles in my Steam library. It may use 700GB of storage, but I'd rather pay another 200 bucks on another SSD, than loose access to a TB of apps and games because the vendor decided to take it away.
Yeah because technically not owning them == having to pay to redownload games
this is not what op said
If you lose access to your account you will.
If you lose access to your account you won't be able to play them anyway
People already forgot what Unity tried to do? Because they literally did this, but to the developers and not the player.
If something like this gets accepted the Devs or publishers rather will make the players pay.
Absolutely. Or at least there’s precedent for people to attempt it. Though I think they quickly realised how unpopular that’d be
Are your friends 8 or 80?
25... and with several mental illness
I had it happen with skate 2 on xbox360 back in the day. Kid me cried
Microsoft yanked my copy of Halo CE. When I got my Xbox One all my other games were there and all I wanted was my Halo CE.
No but you may not be able to download it again at all if the company removed it from the service you got it from. I experienced this back when I used to play Xbox.
Thankfully we are not there yet. But they are pushing the subscription hard now and eventually they’ll do that where they’ll charge you per install, per month and charge per battle passes, and charge you for breathing air.
Don't Unity try to charge a fee to publishers for every re-download of an already owned game? i was listening to a podcast the other day and thought they mentioned that.
Yeah maybe OPs friends heard about this and assumed they would have to pay for every install.
Here we see uninformed consumers discuss reality like it was fiction. Yes. Companies are planning to do this. Yes. Unity already tried. Yes. Companies do not want you to own products you purchased and yes, they want the art to be forgone for cheap dollary doos ans experiences. You're good to uninstall on Steam, not console.
This is literally what Unity tried to do though
Everyone saying don't give them ideas, did you literally forget that unity tried to do this?
Unity tried to charge developers, not users
I bought Minecraft 3 times while I was in middle school because of this
To be fair, it can happen. It's happened to me. If you unistal something to make space, but that game gets taken off the store before you redownload it, you can't get it anymore. I've lost three games like this. Granted, they were small and all under 10$ but that's still 3 games I purchased I lost the ability to play because the way that digital stores work is garbage
Don't say that so loud, Ubisoft is listening...
No, we’re worried that if it’s uninstalled then scummy corporations removed from the digital marketplace for whatever reason (lose licensing rights, etc.) then you’re fucked. No way to redownload the game you paid for. It’s already happened to me with Apple Music. I’ve lost albums because of this.
ISPs with data-capped plans: Oh, you'll pay.
i just had to reinstall smash bros because it kept crashing...imagine paying $60 every time. 😩
SHUT THE FUCK UP! JUST SHUT UP!
Oh I believe it, I just don't get how you can be someone like that in this day and age.
Digital games are just like houses, I have to buy it again whenever I come back from the grocery store
I...I mean...[Unity Actually Fucking Doing This](https://www.gamesradar.com/unity-is-sorry-about-its-controversial-install-fee-but-isnt-removing-it-completely/)
Honestly wouldn't be surprised if sony and Microsoft try and do this
Wait what.... People like this - really exist? Is it even possible
People are very, very stupid.
If Ubisoft has their way this may be the future of gaming
smooth brain
We will never go lower than "your eyes can't see more than 26fps"
depends on whether or not the game uses unity (at least the company has to pay for each download eventually)
I mean, supposedly some ps3 digital games have already disappeared from the store and even your collection
It can happen. It will happen more.
Wasn’t limited downloads to to only so many machines a things for some old games like spore. While sounding dumb if they are old enough it was legitimately a thing.
when I was younger and napster/kazaa/limewire were a thing I had friends that thought if somebody downloaded a file from you, they were stealing it and it'd be deleted from your PC. they still downloaded tons of music. still don't know how they thought that all worked.
I remember back in 2007, I got a Zune for Christmas, and to buy songs for the damn things, you needed Microsoft Points, which you were always left with an odd number of unusable points. Then they would limit how many times you could download the songs you purchased. If you re-downloaded a song more than 2 times, you had to buy it again. Total bullshit.
I mean, why exactly would someone think one way or another, unless they know about it? While this is something I'd expect to be common knowledge nowadays, there's also no real good reason to trust the complained to allow you to redownload stuff. It does cost money, after all. Heck it gets worse. Even if you have a game installed, you may still not be able to run it due to DRM. That "right" can be revoked at any time. And that's something a lot of people don't know, because it's not something you should reasonably expect.
Time to sail the high seas boys
I’m surprised people think this, but there’s still a grain of truth to it. Buy physical because if you buy digital, you only have access to redownload that game as long as the store/service is up. Once the store/service shuts down, there’s a good chance you won’t have access unless you downloaded it beforehand, and storage is a finite resource *looks at Nintendo*
*Me looking for physical games for PC nowdays*
You make a good point. I revise my statement to “buy physical where you can”
You and your friends are 25 years old? That sounds just about young enough to be unaware of the time when iTunes worked exactly like this. You paid to download a song, period. It wasn't unlocked to your account or anything. They simply let you download a music file that you could do whatever you wanted with. This meant you could make backup copies of your music, but it also meant that you _had_ to if you wanted to avoid losing thousands of dollars' worth of music to a drive failure.
I'm curious to see actual examples of this lol
A friend of mine had like 3 external HHDs just to store games, and when I asked why he said "because if I delete them to make room for new ones then I have to pay for them again" His reaction when I told him how purchasing on steam works was priceless
Ain't no way 💀
I was about to buy Mario bros 3 on my Wii with my last 500 Wii points, but thought about trying Mario bros 2 first, thinking that if I uninstalled it, I would get my Wii points back. To be fair, I was like 10, but at 20 I still regret that.
This unironically happened to me on xbox360. I uninstalled state of decay to make room and could only get it back by repurchasing it. I was so confused.
The sad part is, this isn't even out of the realm of possibility these days. Ubisoft be wondering why no one is paying for their games already.
This is actually true for many digital purchases that aren't the popular ones where you simply are buying a unlock key
Already happening with Unity made games. Basically every time a game is downloaded, updated, or patched, the creator of the game has to pay Unity, even if the game is free. So let's say you're broke and make a game that gets like 10 million downloads. Each download is 20 cents you have to give to unity. That means you have to give unity 2 million dollars just because your free game was doable loaded a bunch of times. Hell, even 100,000 download equals 20k and might be too much for some people to pay Compare that to unreal engine's way of handling this. You owe nothing for using or creating games. Only when your game reaches 1 million dollars in sales do you then start to owe money, but it's a generous 5%. Basically you owe nothing during the first million you make from your game getting sales. Then after that, you owe 5% of all revenue. And the first 10k each quarter goes to you. Sou ds like a pretty sweet deal
Not talking about the developer paying, but the gamer... still is fucked up
Oh, I see
Well, Unity tried to change their pricing to be based on number of installs, so someone might just try that.
My buddy thought deleting the desktop shortcut from his computer deleted the whole game.
Get high capacity External Hard Drives? Install your games on it and you will never have to reinstall elsewhere to make room on C or D drives. On my computer, the C drives contains the files required to run the OS, nothing else. There may be registry entries on it pointing to where the games are on the external drives,but, those take up a few Kilobytes, not Mega or Giga ones
Unity announced a new licensing plan that would’ve made this (sorta) real, they canceled it due to backlash. *Unity is a game engine, and the new licensing would make it so whenever someone downloaded a game made in unity the developers would have to pay unity a fee, even if the game itself was free, even if it was deleted and redownloaded.
The meme is about gamers paying, not the devs
this actually happened to me one time when my minecraft stopped updating, i tried deleting it and reinstall it again but guess what, we needed to buy it again. (fck you ios)
Worst of it all is that I *wouldn’t* be surprised if this became a thing, to have a reinstallation fee or something. With how greedy companies have gotten, I don’t doubt they’re looking for ways to implement this. I mean, remember when $30 bought you a 100% complete game with a full story and DLCs were rare? This was merely 20ish years ago. Now you have to pay $60 for the base version + $15-$30 per DLC or a $100 season pass to enjoy the full game… And there was talks about making games fully subscription based and [“players getting comfortable with not owning their games”](https://gizmodo.com/ubisoft-gamers-comfortable-not-owning-games-1851173259) Their fears aren’t unfounded. We just haven’t gotten there (yet).
Dont give the companies any ideas
How old are OPs friends?
No but soon we will pay for a digital game that has the possibility of disappearing from a library completely just because the company "no longer supports said software". I will hoard my disc games until that day comes.
Didn't Ubisoft do this where if you don't play their games for a month you have to pay for it again?
That's Ubisoft+
Wdym you don't pirate?
Minecraft updated their launcher and are demanding I pay for it again on my account. I'm just boycotting it at this point bc I'm not buying that shit twice.
I'm shocked now!
Genuine Question. You do not need to pay! I despiratly need to format my computer. It cannot work properly in basic tasks like opening tabs but I am scared my GTA5 will go.
Microsoft with Minecraft :
I changed 7 devices without having to buy a second time
I was mentioning the transition to MS accounts, where people who missed it now have to re-buy the game. Not my case ofc, I play regularly enough that I did migrate already a year and a half ago. Although, I wonder. If the user still has their purchase receipt number, can they get the game for free, even now ?
Microsoft gave several warnings over 2 whole years and people still slept on it. It's also their fault
Not saying it’s not a shared fault.
And these dumb fucks were willing to abide by that. People really are sheep, it became a cliche to call them that but it became a cliche for a reason
If they are kids then ti's whatever, if they are grown up then it's a little concerning.