Ubisoft revoking access to single-player games is dark news for gamers

Last week was a bad week in the world of digital ownership, giving a troubling insight into a fact we’ve wanted to deny ourselves for so long: that we don’t really own our games when we buy them digital, but instead rent them from fickle landlords (they are publishers) who revoke our access to These games at any moment.

I’m talking about Ubisoft shutting down online components for 15 of its older games (though not in all cases), which I covered last week. This not only entailed shutting down the long-empty multiplayer servers of old shooters, but co-op features that were meant to be playable over the local network, core single-player game features (as in Anno 2070), and unlimited downloadable content for single-player games. . When I reached out to Ubisoft for comment, they came back with the following:

“We are not making a decision to shut down legacy Ubisoft game services easily, and our teams are currently evaluating all options available to players who will be affected when these online game services shut down on September 1st.^Street2022. We are also working with our partners to update this information across all storefronts, so that players are fully informed about the removal of online services at the point of purchase as well as across Support Article Where we shared the news.

Conveniently ambiguous, then, although seeing as they “evaluate all available options” when these games and services go down in several weeks’ time, we’ll come back again to see what action they will end up taking.

So far, the issue has seemed to be confined to games with some form of online feature (however weak) but we learned over the weekend that Ubisoft will also be pulling and revoke access to is a full-blown single-player game, Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, from Steam as well as its Ubisoft Connect platform from September 1. What makes this particularly horrible is the fact that Assassin’s Creed Liberation was on sale on Steam just last week, incentivizing players to buy a game they won’t be able to play soon.

On closer inspection, it looks like another single player game from Ubisoft, Silent Hunter 5, will also become unavailable to current game owners.

This move is not unrivaled, even for Ubisoft itself, and it may have something to do with the company’s DRM architecture. Last year, the DRM servers for Might and Magic X: Legacy were deactivated, meaning that players were unable to play the single player portion of the game. Ubisoft removed the game from all platforms, before fixing the issues and reinserting it five months later. However, the difference between that and this is that it was a technical error on the part of Ubisoft, while that appears to be a big part of their plan.

While a lot of high-profile games have been pulled from storefronts over the years, they will always be playable for current owners. For example, the GTA Definitive Edition Trilogy pulled the original versions of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas from sale, but it remains playable for current owners. While Bethesda was preparing to release its 2017 game Prey, the original Prey from 2006 was pulled from sale, but those of us lucky enough to get it before then can still play the somewhat underrated shooter today.

On the other hand, we’ve seen publishers similarly callously enforce their will when pulling games from the store. In 2013, the servers for the War Order “Challenge” package were not only closed, but also canceled from the Steam store for current owners. And the It was erased from the hard drives of the people who installed the game. Granted, this was a failed multiplayer game that ran its course, but the level of snooping on a product that was ostensibly “owned” by players was unparalleled.

However, this seems bigger in its own way, because while multiplayer games rely on the constant attention of other players, with publishers pulling the game out as soon as they see it as “dead,” single-player games don’t “die” in the same way. When we buy a single player game, we expect it to be available for us to come back to whenever we want – whether this is a game of the year or a nostalgic trip down memory lane in 10 years. Ubisoft’s exclusion of games that people have bought without explanation or fee is something we expect from a subscription service like Game Pass, as an endemic part of the service is that games will come and go. What they’ve done here undermines the idea of ​​”buying” or “purchasing” products, which is ostensibly what you do through Ubisoft Connect, Steam, and other platforms.

Another question is whether Valve, or more specifically its Steam gaming platform, has any liability to those who have purchased the games in question through it. This is obviously Ubisoft, but as a de facto gaming platform for PC gamers, which people owe to Valve because it offers a depth of features, power, and communities that sets it apart from primal competitors like GOG or the Epic Games Store. Should Valve step in to defend those who use its platform believing it is a place where their game library is safe for future generations?

There’s a good chance that many people who have purchased Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD or Silent Hunter 5 via Steam don’t even realize that this game is DRM-based outside of Steam (despite the small size on the store page), Steam in this context is pretty much Launcher for other launcher only. In other words, it sounds kind of silly, right? You can see how less knowledgeable people, or perhaps more casual players, can get confused.

Valve has been reprimanded in the past for its “hands off” approach to the Steam format over the years, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hear about the feedback. The platform has provided graphs and notifications to mark the periods when games have been bombed, allowing potential buyers to not only contextualize their overall rating, but also read why a particular game is receiving a backlash at a given time.

After years of allowing any kind of trash on the platform, in 2019 Steam removed more than 1,000 games it believed were abusing the Steamworks system. This was due to criticism that Steam wasn’t doing enough to weed out the scandalous scam hackjob games that were circulating on the platform.

But should Steam do more keep Active games for people who bought them when a third party publisher tries to invalidate them? Perhaps when a publisher like Ubisoft tries to revoke access to a single-player game, Valve should force it to remain playable for existing players, and work with the publisher to migrate it to Steam in a playable state without DRM and other technical bureaucracy. For years, Valve has been taking a 30% off sales of these games, so it makes sense that their involvement in sticking with these games would be a proportionate share of their profits. It would be a strong move by Steam, sending the message that “your games are safe with us” even when publishers like Ubisoft stop being careless.

In my previous feature I discussed the things that Ubisoft can do to mitigate the impact of a game (or an online component) it kills: unlink online aspects and game servers from the Ubisoft infrastructure, and make co-op modes playable offline via Local Area Network (and Virtual LAN), give free upgrades to newer “remastered” versions of the game where possible. For full-blown single-player games that don’t have remastered versions, like Silent Hunter 5, either offer refunds, or remove massive DRM that seems to cost too much to maintain on Ubisoft.

These are some seriously worrying moves by Ubisoft, and the company can do a lot to reassure gamers. Even if they raised their hand and admitted what appears to be the case largely, which is that they created a bloated, high-maintenance online DRM infrastructure sometime in the late 2000s that made these games unsustainable, they would do whatever It is possible to make sure that the buyers of these products are counted, and that this will not happen again, this will go a long way.

It’s strange that Ubisoft is “evaluating the options” when they would almost certainly have been evaluating them before announcing the cancellation of these games and services. But let’s see. They have six weeks to come up with something for these games and modes before they go, and we’ll be watching closely to see if their “ratings” lead to anything of value to players.