Digital ownership is a strange concept to parse. Whenever we purchase a game from the PlayStation Store we aren’t so much as purchasing a title as we are being lent the license to play it. Take a peek into the terms and conditions and there is nothing stopping Sony from giving you three months notice and pulling the game from your library forever. It'll still be yours so long as it remains on a hard drive somewhere, but otherwise, you’re out of luck.

This is the sad reality of not only modern video games, but film and telev༺ision too. The sharp decline of physical media and simultaneous embrace of subscription services and the digital landscape means that the world we used to know is being lef𒉰t behind. Unfortunately, the big corporations still hold most of the cards when it comes to accessing the media we love.

This includes Ubisoft, who to mark the release of168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s early access period, decided to once again rebrand parts of its subscription service. Now, there is a paid tier known as Ubisoft+ Classics, which offers a specific subset of its games at a lower cost for PC users. Not to be confuseꦏd with the normal Ubisoft+ or Ubisoft+ Premium or any of the other names it has used for this thing in recent years. The whole thingꦑ is a mess, and reminds me of the horrible times when I’m forced to boot up and install things on Uplay.

Director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay goes into greater detail in a , saying that Ubisoft+ has just experienced its strongest year yet, and this new tier represents a clear demand from its audience. It might not like making use of its back catalogue when it comes to modern titles, bu♛t Ubisoft still has one hell of a legacy to draw from, one that fits snuggly into a nostalgia-pandering subscription service. New tiers and a big focus on subscription services also surfaces another point from Tremblay however, and how he wants consumers to grow familiar with the idea of “feeling comfortable about not owning your game.”

“One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s b💜een a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don’t lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That’s not been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your engagement with the game.”

The thing is, Tremblay isn’t inherently incorrect with his line of thinking. When the Xbox One launched over a decade ago, the world wasn’t ready for an always-online ecosystem or the dominance of digital-only products. We still wanted to swap physical games with friends and trade in pre-owned copies for credit or cash, with the majority of purchases still made either online or in brick and🎉 mortar stores where a case came with a disc you needed to play each and every game you purchased. You didn’t own those games, Ubisoft or Rockstar or whoever did, but at least you owned a physical copy of your licence that couldn’t be revoked in the same way a digital one could.

The proliferation oꦅf smaller indies, price parity, and stronger download speeds over the next decade allowed that transition to prosper, now leaving us in a place where the majority of sales are now made on digital storefronts. Owning a physical copy is nice, especially for a series I hold dear to my heart, but corporations have otherwise cond🍸itioned us into falling into the palm of their grubby digital hands.

Physical media lends games, film, and television an element of permanence that can never be achieved in the digital realm, at least not without resorting to piracy or operating outside the lines we are forced to abide by. Products are removed from sale, services are shut down, and profits will always come ahead of pre🐼serving artistic achievement no matter what or how we try to change things. Tremblay talks about subscription services as something that will always be around, and consumers will come to forget about physical media and embrace the same behaviours in a digital space. But that, by its very nature, is impossible. We are relying on licenses that can be pulled away at a moment’s notice and hardware which, one day, will cease to operate unless some suit in a boardroom somewhere decides to care enough.

I enjoy owning my games, and still value the presence of physical media, even as it keeps on fading away. My job as a games critic means the majority of games I play are digital too, so I go out of my way to enjoy physical media or titles that escape my daily purview. To see such a thing taken away with cynical corporate logic angers me, even if I can’t do anything to stop it other t🍎han supporting independent companies or picking up physical media whenever I can to ensure that, when the storefronts shut down and licences are no more, I’ll still have things to 🌌hold onto.

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