Comment by PaulKeeble
7 days ago
The game that kicked this particular petition off was The Crew, a game that you could happily play single player which Ubisoft made always online purely for DRM reasons its a prime example of the abuse of power that legislators should be doing something ab0out.
This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.
"Let the problem fester until the negative externalities build up so much it overcomes the coordination problem and companies are subject to the same coercion (but through 'market forces' so it's good), one day, eventually, maybe" isn't a meaningful argument against legislation.
Excellent summary of our current pseudocapitalist hellscape. How do we stop this ride when even the meta is a coordination problem.
2 replies →
> This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it.
This is the EU. We don't believe the market fixes everything. As an EU citizen I really applaud the restrictions on bad business practices of tech companies. A lot of those are US-based but they'll have to play by our rules if they want to operate here.
Arguments like this are not very powerful.
It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method"
that said, more occurrences of this situation might make your argument more powerful over time.
> It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method"
Only with very very poor pattern matching. If people don't buy something, there is a 0% chance it will exist. That's better than any birth control method you might recommend.
1 reply →
That’s the American/capitalist thinking : the market should sort itself out against bad actors.
3 replies →
>you can just not buy it
Did Ubisoft clearly advertise the fact that the game would stop functioning entirely in the future when it was selling it?
Hence:
> the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.
1 reply →