Tomba_be

This is bound to fail in a more spectacular way than Greenlight. What about mods that stop working after a while (due to game patch for example) and the creator doesn't bother to fix it? What about mods that include a bunch of stuff taken from other (free) mods, you can't really place a copyright claim on edited config files... What about mods that place copyrighted content in games and charge for it now?Not to mention the floodgates of garbage paid mods that will make it impossible to find anything decent anymore...

I wouldn't mind paying for really well made and well supported mods, and selling them is not much different from selling TF2 hats or DOTA2 gear. But in those games the content is much easier to check for the above problems. You can't check big mods for problematic content because you never know what the modders are changing...

There is no need for a thoughtful approach. It's very simple and has been stated already. Pornography is not allowed on the appstore, which is okay because it's Apple's store and they can put in any dumb rule they want. But Apple considers nudity to be pornography. Which is factually wrong. So they are rejecting a game based on a completely wrong interpretation of their own rules.

Besides that: no, I do NOT have to respect peoples/companies opinions/beliefs/choices when they are completely insane and harmful to society. Or should I respect genital mutilation of women in Africa because it's a tradition there, or the prosecution of LGBT citizens in Russia because that is the law there? Or is it okay that there are still countries in which women are not allowed to vote? Or should I respect the law in countries that do not allow gay people to marry? This obsession with banning nudity and sexuality is the sign of medieval mindset and should be loudly complained about and ridiculed.

Also, that's what you get when you buy from a company that thinks its customers do not have the ability to think for themselves.

Well, Victorian London was to be expected at some point. It's an interesting period, with a lot of climbable buildings, lack of guns and a whole lot of, fictional and real, very famous characters.

I don't even mind them making an AC game every year. They put a hell of a lot more effort in it than most annualized games (CoD, EA Sport games,...) so it's a lot of fun for people who like the AC gameplay (even if it doesn't change all that much).

But this "leak" is another awful move by the Ubisoft PR team. Obviously someone is working on another AC game, but it's a different team which has no influence on the bugfixing of Unity. But I can see how many people will get upset when reading that Ubisoft is working on the next AC instead of fixing Unity...

You would think Ubisoft would have an idea about how many review copies they send out... It's not like there are 20 reviewers in the world. Most big game companies send out review copies to everyone with a YT channel. I write reviews for a local site, and I've never EVER had problems finding other people to play a game with, especially one from a big publisher.

Sure, maybe there won't be tens of thousands of people to play with, but there will definitely be thousands, and unless I can see all of them in my game (which I won't) there is no real difference between a playerbase of 5 000 and 5 000 000.

Have you even LOOKED at the games Ubisoft released in 2014 before claiming they are all bad? Apart from the AC:U trainwreck, most of them were pretty decent to good. Also, Ubisoft is the only one of the three big publishers consistently creating interesting games (Child of Light, Valiant Hearts, Blood Dragon, M&M Legacy, the first AC,...) that you will never see Activision or EA risking. Yes, if a concept is successful they will create more, can you blame them?

I will agree their PR team seems to consist of 100% aliens who have no idea how to talk to an audience.

I understand the fact that backing a Kickstarter is a risky endeavor, and that you might not ever see what you paid for. But making the decision to just NOT have some of the features that you promised because you want to implement online DRM is a dick move.

And the people who say backers should just suck it up are really anti-consumer-minded I guess? Do we no longer even have the right to complain about something we don't like, especially something that was promised? Maybe the devs figured this idea might not upset too many people, and change their minds after seeing thousands of fans complain loudly? I remember (the same?) people saying everyone complaining about the Xbones always online DRM system, the mandatory Kinect or the blocking of second hand sales; were just idiots that would never get anything changed. Well, it seems complaining does create change if enough people do it. Maybe the Elite devs also change their mind. I was very likely to get this game, but I'll never buy a space sim that I can't just enjoy at my own leisure or when the servers inevitably go down. Because if huge multinationals can't keep servers online, a small studio definitely won't. Unless this news completely kills the sales of the game in which case the few people that still buy it can enjoy it until the developer kills the servers because they're not profitable anymore (and just tell people to buy the sequel). Combine this with microtransactions and I fail to see why I should buy this game to support a company that just treats customers the same way the giant corporations do.

I think reviews should take this sort of nonsense in consideration when scoring a game. And also add big warnings on top: 'GAME IS DEPENDENT ON UNRELIABLE SERVERS' or 'GAME REQUIRES UNSTABLE EXTERNAL SOFTWARE'. It will be near impossible to play current games in 10 years time because the disc version barely works, and you won't be able to update it anymore, nor connect to servers that have been taken down years ago to even play the game. I guess pirate groups should be considered saviours of the gaming culture if things keep going on like this...

RE: archiving of video games: Would be nice if copyright law was so that if someone wants to file a copyright on any artistic work (such as video games), that a copy of the source code should be deposited to a government institution for safekeeping AND to be used as a reference in case of copyright lawsuits. This should be done at a certain point after the release (as to get the best working version, and to appease publishers that are afraid their work might get stolen that way) and should also include any related software, such as multiplayer servers or DRM. Companies are free to refuse being included in this project, but then also have no legal defence against anyone copying the game because there is no deposited version to check any counterfeit against.

It would be a crime against culture if in a hundred years we would lose access to this entire form of media. People have been figuring out old games up to a point, but there's a pretty huge leap between decompiling Atari hardware and games, and getting the PS3 version of GTAV to run on whatever Quantom machine our grandchildren will be using.

@jiojiop said:

Sarkeesian does seem to blame everything she doesn't like in video games on misogyny. I don't mind her taking offense at the way women are portrayed in video games, but blaming game developers of hating women is a step too far based solely on her biased opinion. Maybe they don't cater to a female audience enough and mostly use women as an easy plot device, sure. But that is a very long way from hating them. There isn't a secret plot to make women look bad in video games, just as there isn't a secret cult in which reviewers all sleep with indie developers and get paid to give out good scores to their games....

You weren't a dick at all, disagreeing with people in a civilized manner is exactly what this whole affair lacks :)