The Ravens Nest

Video Game Publisher Fucks Around…Are They About To Find Out?

In case you’ve missed it, this was the latest from Ubisoft…

It seems with the rise of services such as Spotify and Netflix, everyone wants to put their content onto a subscription-based service.

In theory, this is a great business model. Bear with me on this one. I know some of the keyboard warriors out there are ready to type into the comments but I ask you to just understand something.

If I create a streaming platform, we’ll call it The RPG Index, and I have PDFs of every game in existence (whichever ones I can get a license to post) and sell it to you for $5.99 per month, that sounds fairly reasonable. You have access to a Drive-Thru RPG-level of a library and you can check out those books rather than purchase them, then I think that would be a good business model. Let’s say I have a couple million subscribers every year that use this service, then, for me and people who may be minimalists, this would be a great deal. An entire library at your fingertips for less than $10 per month, that’s reasonable.

Keep in mind, I am not in any way trying to dissuade physical ownership at all. I’m just there to provide a convenient service at a very low price. That makes sense. If, by subscribing to The RPG Index, that leads you to purchase a physical copy and/or a PDF from the company, then that helps as well. Everyone wins. Some can stick with the subscription, some can buy, some can just not bother with either. A free tier where you can directly download a copy of games like Cairn, OSRIC, Basic Fantasy RPG and the free material from Troll Lord Games could even be a great way to entice players and GMs alike to subscribe for other games.

I’m well aware that the idea itself is dead on arrival these days as there is a growing distrust for streaming services. Magic: Online and D&D Beyond are prime examples.

When Netflix was $7.99 per month for watching whatever movies I wanted, that was reasonable and made sense. When the price increased to $9.99, I understood because Netflix was producing original content but when Netflix started ever-increasing the prices, adding ads and all to cover the debt it was in on top of the content becoming less and less interesting, that’s when I checked out, took my money, got Plex and rolled my own. Now I can watch my own curated content that I actually want to see and not be bothered by a monthly subscription.

When Jeremy Hambly of The Quartering got bounced from Magic: Online for saying things WoTC didn’t like, that pretty much ended his days of playing that online with his friends. Likewise, with services like Discord telling you what you can and cannot say either on or off the platform, we can start to see why larger tech companies are viewed with suspicion.

With physical ownership, you can simply walk over to your shelf, pull the game you want and play it at any time. Being a fan of the Assassin’s Creed games, that’s a plus for me. Being able to pull my copy of The Wretched RPG down and prep my table for play is something that I absolutely love. Being able to take a CD, rip it and put it onto the memory card on my phone when Spotify doesn’t have it (Mötley Crüe’s album Decade of Decadence being a prime example) is one of the many freedoms that physical ownership helps me to enjoy. If I want to watch a movie or series and the file gets corrupted on my hard drive, well I still have that physical copy to fall back on, no problem.

I will never once argue against physical ownership but I need to point out something that Phillipe Tremblay had to say concerning this shift to digital…

Needs to happen? For what reason? Because it would help their business. That’s all. There’s really no service to you.

I’m aware that there are gamers right now, PC and Console that are currently buying games digitally and some are locked behind PlayStation Plus accounts. Hell, you can’t play GTA Online on PlayStation without the PlayStation Plus account. However, you can hop on Trevor and go on a rampage if you’re not online, if that’s what you want. In other words, companies like Ubisoft are now going to put the squeeze on you and your wallet.

What Ubisoft and many others are failing to realize is that their timing for their bad behavior is absolutely deplorable.

These days, there are people who can barely afford their groceries, do they not realize that these games are a luxury?

When getting back into tabletop RPGs, I was finding OSRIC, Cairn, Basic Fantasy, Swords & Wizardry, Castles & Crusades and many others that were absolutely free PDF Downloads which was great. Let me give you a cost breakdown here.

On physical, Basic Fantasy ran under $10 as the books are inexpensive and sold at cost.

OSRIC ran a bit higher. It’s one book and it’s digest-sized and it sold for close to $15.

Swords & Wizardry, I bought in a few formats. The Complete Boxed Set, I bought for $45 but there were supplemental materials that also came with it. It was part of a deal that came to my attention on a live-stream and I jumped on it. The Whitebox Rules book ran for close to $15 at the time of purchase and I backed a kickstarter which garnered me a PoD, Offset Print book and some adventures all for about $94.

Finally, there’s Castles & Crusades which cost me about $45 at the time. I want you to all keep in mind that I bought a later printing of what’s available for free and it had the AD&D homage cover artwork.

I also didn’t pay all that all at once, this has been about two or three years. In fact, at the time I went all-in on Basic Fantasy, I spent $60 in total for all the books. All of them. That’s the cost of one physical copy of the D&D PHB these days.

What they all have in common is those were one-time purchases. That’s it. I own those books and they are in my library forever. Even if I were to lose the books (which would grieve me, won’t lie) I’ll still have the PDFs on my tablet, computer and phone. I don’t need to access some server somewhere in order to get it.

Tremblay’s entire stance is one that I consider extremely tone-deaf in today’s economic climate and he’s lost on the fact that, end of the day, I don’t need the new Assassin’s Creed game as much as I would need food, a new pair of shoes, warmer clothing for this season or the money in my pocket.

This news also comes in hot on the heels of how Ubisoft is in trouble from the many faux pas they’ve made over the past several years. Is it any wonder why the company finds themselves in dire straits only to pull what you can now reasonably construe as a desperate attempt to bolster the numbers they may have had during…oh…dunno…the last four years?

The firestorm that has ignited had me chiming in with “Ubisoft Needs To Get Comfortable Having Me As A Former Customer.” Which is true. I’m not going to pay subscriptions to each and every company just to play one game, watch one show, listen to one album or read one book. It’s just not happening. Others are echoing similar, if not even more blunt sentiments. Remember when I said the timing was bad? Well, consider this. Companies that enjoyed a captive audience for nigh over three years are finding that the growth…suddenly stopped. While there is no such thing as “infinite growth,” companies that navigated the last few years correctly, find themselves doing well despite the multiple lockdowns and near-economic destruction. The ones that thought it would go on forever, lobbied for extended lockdowns to prop that grown narrative up, blew any windfalls on executives who cashed out and booked as soon as bonus was in hand and hid at home while they left their employees out to do battle with the so-called deadliestest disease ever from parts unknown with no exit strategy, they’re now at a loss to explain how this happened to them. The fallout from the bad behavior now puts you and I on the hook to make that up and the company will now initiate tactics by inflating numbers artificially in order to keep investors at ease which will now be a series of actions of kicking the can further down the road. Short term and short-sighted initiatives are all you can now look forward to until the company enters it’s death spiral. If you don’t believe me, I offer RadioShack and GameStop as evidence.

Next, building on what I just talked about, keep in mind that, in my article Greater Expectations, I specifically enumerate that you, as a customer, essentially do not matter. What does matter is that profit and loss statement (the P&L) and the numbers on that spreadsheet are what matter most. My suggestion to combat what they see as a direction and trend is to defy that trend without mercy. Vote with your wallet. Divest yourself from the company, purchase physical when and where you’re able, whatever you’re able to do to help make a bold reflection on that P&L statement is what you should do while ensuring you can take care of yourself first. Always take care of your needs, first, people. Seriously.

Here’s another thing to remember is that these businesses are now looking at what games do well on subscriptions first to see which ones will be developed as a series. That is not something you want. At all. This will effectively eliminate the independent gaming section and yes, this will even begin to filter down to whatever games you love the most. Maybe your game gets a franchise, maybe it just disappears. I’m oversimplifying, of course, however, services like Spotify have omitted original versions of albums or even featuring compilations of albums that do not have the songs you love the most. Remember that Decade of Decadence album I mentioned? Yeah, go look that up. It’s not there. I lucked out and managed to find a physical copy and put that bad boy on my phone.

Finally, with so many streaming services being pushed, physical media being de-emphasized and so many rejecting it, I can think of one more reason why people are rejecting it:

Paying out of your pocket, from money you earned by selling the labor off your back, it should very well be you that owns whatever it is you have purchased. Full-stop. There’s truly no conversation, negotiation or discussion to be had. Attitudes like this are the reason I have largely backed out of video gaming as a whole and went back to buying and holding books as well as other physical media. While digital ownership is convenient and I still hold to the fact that carrying a digital library is a great thing as long as you own the files. If the files are to be perpetually rented, I suggest having physical as a backup because if the subscription is terminated wrongfully, at least with music, you’re covered. Movies? Same thing. Games…that’s where it’s really going to start becoming very iffy, given the day one gigabyte-sized packages that have to be downloaded just to play the game. At least with Elder Scrolls Online, I don’t need a subscription to play it. I bought the game, paid for it and can continue at any time. I own it. You’d have to break down my door to take it from me, which is not something I recommend. Never theoretically own something that can be edited on the fly without your knowledge or consent.

The best course of action is, of course, to stop giving these companies money until they reverse course. Once they do, then all is fair but always keep an eye on them.

It’s apparent that Ubisoft isn’t learning much from WoTC and Hasbro’s mistakes.