>> ^raverman:

Steam Ownership:
- No physical possession of purchased product.
- No ability or rights to transfer, gift, or on-sell your product once you have 'taken ownership' of it.
- No ability to 'lend' your purchased product. (sharing your steam account is a breach of terms and conditions.
It is not legally ownership of anything. It's only a payment for perpetual renting of the product for one individual user only. It is at Steam's discretion to revoke that lease - and the lease on ALL other steam games at any time if they judge a breach of the account terms and conditions.
If they only charged half the price for 1 month use of the product i'd be fine with it. I don't NEED to own it - i just want to play it. I'd even pay a micro-payment for each time i loaded it and every hour i spent playing.
It pisses me off they charge the full store box price when you actually have no real rights of ownership. It's a scam.

And..?

Have a look at DRM currently... Ubisoft's constant connection to their server required to play your game, for example. Their server goes offline, your physical product is useless (whereas you can set Steam to work in offline mode).

Steam obviously isn't for you, that's your option. But as far as digital content delivery goes, it is a reasonable and effective way of doing business.

Super short, Ubisoft's horrible DRM scheme that punishes paying customers, and dumbed-down, cheating-you-out-of-gameplay design = no.

Tier the internet and it will only drive the users to Pirate Internet.

Anyone and their damned dad can learn how to tunnel. I guarantee the first week of tiered internet, pirate nodes will be up all over the damned world. I would even venture to say that there would be wholesale DDOS attacks generating from strange corners of the globe on all major gateways. The same thing that happened to Ubisoft and their bullshit DRM.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'massive, wic, attack, norway, nato, soviets, russians, game, explosions, ingame, realtime' to '1989, amazing, graphics, sweden, massive, rts, soviet, invasion, war, wic, ubisoft' - edited by Zonbie

Tags for this video have been changed from '1989, amazing, graphics, sweden, massive, rts, soviet, invasion, war, wi' to '1989, amazing, graphics, sweden, massive, rts, soviet, invasion, war, wic, ubisoft' - edited by Zonbie

Tags for this video have been changed from 'world in conflict, game, sierra, rts, cgi, animation, 1989, new york, massive, sweden, wic' to 'world, conflict, game, rts, cgi, animation, 1989, new york, massive, sweden, wic, ubisoft' - edited by Zonbie

>> ^Farhad2000:
With Ubisoft buying old Eidos IPs there is alot of speculation that after Dues Ex 3, Ubisoft will be resurrecting the Thief franchise.

DO NOT WANT!

I would hate to see Thief become a watered down action based stealth game (oxymoron?) with thin 2D plot and corridor design... All of which synonymous is the 'resurrection of franchise' industry these days.

Well actually Looking Glass Studios folded mostly because while making incredible innovative games that were highly praised critically they never sold enough copies and constantly needed capital injections.

When Eidos over reached with its frivolous funding for Ion Storm it couldn't come up with the capital to sustain LGS, the company folded and much of the staff got rolled into Ion Storm Austin.

With Ubisoft buying old Eidos IPs there is alot of speculation that after Dues Ex 3, Ubisoft will be resurrecting the Thief franchise.

This is the intro to Ubisoft's Ghost Recon.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'africa, farcry, farcry 2, ubisoft, jack, carver, fps, zordon, bear grylls' to 'africa, farcry, farcry 2, ubisoft, jack, carver, fps, zordon, bear grylls, yahtzee' - edited by Zifnab

The Ubisoft developers themselves were pushing this as one of the selling points of the game, and this video does a much better job of arguing its effectiveness than Ubisoft themselves did.

Reading through the comments, there seem to be a lot of hardcore gamers who seem to be dissing this concept as superfluous, because there are too many "easy" games out there already.

I disagree.

I've been trying for a while to get mintbbb to try some of my console games. She's interested, since she knows they're very pretty looking games, and given the way that I rave about some of them, she knows they're fun too. She's an EQ/WoW vet, so I know she can play complex and difficult games, that's not what's holding her back. It's the controller.

She simply isn't used to making quick, precise movements with her thumbs, especially when the damn controller has some 16 different buttons that you need to accurately locate and press, often with a precise degree of timing.

I've been trying to find her a good onramp for a while, but she mostly just gets frustrated. Katamari Damacy is a good one, but, well, the King of All Cosmos can be a real ass, and there's not a tight enough feedback loop to really help her learn. I tried Overlords, but the game concept was tough for her to grasp, and past the first level it became clear its difficulty was tuned to be a challenge for someone like me, which made it nigh impossible for her.

We have a Wii, but that controller won't teach her how to play a 360 or PS3 game. I admit I haven't plonked her down in front of Zelda or Metroid which have traditional-ish control schemes, but I don't know that it'd get her comfortable enough with the controller to pick up something like Mass Effect or God of War on a more traditional controller.

This vid has me thinking I should give the new Prince of Persia a try for her. I'd crossed it off my list after hearing the reviews, since I don't want to pay $60 for a game I'd finish in an afternoon without breaking a sweat, especially when they didn't rate it as being some sort of must-see story or gameplay experience along the way.

At a minimum, a rental might be in order.

This video is a viral marketing piece. Ubisoft PR did not feel they were getting enough credit for their "innovation", and produced this along with several positive articles through other outlets.

Sands of Time's time rewinding mechanic, to name one of several titles that used that approach, allowed the player to have control over where they were placed after making a mistake. It makes no sense why they would call this generation of Prince of Persia's approach to player-failure "innovative" when the game removes control from the player and forces them to lose progress when unable to surmount one of the platforming segments (sending the player back to a previous point that could be seconds away, or minutes).

At what point are we going to stop simplifying games for newer audiences? Dragon's Lair? Hey, remember adventure games???

I'm sending this to my buddy over at Ubisoft. We'll see what he says.

If anyone from Ubisoft, Steam, EA, Activision, Sony, etc. sees this, I think we can expect it to release as a major game title by next Christmas.

Borat called, and he wants his catch phrase back!

Oh and yeah, looks pretty I love their art direction. Considering it's from Ubisoft, I hope it's not the style over substance that Assassin's Creed was.