Ubisoft Sellout - Bankruptcy Speedrun Any% Thread

[moocow]

I agree in theory, then you have to ask how they would skirt responsibility. Technicality, lack of funding, outdated software, lack of will. Things have changed since cartridges were standard for games. Now you have to account for copyright, loyalties and existing laws.

Update game binaries to no longer require phone-home checks to run. Release server binaries so people can host servers themselves. No need for source code. No need for game data. Don't have to give the game away for free. Perfectly reasonable to require players (or server runners) to own a legal copy. No need to continue updating binaries once released (i.e. if future OS builds can't run it, tough titty). Hell, you can even take out whatever hooks you use to incorporate any anti-cheat so you're not "leaking proprietary garbage" nobody wants anyway.

None of that is hard. Phone-home license checks are generally a one-liner. Comment it out, recompile, test-fire it just to make sure, done. Games with multiplayer components are already talking to a server binary anyway, so strip out any corporate "secret sauce," slap on an 'AS-IS, NO WARRANTY, NO ANTI-CHEAT INCLUDED SO THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM" notice at startup, and turn it loose with a sample config file.

That's it. I can think of no reason whatsoever why any "dead game" cannot be given this treatment at EOL/EOS.

 

[Disc]

Update game binaries to no longer require phone-home checks to run. Release server binaries so people can host servers themselves. No need for source code. No need for game data. Don't have to give the game away for free. Perfectly reasonable to require players (or server runners) to own a legal copy. No need to continue updating binaries once released (i.e. if future OS builds can't run it, tough titty). Hell, you can even take out whatever hooks you use to incorporate any anti-cheat so you're not "leaking proprietary garbage" nobody wants anyway.

None of that is hard. Phone-home license checks are generally a one-liner. Comment it out, recompile, test-fire it just to make sure, done. Games with multiplayer components are already talking to a server binary anyway, so strip out any corporate "secret sauce," slap on an 'AS-IS, NO WARRANTY, NO ANTI-CHEAT INCLUDED SO THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM" notice at startup, and turn it loose with a sample config file.

That's it. I can think of no reason whatsoever why any "dead game" cannot be given this treatment at EOL/EOS.

And even then, Stop Killing Games was not about forcing game devs to go back and update their old work. It was scoped very deliberately (read: to the most realistic limitations) to requiring that games made in the future have sunsetting plans that allow people to play IF they are done via a single-purchase model. So what this amounts to is that you have to plan from the beginning for the point where the game’s update lifecycle ends, how it will be still playable beyond that point.

Naturally, that requirement makes things even easier when the time comes, because you have an official plan.

 

[Pinball 2000]

I say this as someone who happened to own The Crew 1 before it shut down: to me, the most egregious part of Ubisoft shutting down The Crew was not being unable to play it (since I knew all along we’d eventually see some fan-made attempt to bring it back online). What was far more egregious was the fact that not only did they shut it down, but they also revoked it from people’s libraries.

On my personal Steam account, there are a few free-to-play games that have since closed, but they’re still in my library. For example, there used to be an F2P game based on the anime Ghost in the Shell. I played it a little bit back in 2016, realized “yeah, this isn’t for me,” and moved on. The game has long since gone offline, but it remains in my Steam library, and I still have the ability to install that long-dead client if I wanted to. If someone wanted to revive this game down the road, those files would be instrumental in making that happen.


What really grinded my gears was that Ubisoft took things a step further by completely revoking anyone’s ability to download the files again. I consider that the very definition of anti-consumer behavior. Hell, the only reason I was even able to play the revived version was by having to download a “completely legal” copy of the game online. I would have been more than happy to grab the copy I purchased a few years ago and patch that, but Ubisoft explicitly will not let me do that, since they took away my right to download what I paid for.

 

[Oliver Onions]

The media's physically fine and readable, but the decryption keys all expired and there's no source for new ones anymore

That's really interesting, I never heard about this before. Was it not possible to create keygens or cracks like for PC games?

Things have changed since cartridges were standard for games. Now you have to account for copyright, loyalties and existing laws.

You could easily fix this problem by having any licensing contracts for songs or likenesses in games be a one-time fee, but obviously the Chosenites on the losing side of that deal would never accept it. It always comes back to people wanting more money for themselves.

I would have been more than happy to grab the copy I purchased a few years ago and patch that, but Ubisoft explicitly will not let me do that, since they took away my right to download what I paid for.

I had a similar experience a long, long time ago with Carmageddon 2. I had a legitimate copy of the game but when I tried to run it on my new PC it wouldn't even boot up. I went to the Shiny Entertainment (remember them?) website and found an announcement saying they were aware Carmageddon 2 wasn't compatible with [whatever version of Windows was current] but there were no plans to fix the issue.

In the end I downloaded a pirate copy and it ran perfectly, so it was clearly something they could have patched but chose not to.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I say this as someone who happened to own The Crew 1 before it shut down: to me, the most egregious part of Ubisoft shutting down The Crew was not being unable to play it (since I knew all along we’d eventually see some fan-made attempt to bring it back online). What was far more egregious was the fact that not only did they shut it down, but they also revoked it from people’s libraries.

On my personal Steam account, there are a few free-to-play games that have since closed, but they’re still in my library. For example, there used to be an F2P game based on the anime Ghost in the Shell. I played it a little bit back in 2016, realized “yeah, this isn’t for me,” and moved on. The game has long since gone offline, but it remains in my Steam library, and I still have the ability to install that long-dead client if I wanted to. If someone wanted to revive this game down the road, those files would be instrumental in making that happen.
View attachment 8303976

What really grinded my gears was that Ubisoft took things a step further by completely revoking anyone’s ability to download the files again. I consider that the very definition of anti-consumer behavior. Hell, the only reason I was even able to play the revived version was by having to download a “completely legal” copy of the game online. I would have been more than happy to grab the copy I purchased a few years ago and patch that, but Ubisoft explicitly will not let me do that, since they took away my right to download what I paid for.

This is why you always, ALWAYS back up anything you "buy" and "own" on a separate drive the moment the install ends. You just never know if you will ever get the permission to install it again in the future.

 

[moocow]

That's really interesting, I never heard about this before. Was it not possible to create keygens or cracks like for PC games?

Nobody ever bothered. The format was dogshit. It was dreamed up by a consortium of Hollywood lawyers and Circuit City, who gave absolutely zero fucks about the actual product quality and focused entirely on strict copyright enforcement, pitching it as "DVD rentals without the returns." The real motive was to try to kill off DVD and replace with this format instead, which amounted to little more than Pay-Per-View on discs. CC was to be the exclusive distributor of players and initially also physical media. The fuckers would always try to pressure people to buy a DIVX player over a DVD player when they wanted a DVD player. I got banned from a couple stores for talking people out of it and into the cheaper (higher-quality) DVD players. That shit was funny.

The trouble was the actual product sucked shit. At a time when DVDs were taking off (along with widescreen HDTVs), and studios/distributors were bending over backwards to load up their releases with special features, like extended editions, director's cuts, commentary, behind-the-scenes/making-of featurettes, production stills, interactive menus, multiple languages (audio and subtitle), etc., DIVX format discs were universally so barebones it was rarely even worth the $5 purchase price.

The format technically supported most of what DVD could do, but IIRC no DIVX release ever included any special features of any kind. Worse, I don't believe there were ever any 16:9 (widescreen) releases. It was all 4:3 pan-and-scan. It supported fewer sound formats (it really was aimed at shitbox 2-speaker old-school 4:3 TVs, with the goal being getting people to conclude "if we want this to look and sound good, we have to see it in a theater"), and there were no foreign-language imports with English subtitles (because DIVX was a completely American endeavor -- no international collaboration took place on the format). The maximum resolution was (IIRC) 480p and high-definition was not supported.

Picture quality was inferior (distributors didn't spend much effort making their encodes look or sound good) compared to DVD, and it was always "just the movie" and nothing else. Ironically the DIVX consortium achieved their goal of preventing privacy, but instead of it being because "oh if you don't like it you can just pass the disc along and maybe the next person will pay to unlock and keep it since it's already in their hands," it was because "your product is shit, players are more expensive, and this is obviously a cynical cash grab."

The format itself was designed around the same general timeframe as DVD, so whatever encryption they implemented on the discs and players was no doubt easily crackable by today's computers (and probably as incompetently-implemented as DVD's CSS), but the funny thing was the product was so fucking awful, nobody even wanted to pirate it. Not even for the challenge (it was assumed it wouldn't be any harder than the much more worthwhile DVD format). Even if you cracked it, you were stuck with an inferior version of whatever you'd extracted compared to DVD. So DVD won that half-assed format war, and DIVX faded and died the unceremonious death it deserved. Thankfully it helped take Circuit City down with it.

 

[p1138]

Nobody ever bothered. The format was dogshit. It was dreamed up by a consortium of Hollywood lawyers and Circuit City, who gave absolutely zero fucks about the actual product quality and focused entirely on strict copyright enforcement, pitching it as "DVD rentals without the returns." The real motive was to try to kill off DVD and replace with this format instead, which amounted to little more than Pay-Per-View on discs. CC was to be the exclusive distributor of players and initially also physical media. The fuckers would always try to pressure people to buy a DIVX player over a DVD player when they wanted a DVD player. I got banned from a couple stores for talking people out of it and into the cheaper (higher-quality) DVD players. That shit was funny.

It's worth bringing more focus to this particular point. It was so early in the lifetime of DVD being a competing format, that they weren't necessarily really trying to directly outcompete the DVD format(and they couldn't for all of the format and quality reasons you mentioned), but more so act as a halfassed "cheaper" equivalent to replace VHS rentals. This is more apparent when you remember that DVDs only launched in the US in 1997, and this DIVX shit was between 1998-99 so the market to sell people a player to replace their VCR was wide open.

https://variety.com/1999/film/news/dvd-sales-up-but-rental-issues-linger-1117760190/

That point may be coming sooner than the studios want to acknowledge as prices for the machines drop. Indeed, by the end of 2000, DVD penetration will likely reach 10% of U.S. households: the point at which VHS rentals took off.

So even after DIVX was already dead, the industry still hadn't hit 10% of the market for DVD yet(and was also one of the reasons the playstation 2 that released in 2000 was so popular).

Although thankfully because it was stuck with Circuit City, it never stood a chance because any town with a real population could easily have a dozen video rental stores and maybe one CC store nearby. Not to mention the video rental stores still having VHS and DVD formats to have a much broader catalog of media to rent in the first place and that's ignoring all of the retail movie store locations that were a thing and record stores that jumped on the DVD bandwagon because they took up less shelf space than VHS so they could have more inventory available. Suncoast Video, Tower Records, FYE, The Wherehouse, Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video, all of the mom and pop shops, any other electronics store besides just CC(Best Buy, CompUSA, etc.).

 

[Oliver Onions]

Thanks for the detailed breakdown, I love format wars shit. Surprised I've never seen any YouTube documentaries on this topic; it seems like the sort of thing Technology Connections would love talking about.

 

[p1138]

Thanks for the detailed breakdown, I love format wars shit. Surprised I've never seen any YouTube documentaries on this topic; it seems like the sort of thing Technology Connections would love talking about.

He glosses over it in a video of an even shittier temporary rental format(there were VHS versions of shit like this too, one in particular started an erase head built into the VHS cassette after a set number of viewings, I think Techmoan covered that one)

Yeah, a physical disc with an expiration date that physically expired within a year of production, with an expiration date hidden within the sealed package due to degrading based on oxygen exposure(not even the self erasing VHS was that bad), thus producing guaranteed trash because slow retail sales would just result in the product expiring like produce.

Like said above, the DIVX(not DivX) format died in a year, was only sold by one US based retail chain, and if it was dead by early 1999 and discontinued in the summer, that means it totally flopped for Christmas sales. It really is just that uninteresting to the point of not even being a novelty.

 

[Oliver Onions]

He glosses over it in a video of an even shittier temporary rental format(there were VHS versions of shit like this too, one in particular started an erase head built into the VHS cassette after a set number of viewings, I think Techmoan covered that one)

I found that video when I was doing a quick search to see he hadn't covered it. It's really fascinating looking back at that specific pocket in time where the rental industry could see the tides were turning and started trying to come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to hold on to their business.

thus producing guaranteed trash because slow retail sales would just result in the product expiring like produce.

There's a similar problem today in video games I'm not sure most people have noticed yet: DLC codes. Almost all of them have an expiry date, which is especially stupid for the content that you can't get any other way.

It's not a huge problem since most of the time it's just for cosmetic shit, but it's still a form of completely unnecessary artificial scarcity.

 

[Pinball 2000]

There's a similar problem today in video games I'm not sure most people have noticed yet: DLC codes. Almost all of them have an expiry date, which is especially frustrating for content that can't be obtained any other way.

It's not a huge problem since most of the time it's just for cosmetic shit, but it's still a form of completely unnecessary artificial scarcity.

This was a significant issue in the 360/PS3 era, as I distinctly remember a time when nearly every disc copy came with an "online pass" DLC code. If you bought the disc used, you'd have to pay an extra ten dollars to access the online mode. Ubisoft and EA did this with a ton of their games back in the day.

Even single-player games did this shit. I remember Mass Effect 2 had a pass that locked some extra equipment and side missions, and Yakuza 3 infamously had a pass that was only included with physical copies, was never made buyable separately, and all those vouchers expired about a year after the game released.

A similar trend that's been bothering me is FOMO. You see this a lot with Twitch, where you have to watch specific streams to get in-game items, and sometimes you get less than 24 hours. Same vein as the limited DLC codes.

 

[Oliver Onions]

This was a significant issue in the 360/PS3 era, as I distinctly remember a time when nearly every disc copy came with an "online pass" DLC code. If you bought the disc used, you'd have to pay an extra ten dollars to access the online mode. Ubisoft and EA did this with a ton of their games back in the day.

This was also common with deluxe editions, where what you were actually buying was just the original release with codes for all the DLC. It was a rare 7th gen W for the Sony sisters because I remember Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition came with everything on disc for PS3, but the 360 version was codes because those discs didn't have the same capacity.

Thankfully Capcom would learn from this and go on to make sure everyone got fucked equally with Street Fighter X Tekken and its incredible on-disc DLC you had to pay to unlock.

 

[sodaboard]

I say this as someone who happened to own The Crew 1 before it shut down: to me, the most egregious part of Ubisoft shutting down The Crew was not being unable to play it (since I knew all along we’d eventually see some fan-made attempt to bring it back online). What was far more egregious was the fact that not only did they shut it down, but they also revoked it from people’s libraries.

On my personal Steam account, there are a few free-to-play games that have since closed, but they’re still in my library. For example, there used to be an F2P game based on the anime Ghost in the Shell. I played it a little bit back in 2016, realized “yeah, this isn’t for me,” and moved on. The game has long since gone offline, but it remains in my Steam library, and I still have the ability to install that long-dead client if I wanted to. If someone wanted to revive this game down the road, those files would be instrumental in making that happen.
View attachment 8303976

What really grinded my gears was that Ubisoft took things a step further by completely revoking anyone’s ability to download the files again. I consider that the very definition of anti-consumer behavior. Hell, the only reason I was even able to play the revived version was by having to download a “completely legal” copy of the game online. I would have been more than happy to grab the copy I purchased a few years ago and patch that, but Ubisoft explicitly will not let me do that, since they took away my right to download what I paid for.

steam has a clause in their developer agreement that you can unlist your game from steam and make it so that nobody new can ever play it again, but you must always include one playable build in one depot at all times, forever. not sure why ubisoft got an exception for this.

 

[Spaced Outside Cargo]

fuck Games-As-A-Service

Fuck GaaS, i’m BRaP-ing (Buying Real and Playing)

 

[The Last Stand]

Good news and bad news regarding Ubisoft's servers:

Good news: Far Cry 2's multiplayer servers have been inexplicably reactivated for Xbox 360. Good play if you want to mop up its MP achievements or just fool around with friends in Africa.

Bad news: Rainbow Six Siege X's servers has been compromised; players have received an abundance of premium currencies and skins, cryptic messages are popping up on the screen, hackers in matches are back in full force. Overall, a horrible time, so much so that Ubisoft temporarily closed its servers.

 

[Miller]

Good news: Far Cry 2's multiplayer servers have been inexplicably reactivated for Xbox 360. Good play if you want to mop up its MP achievements or just fool around with friends in Africa.

I didn't know Far Cry 2 had a multiplayer mode.

 

[The Last Stand]

I didn't know Far Cry 2 had a multiplayer mode.

It does, even has a map editor tool as well.

 

[Sneed Force One]

Ubisoft has been hacked by several groups, primarily via a known memory error with MongoDB called "MongoBleed" (CVE-2025-14847), with billions of Rainbow Six Siege currency handed out to players, forcing a rollback.

Found this image on 4chan /v/ alleging infighting between the hacker groups, with one group supposedly extorting Ubisoft (disputed by other groups).
/r/Rainbow6 users allegedly found one team's Telegram group, in which they appear to be considering what hacked data to release and twist the knife by revealing which Ubisoft & Tencent employees were used as attack vectors.

Both on 4chan and Reddit, videos have been posted of Siege's main menu rapidly listing user bans, with names humorously copying the lyrics of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean".
Another video was posted to Twitter.

The hackers have a fun sense of humor, and the /r/Rainbow6 community have been taking the news with amusement. A good "Fuck Ubisoft" all-around.

As of 23:00 UTC, all Siege servers are offline for unplanned maintenance.

Edit:

Michael Jackson fans rejoice, as no accounts will be banned for spending their hard earned billions of hacked credits.

 

[Nicholas II of Russia]

Couldn't have happened to a better group of people.

Happy New Year, Ubisoft.

 

[The Last Stand]

Happy New Year, Ubisoft.

I feel sorry for the backend employees having to clean up this mess.