Ubisoft needs to switch course on this stuff.

I just bit the bullet with Anno 2070, after recently suffering uPlay downtime affecting single-player Settlers 7.

Let's see how this goes...

Is "The Crew" a single player or a multiplayer game? What about "The Division"? If you'd rather answer about a non Ubi game, what about Star Citizen?

They don't say they'll add online content to single player games, they say they won't make single player games, but connected ones, like the above examples. Assassin's Creed: Unity is the example of baked online content (the coop missions), the others are not single player games.

Cold drink in hand and world cup on the telly, so it does seem to be good. Have a great one as well :)

You can forget about LAN play in The Crew and The Division as the games are completely designed for MMO style Multiplayer like you said even if there is a so called offline single player mode in them. It is sort of like Borderlands where you can play the whole game alone but it is actually quite difficult to do so on your own and feels like you're missing out on everything that makes the game so popular and fun. Our concern is not the current state of multiplayer or online features baked in these games but what this ideology will eventually lead to as it is exactly what Early was hinting at in the article i.e. online features that will eventually be an integral part of the gameplay experience.

As is the case for The Crew where pirates will play the game but it will just be a fraction of the full game because you can't get the complete experience of the game without actually being part of a crew and the same goes for The Division which is a squad based game and going at it alone would hardly feel like you're getting everything out of it. Eventually this is what they plan on doing for their other franchises as well like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry which currently do not have such online content that would make a pirate feel like they only got to play half of the game because of necessary online coop to do the missions in the game. So it will eventually lead to more games like The Crew and The Division and single player based games won't be the focus anymore.

Steam style client DRM exists for multiple reasons:

1) It stops some day one piracy, which can supposedly increase sales to some degree.

2) It killed the entire resale market for PC games, something publishers want.

3) It lets them track your tendencies and interests for marketing purposes.

None of it is really about stopping piracy in general.

So Ubisoft says they'll stop making single players and move to MMOs. If you care about MMOs, all's well and you buy Ubisoft's games, if you don't care about MMOs, all's well again, and you don't buy Ubisoft's game. Same thing as what was happening since the dawn of MMOs.

Biggest part of those games isn't the squad you are part of. It's the other squads you'll be encountering. Same as WoW has private servers, that allow up to 50 or 100 players, you can do most stuff (though raid bosses did need more work, not all the scripts were available), but you were missing the living world aspect of the game.

Borderlands is quite a nice comparison actually. You can play the game single player, and enjoy it, though you will need a bit of luck or foresight to do everything on your own (unsure about Crawmerax). Borderlands is more or less a Diablo 2 fps, and I don't recall people complaining that they lost access to parts of Diablo II because they had to be online.

So again, Ubisoft isn't saying that they'll make their single player games online only, they say they won't make single player games, but offline MMOs (or mingle player, as I've heard them called).

Once more, I will wait to see what they'll do before I pass judgement.

But it also appears the the publishers like Ubisoft etc. are not content with only that. They want to make all single-player games "online experiences", one of the reasons making sure that pirates would feel they don't get a full experience.

In general I feel they want to make games a service, something that has an expiration date if needed. If you can't play games you bought a couple of years ago anymore, you'll have to buy more. A constant stream of revenue from people who want to keep playing the games.

In practice, pay per play or a monthly fee is their ultimate goal with the service model.

DRM is probably a bonus there but not the reason they're doing this. The reason they're doing this is because they think it will sell more copies. They see online connected worlds as the new thing, the next-gen thing, the thing that made DayZ, Minecraft, WoW and others the biggest deals in gaming.

I think Ubisoft has boardroom meetings where suits discuss how they stay popular and relevant and people tell them "co-op is big right now" and "online worlds are huge right now" and the suits say "okay make a lot of that."

Gross, I'll just stop playing games if it comes to that.

And as a consequence of that, they shouldn't expect people to pay as much as they would for a complete game they get to keep.

Also, this model would definitely kill all scripted single-player games as they wouldn't make much money if the game has only e.g. 6 hours of decent content.

And so only online-persistent-world games would be created, and these would soon reach market saturation point... so what's the point in the long run?

True, what was the point of all those doom-clones, diablo-clones, pong-clones, street fighter-clones and so on.

Gaming industry sees a successful game, they say "Hm, this works, let's try to make it better". They have been doing that since the 80s. Every now and then a new game comes that becomes successful, and that becomes the game to copy.

Not necessarily. Take for example OnLive. They also offer(ed) a model where for a certain monthly fee, you have access to a certain library of games to play (most of which were single-player games). You can't affect what games there will be, sometimes games disappear from the library (even if you are in the middle of playing it) while new ones appear there. Similar idea as with Spotify for music, or Netflix for TV series and movies.

The point is that IP rights holder has as much control of the usage of the content as possible (and you have very little, only to use what is provided to you), and that you will pay as long as you want to keep using the content provided to you. You can't e.g. decide to stop paying, and keep using your old backlog without restrictions. If you stop paying, you stop playing.

That model may be fine to many people, especially those who consider games (and other media) as content you throw away after use.

The ultimate "games as a service" model. From publisher's point of view, that would generally favor making games which people like to play for a long time, without having to come up with new games or new content.

There is a downside to this for them. I have a job right now and I can afford to spend a fair bit on games and build up a backlog. If in a year from now I lose my job, they've still received a fair bit of money from me.

But if I just stream games, I'm not going to spend as much money and if a year later if I should lose my job, they're not going to see any more money from me.

Maybe so, but then I sometimes think how insane amounts of money (for a kid) I used to use for playing games, back when it mostly meant going to arcades and inserting coins to play. That was a true "games as a service" and "pay per play" model where I could play only as long as I could pay for it, milking every last dime from me.

I see e.g. the microtransaction games as a modern version of this model modified somewhat. With Dungeon Keeper Mobile and Plants vs Zombies 2 EA seems to wish someone really uses $60 or more to buy gems that allow you to progress with the games. Would you normally use that much money to play such simple mobile games?

Fair enough, but we didn't have viable alternatives back then.

Nope.