this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
700 points (97.3% liked)

Technology

60079 readers
3354 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off::An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's hard to not be cynical about this pattern. To me, it's starting to look like a lot of companies are setting up long-term plans to weather a recession, and patiently wait for baselines to shift in order to normalize stuff like this.

Another way to frame it is, given enough time, a business will ultimately engage in rent seeking behavior if they see no alternative to adding value. Which kind of makes sense, as Ubisoft now builds absolutely monster sized games (e.g. Assassin's Creed 22 - Find all the Things Edition), with all the DLC, online content, and cosmetic bolt-ons imaginable; they've saturated that market. There's literally nowhere else for them to go, unless they take on much bigger risks like building a whole new franchise or two.

[–] wikibot@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a type of change to how a system is measured, usually against previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the system.
The concept arose in landscape architect Ian McHarg's 1969 manifesto Design With Nature  in which the modern landscape is compared to that on which ancient people once lived. The concept was then considered by the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly in his paper "Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries". Pauly developed the concept in reference to fisheries management where fisheries scientists sometimes fail to identify the correct "baseline" population size (e. g. how abundant a fish species population was before human exploitation) and thus work with a shifted baseline. He describes the way that radically depleted fisheries were evaluated by experts who used the state of the fishery at the start of their careers as the baseline, rather than the fishery in its untouched state.

^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^