Ubisoft Eliminates Paper Manuals

[GreatEmerald]

Don't play Ubi's games if you do not like their corporate strategy tbfh.

Who says we are playing them?

[Corlagon]

So what? You people love to whine.

And three more paragraphs of solid whining in defence of the decision are going to contribute to abating that maxim wonderfully

[jeff]

I love how environmentalists act oh so offended when the "green" philosophy is used, as it always is, as a marketting or political gimmick - a philosophy largely funded by political lobbyists and such concerns to begin with. Please, wake up.
Edited on Wed, Jun 09 2010, 10:58 by Moragauth

Boy it had been a rough week and I was looking for something amusing. Your post gave me a good laugh. Honestly I had a hard time deciding which was funnier; the attempt of UBI to hide a marketing decision by calling it Green or the fact you bought it. UBI's decision had nothing, nothing, nothing to do with being green, and the previous posts had nothing to do with whining, but calling a spade a spade. Again I thank you for the laugh I needed one.

[ThunderTitan]

>>>I love how environmentalists act oh so offended when the "green" philosophy is used, as it always is, as a marketting or political gimmick - a philosophy largely funded by political lobbyists and such concerns to begin with. Please, wake up.<<<

Yeah man, we should totally only be offended by stuff no one is lobbying for... so basically nothing...

[LocutusBorg]

Who needs paper manuals when you can get a *.PDF file online?

Not to mention that most manuals that come with games, are printed on glossy paper, which is horribly expensive.

If you really want the manual, just google it if you can't find it on the actual website.

Once you find the manual, decide whether or not, you wish to print it out.

Economy lesson #1375:

1. Ubi says "we are going green, no manuals!"
2. They develope game without any/or pdf only. However... price is still the same.
3. You get a game... but need something from manual.
4. You are wasting your time and efford for searching a manual/print it. (which you could spent f.e. on a game)
5. You PAY for searching it/printing it (electricity, paper, ink).
6. You payed for game + separately for manual (both in money, time, efford, pissing of when you Alt+Tab between game and manual, etc.).
7. (the most important) Ubi wins, electricity proviider wins, paper and ink producer wins... The only one who loose here is you.

That how this economical go-green works. Like many ppl before said: bullshit!!!!!!!

Don't you feel a little frustrated?

[darknessfood]

You could look at it like that. But I seriously never look into a manual. I will find out myself...

[GreatEmerald]

4. You are wasting your time and efford for searching a manual/print it. (which you could spent f.e. on a game)

Uhh, no. Double-click on D:\, double-click on Manuals, double-click on the .pdf file.
Or even better, click on Start, click on Ubisoft, click on your game title, click on Manual.pdf. Personally that's a whole lot faster than getting off my chair, finding where the devil I put the game's box (remembering to check all the trash bins just in case), finding the manual through all the other things that is in the box, taking it back to the PC and opening it.

[LocutusBorg]

GreatEmerald - I have my manuals near my games, so I only reach my hand for them

In your way you forgot about Alt-Tabbing. Now, try it on GalCiv2.

(If we are on GalCiv2: It's .pdf manual sucks to square... I do not know HOW they do it, but scrolling pages is a pian in back side of our body, below belt. It freezing even on very fast machines with gigs of ram. Again, it sucks!)

[Qurqirish Dragon]

Duplicate post deleted

Personally, for strategy games, I need to have the manual available to me while playing the game, since if I have a question then I want to be able to view my situation at the same time. Having a PDF manual doesn't allow this unless the game is windowed- and many games don't play well (or at all) in a window.

For some games, the in-game help is sufficient (such as the civilopedia in the various civilization games). tooltips are only useful for reminders, so I don't count those (they are only useful, in general, once I have no more need for them - or if I return to a game after a long break).

Also, as others have mentioned, a manual is nice to read when you are not in front of a computer - particularly properly detailed ones like the Civilization 4 manual.

[ThunderTitan]

And now they're begging for tax breaks: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10374867.stm

[HodgePodge]

4. You are wasting your time and effort for searching a manual/print it. (which you could spent f.e. on a game)

Uhh, no. Double-click on D:\, double-click on Manuals, double-click on the .pdf file.
Or even better, click on Start, click on Ubisoft, click on your game title, click on Manual.pdf. Personally that's a whole lot faster than getting off my chair, finding where the devil I put the game's box (remembering to check all the trash bins just in case), finding the manual through all the other things that is in the box, taking it back to the PC and opening it.

Try obtaining a bookshelf to keep your manuals safe and in order. Personally, I keep my manuals on the shelf underneath my computer desk, very convenient.

I like having a real manual to look stuff up when I'm playing a game; manuals printed from the .pdf file are of inferior quality and the loose pages are much more likely to be lost or out of order. So I for one, am not happy about the trend away from concise, hard-copy manuals which used to come with games.

[GreatEmerald]

Try obtaining a bookshelf to keep your manuals safe and in order. Personally, I keep my manuals on the shelf underneath my computer desk, very convenient.

I like having a real manual to look stuff up when I'm playing a game; manuals printed from the .pdf file are of inferior quality and the loose pages are much more likely to be lost or out of order. So I for one, am not happy about the trend away from concise, hard-copy manuals which used to come with games.

I could say the same to you - try obtaining a good printer and a paper clip. The quality will be just as good and the papers won't fly away.

[jeff]

I could say the same to you - try obtaining a good printer and a paper clip. The quality will be just as good and the papers won't fly away.

Not sure what you could say the same, but the fact is the commercially prepared manuals were usually far nicer than you can get from the typical home printer and in the quantity the game manufacturer produced them it would be far cheaper for them than us. Regardless whether it could be done as nicely or cheaply at home, the rub is it was a business decision about delivering less and keeping the price the same which they are trying to hide behind an insincere mask of going green. It is however the way of things, if you could see the size of the candy bars I use to get for 5 cents when I was a kid ‘ahem’.

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

I wonder if the environmental cost of the extra time spent reading the electrical manual more than outdoes the cost of printing manuals.

I fear for people's eyesight if environmentalism leads to any more of this.

[GreatEmerald]

Electricity is far better for the environment since power plants can be easily controlled. Install a better filter and you'll immediately get results. Compare that to, say, cars - you can do the same, but it's a whole lot more expensive and you need to do the procedure thousands of times to get the same impact.

[ThunderTitan]

Now if they only did that instead of letting them buy carbon credits...

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

Electricity is far better for the environment since power plants can be easily controlled. Install a better filter and you'll immediately get results. Compare that to, say, cars - you can do the same, but it's a whole lot more expensive and you need to do the procedure thousands of times to get the same impact.

Surely electricity is far worse for the environment than most things, because to produce it you have to burn awesome amounts of fuel, unless you are using renewable electricity which unfortunately is not so.

Cutting down a tree basically doesn't do much environmental damage in itself because the tree can grow back, the land itself is still available for re-growth.

While electricity generation requires mines, which lay waste to huge amounts of land, destroying the trees therein and the power plants take up some land too. From one tree one could probably make thousands of game-manuals.

There is a electricity/energy cost to make a manual, but it is a one-time cost. While using a computer takes a constant (I would imagine large) electricity cost.

Beyond the small number of trees (a few thousand at the moment for millions of manuals) which will regrow themselves (as cutting down trees on it's own just makes room for more to grow), there is a small energy cost to produce them.

It all comes down to how much time we spend reading manuals. If we spend a lot of time, we're better off printing them out and turning the computer off. Whilst if it's a small amount of time then not.

[GreatEmerald]

You're speaking about coal power plants, and they are fairly old now. Coal overall is not a very good power source - it's relatively expensive and gives really small amount of power. At least in Europe, most power is generated by nuclear plants. With them, you only need to worry about the waste and cooling, but nothing that impacts the environment directly. Of course, using geothermal, photovoltaic or, ultimately, fusion power would be a whole lot better, but we're still quite a long way from there, unfortunately...

And trees don't just regrow that easily. If they would, we would be living in land covered with trees from start to finish, like it was before humans started terraforming. So while they can regrow, they are cut faster. So on one hand we have the air pollution problem that makes air toxic to breathe, but on the other hand we have a problem of not having oxygen at all.

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

You're speaking about coal power plants, and they are fairly old now. Coal overall is not a very good power source - it's relatively expensive and gives really small amount of power. At least in Europe, most power is generated by nuclear plants. With them, you only need to worry about the waste and cooling, but nothing that impacts the environment directly. Of course, using geothermal, photovoltaic or, ultimately, fusion power would be a whole lot better, but we're still quite a long way from there, unfortunately...

And trees don't just regrow that easily. If they would, we would be living in land covered with trees from start to finish, like it was before humans started terraforming. So while they can regrow, they are cut faster. So on one hand we have the air pollution problem that makes air toxic to breathe, but on the other hand we have a problem of not having oxygen at all.

We would live in a land covered in trees if we didn't keep on clearing the land for agriculture and ensuring that the trees can't regrow safely (like with grazing animals etc) and destroying the top-soil with mining/erosion.

Most power in the world is generated by coal power plants, or oil or gas power-plants. Even Nuclear power plants require mines to dig the uranium out of the ground. And nuclear waste is environmentally not a good thing either.

Mining and intensive agriculture is extremely environmentally destructive, cutting down trees within reason is environmentally small fry.

If you go into a forest and merely cut down a bunch of trees, then within a few years you will end up with more trees than you started out with. The main enemy of trees is not human beings but other trees.

Only if you sufficiently idiotic (as unfortunately much of the world is) to actually strip clear hundreds of contingent miles of forest, so the soil erodes away and becomes what is Heroes III is known as 'dirt' terrain can you really beat this natural process.

But mining basically establishes the end result of nightmare de-forestation overnight. You cannot mine a place without not only clearing it of trees but destroying the top-soil as well. Once you have made a place look like the moon (or Heroes III rock terrain) by mining, only a lot of time (or a lot of expense and a bit less time) can restore it to it's former state.

[ThunderTitan]

Dude, making paper doesn't just require putting dead trees in a machine, there's also transportation, machinery to cut down the trees etc.

And trees don't grow back so fast on their own, what you're thinking of is man made re-planting programs...

Also, who turns off their PC's when reading a manual?!

You cannot mine a place without not only clearing it of trees but destroying the top-soil as well.
Once you have made a place look like the moon (or Heroes III rock terrain) by mining, only a lot of time (or a lot of expense and a bit less time) can restore it to it's former state.

That's called surface mining...