Ubisoft reportedly deleting customer accounts with purchased games if they have been inactive for too long

I saw a great quote,

"It's not pirating if buying it isn't owning it".

Don't feel bad about pirating AAA titles. See, the creatives and people that actually put work into the game have already been paid - usually at least. There are cases like Bethesda, who stole work from their composer - and so you're not taking any profits from the people that matter.

Any money you'd pay to license a game would mostly just go to shareholders and greedy execs.

Yes but then again I'd be pirating Ubisoft games. Ain't got time for that bloated crap.

I don't even see how greed motivates this. I can't think of anyone that would go back to Ubisoft games after being locked out. Even assuming they were the scummiest of publishers, how does this give them anything other than bad press and sworn-off customers?

It did entice me to actually log into my Ubisoft account because I couldn't actually remember if I had any games from them or even why I had an account with them in the first place. I didn't purchase anything through their store front, so I don't particularly care. Unless they're wiping your Steam games, I don't really see the point, like who buys games off the Ubisoft storefront anyways? Hopefully they at least have some process for reinstating accounts if somebody still has an email receipt at least.

Yeah, was just thinking I should log in sometime. If it's gone, I got it free off epic anyway, so no big loss, but also a better reason to sail them digital season.

I'd you already paid for them, it's not stealing.

Yar har fiddly dee. Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free.

As "wrong" as stealing is, I find it more wrong that companies can keep fucking us over like this without reprimand. Triple A games are becoming more and more difficult to justify the new $70 price tag.

FitGirl only demands you to prostrate before her and to be her sex slave.

But I don't want to pirate same old reskins of bloated games

Not defending it but it has to be a pretty long period, i have played their game or used their launcher in a few years and have not gotten any email about my account getting deleted.

Yep. We need a law that says "a person owns any item or service they buy for a one time fee. No 'licensing' them out of ownership" or legalese for the same thing. Only loophole should be if it's outright advertised as a subscription service.

Then another law that guarantees access to schematics and repair parts for reasonable fees. No loopholes. Schematics or die, that's how I roll.

There's a solution: get the DRM free version/crack of the game you have buyed.

Don't even bother playing. Their games have been shit for years.

But that’s the neat part! You don’t actually own your games. You own the right to play a copy of the game, but if they don’t wanna provide a working copy, then you can’t play anymore. It’s all in the terms and agreements we click “I agree” on

Arr me matey, thar be many a way to acquire that treasure! Ignore the blockades - hoist the colors!

If the EU slaps you with a fine, it's usually not a slap on the wrist but something that seriously stings.

I'm mostly asking out of curiosity, but also maybe for anyone here that'd like to know. But if you buy Ubisoft games from GOG, like Prince of Persia, they won't need the shitty Ubisoft launcher, right?

The only thing thats stopping me from going fully to GOG is the fact that galaxy doesnt support linux right now.

I know GOG has a launcher, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. The links on my desktop just go straight to the game executables.

Which makes it even more strange considering Ubisoft is based in the EU.

Something like this might have to be done to comply to GDPR. I'm not sure about the details, but I do know a company cannot keep personal information for longer than they need. At some point, I guess that would probably translate to removing old and unused accounts.

I really don't see why you say this, sadly. Our laws do not protect us against account closures.

I trust Steam to maintain my library the same as any bank with my money. I don’t feel that way toward any other service.

You don't own it, though. The same can happen on Steam, though they're obviously not that shitty. The only store that lets you "own" games is GOG, that's why you won't find new games by shitty companies there.

They should email all the game keys when they shutdown the account, user OWN those, its their property.

What about pc gaming? As far as I'm aware physical pc games don't exist anymore.

Because game store doesn't exist in my country and international shipping costs much as the game itself

Are you like 12\s :D ?

The reason digital games took off is because it was a hundred times better in every possible way. In 2006 if you didn't live in a capital of a country in Europe. (Which is most people), buying games was a fucking pain in the ass.

First of all games had a short shelf life. Like insanely short. 3-6 months MAYBE. After that go fuck yourself. If it sold superb well maybe it got a platinum rerelease, but honestly most games that platinum-d, you probably had already, because they were the must have-s for the console, and those were basically the games you could buy in your tiny video game store / supermarket(s). (What I mean is they had a very narrow selection of the most popular games, and budget games). The idea that your budget games were older bigger titles didn't exist. You had awful budget games instead. Notice those are all but gone? Thank digital distribution. Makes no sense to stop selling a game. Also owning a more obscure console like the Saturn, was pretty much out of question, because there were even less stuff for it. Also in these stores no game, unless it was LITERALLY unplayable was marked down much. There was a very real cost associated with a physical game. It was perfectly possible to lose money on a real copy, unlike a digital one.

Also more experimental games were a huge risk for a publisher. Especially lower budget ones. Distribution and cartridge printing was awfully expensive. This did get better with CD based consoles a little.

Also the way games are distributed since the 90-s is optical media. Optical media is a huge PITA. The disks get damaged real easy, often without noticeable damage to the surface, they take up a lot a of space, and the optical drive is the single biggest point of failure on any period device. Laptops consoles, desktops. The first thing that always broke was the ODD. This resulted in a costly difficult and with more exotic devices impossible repair. I have a stack of like 20 PS2-s (I know I know), that I got for effectively free, because they were useless to their owners, because they don't read disks anymore.

So this is why digital distribution took off as hard as it did. Because people remember when games were an expensive pain in the ass, and dd made it incomparably cheaper, more convenient, and let's be real here, more long lasting.

Digital software delivery is perfectly fine.

DRM is intolerable.

Convenience.

Because everything is digital these days, most people are getting their music, films, TV, books, comics, etc digitally already. Why wouldn't they do the same with games. Especially if you're not the kind of person who cares about trading games back in or having them all up on a shelf.

If it was source code on a disk then I might agree, but as it is, your idea is juvenile and dead. Only rarely grabbing an old game release on physical media and just playing it is what you want or what you get. It may signify ownership, but so may a digital receipt.

People in discord tell me "it's convenient" and to "shut up, it's the way of the future" because they are children who grew up in a permissive environment that did not condition them to question that kind of rule. They question governments and lawmakers, but not game creation.

No such worries with a crack.

They're all going to go away eventually. Put your favorite games on storage to keep. You don't have to install on your C drive.

With GOG you can legally download installer files and put them where you want.

Be honest: you have forgotten 1500 of them already.

What's wrong with gog? Just download the offline installer and do with it whatever you want.

That's plain wrong for GOG, you can download it and burn it to a CD if you wish.

No, it is not. It's a reason to not buy Ubisoft games, physical or digital. Physical games usually still have a code that's linked to an account and you have to download the game from an server online. Physical games now are just as digital as digital games, but they come with added plastic waste.

The reason to buy physical is for the collection of physical games. Don't delude yourself into thinking it's actually on the disk though. That hasn't been the case for a while now.

Another reason to pirate games. They can ban your physical copy from running too.

Might and Magic X I think which I bought real cheap but didn't get to it yet cuz.. it's on Uplay and I sometimes forget what's on it.

Totally negligible. All you need to keep is a line in a database with the person's email, hashed and salted password, and a unique identifier for each game they own - that's an amount of space that won't even register on any service nowadays. There might be other optional stuff that takes more space, like display pics, cloud saves etc but you can delete those without deleting the whole account.

It certainly adds up, and it makes maintaining the databases more complex and costly as a whole.

Imo this is just lazy, they could at the very least "archive" old accounts and move the bare minimum data out of the main DB, as to make it possible to reactivate the account later on. Why can virtually every platform keep old account arround, but not Ubisoft?

It's probably different on consoles but on PC buying a "physical" copy these days is usually just a box with a code in it to download the game, no discs anymore.

Thanks. I’ve been considering buying more console games digitally. Going to hang onto physical as long as possible.

We may also close long-term inactive accounts to maintain our database. You will be notified by email if we begin the process of closing your inactive account.
If your account was flagged as inactive and you would like to keep using it, you can cancel the closure of your Ubisoft account.

That's expressed weaselly as fuck "We don't normally do it on Tuesdays, but if WE FEEL LIKE IT, we might do it to you, but we'll notify you first!"

Fuck you Ubisoft with a rusty rake dipped in radioactive acid. You remove my products, I'm requesting a chargeback via my credit card provider despite them being close to ten years old old. JUST FOR THE FUCK OF IT. Because you know what? If you're burning the bridge, I'm burning it extra hard. And yeah, if they get hit with enough of those chargebacks in a short amount of time, it's going to trip fraud activity with the CC providers and that .. oooh that's not going to be fun at all. Not even a little bit.

I think that ship has unfortunately sailed.

Even if I buy a game on Steam I don't technically own it. If the game was ever deleted from their servers and then I lost my local copy either because I uninstalled it or because I got a new computer, I would have no way to get my game back, and I doubt that Valve would refund me.

But some games literally don't have physical releases, even if I did have an optical drive. So what option do I have?

The only real solution to all of this is a changing copyright law that says that once a piece of software no longer becomes commercially available through legitimate means it becomes legal to pirate it. But that would require politicians around the world to a, understand computers and b, not being 900,000 years old.

Then don't buy games on any online platform. No more PC games.

If a game you own on steam also requires you to sign into an Ubi account it might? Maybe you'd need to create a new Ubisoft account again? Idk im just guessing a possible answer to that. It's a good question.

Purchased games on Steam fall under Steam's TOS.

There's a post below that says you can't launch the game when the associated Ubisoft account is deleted. You can't associate a new Ubisoft account.

Most of em aren't even worth that

If they're deleting inactive accounts it's not because their servers are full, inactive accounts consume no resources!