Ubisoft account -including games- can be permanently deleted for inactivity | Hacker News Reader

Ubisoft account -including games- can be permanently deleted for inactivity

pcgamer.com

294 pointsyabatopia214 comments

From the screenshotted Ubisoft Support tweet:

> Hey there. We just wanted to chime in that you can avoid the account closure by logging in to your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email. We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account so if you have any difficulties logging in then please create a support case with us. >> ubisoft.com/help

Hey there. We just wanted to chime in that you can avoid class action lawsuits and regulatory investigations, by backpedaling.

You probably also want to fix whatever organizational dysfunction led to a video game company behaving like this, and talking like this.

I can't think of a single rationale for this. A user account isn't much more than a database entry. What possible reason could a company use to justify this?

Maybe they updated their TOS to allow them to do something new with the users data (selling it, storing it in another region, etc) and they want to get rid of accounts that haven't accepted the change.

Its just a guess on my side what a possible rationale may be. Its equally likely that someone just put in a feature request for account expiry without really having a good reason and fully understanding the consequences.

> Maybe they updated their TOS to allow them to do something new with the users data (selling it, storing it in another region, etc) and they want to get rid of accounts that haven't accepted the change.

My Yahoo! Mail account is from about 2001 and I still select “I’ll do this later” when I sign in on a new device. I think whatever new owner buys us next has to continue this.

Yahoo will also clear your entire account if you don't log in for a while.

Happened to me. Lost all my old emails from high school. Sure, that's on me for not having my own local backup, but they still did it with no warning that I ever saw.

I'm so sorry to hear that.

I tried it out on an alternate Yahoo! email address that I don't need and sure enough I got this message

> Setting up your mailbox

> A fresh mailbox is being created, since the old one was inactive for more than 12 months.

https://i.imgur.com/VMHxeyH.png

thank you for the heads up

while im 95% sure you know, Yahoo's web client is or at least used to be open to a lot of exploits. Be safe with these dinosaur email providers :)

Remember that EA had EA downloader around the time steam came around. However, their packaged goods division, who made most of the profit, saw it as infringing at their KPIs and someone pushed the inane idea it could make more money if it just allowed you to download the games you bought a fixed number of times to keep the project from getting killed.

The EA Downloader was released 3 years after Steam.

I think that counts as “around”. steam took a while to materialize on everyone’s radar as more than an orange box installer and it took a while to get downloader off the ground

Long term everyone is dead. If these companies continue to exist, how do they handle this? Will Valve maintain your steam login waiting hundreds of years for a user who will never login?

It’s an interesting question and it has never been directly addressed, though Facebook and similar have enabled memorial pages.

I could see a service like steam allowing a death certificate and closure resulting in a $10 refund so they don’t have to maintain the database entry.

Data for a million accounts takes up about as much space as maybe a single long YouTube video.

I mean, you can move inactive accounts to a separate table or something if you really want a small performance optimization. Delete them after 20 years. This is a very slow, very long-term problem.

This isn’t really an engineering issue. It’s a legal and financial issue.

The cost to maintain the database is actually a small part of it; a large question is reducing the "surface area" against attacks as best you can. Perhaps for steam this doesn't matter, but forums, etc have issues with old unused accounts being hacked and used for spam, etc.

You could lock the account and require a higher standard of proof of identity to recover it (e.g. you prove who you are and steam runs a credit report on you and validates your prior phone numbers and addresses against authorization and billing information that they have for the account--that would increase the barrier to require identity theft which is unlikely to be used just to take over steam accounts and spam).

If it's about dead people and true long-term, I still don't see the big technical issue, but why not give people 30 years or similar to prevent deletion? People backpacking in the Andes, in jail, in a coma or whatever would be able to respond.

> Long term everyone is dead. If these companies continue to exist, how do they handle this? Will Valve maintain your steam login waiting hundreds of years for a user who will never login?

A typical human lifespan is in the realm of ~80 years.

Maybe they just enable this "feature" only for ~80 year old accounts.

Why not? It's not like they'll accumulate many billions of users in that timeframe, so the costs won't skyrocket or anything Facebook is different on that an account can have a lot of data

> I can't think of a single rationale for this.

I can: MAU

This. Some middle manager is salivating at the KPI boost they can put in some monthly report as a result of this.

Billing information = PII, so it is subject to privacy regulations. In many jurisdictions the law allows to store and process PII no longer than needed. If an account becomes inactive and all other retention deadlines expire, keeping the data may be a violation.

To be on the safe side and to satisfy users I would allow users in such cases to download the digitally signed account data and offer the possibility to upload it again.

This doesn't make any sense. This makes sense if the account is inactive and has no active licenses to it, but like, if you buy game X with whatever the industry-current licensing is, and the expectation is that you have a license as long as you have an account, termination is silly. You have an active agreement (i.e., the license) to use the product. That's a contractual/business relationship.

You could just as easily delete all of the PII in the account by sending someone an email saying "your licenses are now attached to these codes, please use them to reactivate your licenses with a new account if you want to access them" but they don't. They just delete them. There are many ways to square this circle.

Precisely. Storefronts want their cake and eat it too: they want to take control they have over the license from the user, but without the obligation of actually keeping it accessible forever to the user.

If you can prove that there is a person with the access to the account and it was the intent of the buyer for this person to have access, then fine, account can be kept. The email notification they send is proving exactly that.

You have it backwards.

Only if you can prove that there is not a person with access to the account and intention to access it can the account be deleted.

This proof is technically impossible and thus does not make sense as a solution. We are living in the world where zero trust is default and bad things happen, so the ONLY right way to protect customer data is to verify the identity regularly, rather than declaring it valid once and forever until proven otherwise.

Dude... come off it.

You're wrong here, both legally and technically (and in my opinion, also ethically).

In the bluntest possible way, even if you were correct (and you're not...): They could have just deleted the billing information and not the account.

Ubisoft designed products that require an online account to use - Ubisoft is on the hook for providing that online access for account holders because they paid for that product. Alternatively - in any region with good consumer protection laws, they're about to issue a lot of full refunds.

We aren't living in this world, that's your imagination. Rather than making the users suffer by default, identify a more specific "bad thing" and address only that with the min user inconvenience

A digital purchase is often the purchase of a license to download and execute the product. If that's the contract, then it is necessary to keep some PI on file in order to respect the terms of the contract: offer a download upon request to a particular person. No need to keep PI on file indefinitely: the purchaser is enabled to take their wares and the store to remove accounts if dealing with PI laws is too much hassle.

If this is too much hassle, they could instead sell a license to execute the software, regardless of how it is obtained (but offering a way to download for now, putting the purchaser in charge of backing up those files). Similar to what GOG are doing.

But no, that's not enough control for them either. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Billing information isn't the same as game access, they can always delete the billing information and keep everything else. There's nowhere in the world that a list of owned games is considered as PII.

If that's the case then it would be simpler to just put that as the reason accounts can be closed. It would shift the blame to some government and at least give an air of transparency to the whole thing.

I’m in Europe so I’m more familiar with GDPR than privacy regulations for other jurisdictions but it would be a gross abuse/misinterpretation of GDPR to use it as an excuse for closing down accounts of customers who have already paid for their games. GDPR does require data controllers to remove data subjects from their database but only if there is no legitimate reason to keep their account information.

Active account is a legitimate reason. Inactive account and no explicit consent to keep the data -> no evidence that customer still wants to keep the data -> no legitimate reason -> better be deleted.

As a child you may leave your toy in playground, return back in 1 hour and it may still be there. If you come back in 10 years it would be an unjustified expectation to find it there. As an adult you buy a property, abandon it and in 30-40 years it is no longer yours. Why in the digital world it should not be the same?

The answer is pretty obvious - because the digital world is fundamentally different, and you toy doesn't occupy any playground space, and also it's not publicly accessible, and you haven't paid for your toy to stay they, etc

Except I never abandoned my copy of Far Cry 4. A better analogy would be a book on a shelf. I may not complete a book I bought 10 years ago but I may revisit it anytime.

If you can't hold billing information just delete it.

If you can't keep first/last name, or birthday, just delete it.

However in pretty much every jurisdiction, keeping any kind of information FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE CUSTOMER is 100% allowed, encoded in the law, used as examples and is within the spirit of the law.

Any judge, lawyer or layman would laugh at the idea that GDPR can be used as an excuse to force users to re-buy products.

If you are no longer certain that customer has access to their account, indefinite data storage becomes a liability, not a service.

„For the benefit of the customer“ is too vague justification for it, you need a more specific reason.

Then just delete the offending information. No need to delete the account and the game they contain.

Nope. It's not really vague at all, and is quite clear in the law in several places.

You can keep data in your servers without consent if that data is there to serve the interests of user. In this case, the interest of the user is getting access to the games they purchased and paid for (!!!). This is called "legitimate interest".

A company can keep the address and phone of their customers if they're providing services that require address and phone. Package delivers don't even have to ask for consent to deliver a package to someone, for example. If you need email to guarantee that the user can access the games, it's fine to keep it. The law is not as stupid as Silicon Valley tries to paint it.

I'm pretty certain that Ubisoft is breaking GDPR and other similar laws in several places, but "keeping data to provide a service" is the one place they're not.

Given an inactive account that does not respond to emails and the risk of PII theft, what is the best interest of a customer? Now add the costs of maintaining such accounts, which did not accept the latest ToS, did not migrate to the latest version of software etc, what is the best interest of the business? I do not think that the answer "keep the data" is obvious.

In real world nearly everything has an expiry date, beyond which product is no longer usable if you do not invest in maintenance. Who said that in digital world it should be different?

Privacy laws are not about the best interest of the business.

As pointed out above, you are allowed to keep all data necessary to provide your customer what they purchased. Losing that data is not the customer's problem, but yours. If you cannot keep your customer data safe indefinitely, then maybe you should've settled on a business model that does not require keeping customer data indefinitely.

What “PII” has risk of theft?

Passwords should be properly hashed. Heck, just delete the password and let the user ask for another if need be.

If there is ANY unnecessary data that was collected but that doesn’t need to be there, or that needs consent to be stored, just delete it. Easy peasy.

List of games owned? Email address? That doesn’t need consent, because it’s legitimate interest. It is 100% in the customer’s interest to have game ownership information long term, and deleting it would cause actual loss to the customer. That’s probably as bad as having PII leak!

And what's that “cost of maintaining accounts”? Less than a kb of data per customer, on average? Probably just a few database tables?

Once again, if there's unnecessary PII, just delete it.

This whole thing is just to force customers to re-purchase games.

> In real world nearly everything has an expiry date, beyond which product is no longer usable

That’s clearly not true. There are several products that don’t have it.

But in the case of games/software it is worse, because the expiration date is 100% artificial: since the games need authorization servers to run, the expiration is under control of the company.

What is the expiration date of US constitution? Reasonable expectation for personal account of a human being would be maximum life expectancy of a human or notification of death of the user.

US constitution has already expired in my opinion as an external observer. ,) It is not a good example, anyway, because it is not a product and not something in possession.

Reasonable expectation of account life time is the period when the user needs it, no more and no less, and it is not the same period as the life of the user.

The GDPR has no rules around "activity", and lots of justifications available for "necessary to the business", in this case to continue to allow people to play the games they've paid for.

Only angle I can see that this might work for is reducing the number of people you have to email when you get breached.

I'm almost certain this is the reason. A lawyer somewhere in the company has seen "PII retained indefinitely" and lost their shit over it without ever looking at the context around that. No doubt a bunch of people internally have been hammering them with "but this will look terrible when we remove people's access to products they bought".

Any lawyer even vaguely familar with GPDR wouldn't be worried about this. There is a text that states: "processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party.." and "processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject".

It could be easily argued that providing an end customer with access to digital products they bought is part of the service that data subjects signed up for, so retaining PII indefintely is 100% allowed (unless the data subject explicitly requets their account to be permanently deleted).

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/

You are probably right. Most of my experience with corporate lawyers has been all about minimizing risk even if it means losing out on substantial business while there has been zero interest to find a solution. The root cause, as usual, is terrible incentive design where lawyers get punished when a legal problem occurs, but don't get rewarded when they consulted on finding a good solution that allowed the business to thrive.

> In many jurisdictions the law allows to store and process PII no longer than needed.

1. I think this is a misunderstanding of the GDPR. You are allowed to keep and process PII, as long as you have a justification. Keeping the user‘s purchases around would be such a justification, as would be consent. 2. Even if you were right, they could still keep your account and games around, and just delete the billing info.

Steam did something similar a while back. You had to log in and choose a new account name when they decided email addresses weren't suited as account names anymore, if you didn't your account got purged.

Didn't that just park your account until you changed it? I don't remember seeing anything about it deleting your account, and I can't find it now.

When did that happen? I still have my OG Steam account with an email address as username which is now 19 years old.

I was never prompted to change that, even though I would definitely like to. I would appreciate any insights you might have.

I can't remember any specifics I'm afraid, it was probably 10+ years ago. I remember being prompted to change it (either by mail or in the client), I never did and I never logged in either. The account is gone. Since it was that long ago I can't rule out simply misremembering.

Steam account names are immutable. I don't recall them ever offering to let you change the login name.

Change the username? Sure. Change the email associated with the account? Yeah.

But if you've got a near 20 year old steam account, you're still logging in with whatever email address you had near 20 years ago.

From their support page[1],

> we may immediately close inactive accounts to comply with local data protection legislation

I'm not sure if that's actually what their lawyers think, or if blaming GDPR is a convenient excuse. The fact that no other company seems to do this makes me think they know its BS.

[1] https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/help/account/article/closure-o...

Cloud saves maybe? Those can take up a lot of space.

Then expire just those, that would be a lot less controversial.

> You probably also want to fix whatever organizational dysfunction led to a video game company behaving like this, and talking like this.

It's not just gaming companies. Twitter [1], Google [2], Instagram [3], Microsoft/XBOX [4] and more are all doing this.

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/inactive-twit... [2] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-... [3] https://www.pagetraffic.com/blog/does-instagram-delete-inact... [4] https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/inactive-microsoft...

ToS of Ubisoft never explicitly mentions any account retention policy. Quoting Eurogamer:

> Interestingly, PC Gamer reports that it couldn't find mention of this in the company's US terms of use or its end-user licence agreement, however, it does reserve the right to suspend or end services at any time. It's also not clear how often you need to log into your Ubisoft account to prevent it getting tagged "inactive".

Twitter, Google and Instagram run on subscriptions to online infrastructure, not purchased digital goods.

Microsoft apparently won't delete your account for inactivity if there are any purchases tied to the account: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-account-...

What if you have purchased movies on YouTube? Would Google still delete your account for inactivity?

Thank you. I didn’t realize this point. For others:

> Exceptions to this policy

> A Google Account is considered active even if it has not been used within a 2-year period if one or more of these applies:

[…]

> Your Google Account has been used to purchase a digital item, for example, a book or movie.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en#zi...

Thank you for pointing this out. A lot of the media coverage around Google's policy update skips mentioning the exceptions.

Buying a movie from google for that certainty sounds pretty good huh. I wonder if the purchase might also dissuade any accidental deletions of a google account.

> Buying a movie from google for that certainty sounds pretty good huh. I wonder if the purchase might also dissuade any accidental deletions of a google account.

I feel like I must mention here: I anal. I am not a lawyer. That being said, Google accounts are complex. Here is what it says near the top of the page in the same link I posted:

> Google also reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years. This is determined based on each product's inactivity policies.

My personal opinion is that Google isn't committing to deleting your Google mail data at exactly two years whether you bought a YouTube movie. However, Google is also not committing to preserving / storing say your location history (for example) in perpetuity because you bought a YouTube movie.

Once again, this is just what I read. I am not a lawyer, and definitely not a Google lawyer.

I wonder if this covers Play Store microtransactions.

Doesn't that google policy mean half of youtube, blogspot, etc. will disappear at the end of the year?

> You probably also want to fix whatever organizational dysfunction led to a video game company behaving like this, and talking like this.

I think this is not a problem unique to Ubisoft, so I am skeptical of the usefulness of blaming this on them alone.

These are the same assholes that let you use a email containing a + in the email. e.g. name+shittyuplay@gmail.com, and Automatically log you in after registration, so you can register and buy games.

Then dont allow you to login or use the support services later on because the email contains a +. So I get their emails, including eventually one about the cancellation, but still havent been able to login or use the support for my account. And if I post on the forums I just get the shitty advice that I need to login to support services or request a password reset because neither of those allow + in the email either. I also received what looks like a ban for using curse words in my support request at one point, and yes I did use <name>+shittyuplay so well thats true, but if thats the damned problem dont let me register it in the first place.

I dont care anymore since the game I registered was just some shitty thing that came with a graphics card, but I am astounded at how incompetent they can be while still trying to become more popular than steam. Steam only needed to provide better service than pirates, but Uplay needed better than steam, so well they are doomed and good riddance.

I went to the cupboard the other day to play some old board games with family and friends.

But we hadn’t played the games in quite a while so the board game company had sent someone around and destroyed them.

It’s fair enough too, I mean how can the game company be reasonably expected to not destroy what it sold me if I haven’t used it for a while? It’s on me.

So we had to find something else to do that afternoon.

While I have to admit liking some Ubi Games in the past, namely Anno 2070 & 2205, Watch Dogs & AC: Unity I really hate what they do regarding to "Savegames". Me and my wife have some overlap in games we enjoy and lately it becomes more and more difficult to have separate playthroughs. We already use different windows users, but that's not enough, you have to disable "cloud saving" but it usually still "overwrites" other savegames. So usually I just let her finish the game and then completely restart for my playthrough.

Worst offender, though was "The Crew". There didn't seem to be a way to actually restart, or reset progress. And it wasn't even that I wnated to "share" the game with her. It was just me wanting to restart after a few hours, because I had the feeling I rushed/missed something in the beginning.

The way cloud saves seem to work on Steam is that there's some folder that is synchronized with the cloud after you close the game. If Ubisoft's thing works the same, then 1. start game 2. delete saves 3. kill game might work.

I usually find a way to do it. But with "The Crew" it was different. I think the problem is, that even the "Single Player Mode" is not really single player but some sort of online hybrid thing nobody asked for in a single player racing game.

One of the things that sets steam apart is family sharing, so you can share licenses with a spouse or sibling but keep your saves on your own profile. Uplay doesn't have that.

This piece of news is more than 7 years old, and Ubisoft has previously confirmed that the only accounts that can get deleted are the ones with absolutely nothing in them. The writer for this article should have done additional research on this. Seems to me that it came up on Twitter again and the writer took advantage of that to write an inflammatory article that's sure to get a bunch of views.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/156ukmv/ubisoft_c...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/40ye8e/ubisoft_may_s...

As an aside, the fact that Ubisoft try to get you to sign up for an online account from a console and will actively prevent you from playing a game if you don't (so long as you're connected to the internet) is too user hostile for me to begin with. I've basically stopped interacting with their games as a result.

I don’t generally play their games but I currently have a PSN+ Extra subscription which has access to a large portion of their library, so I’ve been playing all the games I’ve missed (far cry 5 and 6, AC Valhalla, watchdogs legion, ghost recon breakpoint). While they aren’t -bad- games, they all feel very similar and ultimately quite shallow and hollow. Certainly worth a few hours of fun each, but they started to feel stale pretty quickly, certainly not worth paying the normal price tag for, so you’re not missing all that much.

They prevent you playing even single player content? I’m surprised that such a design passed certification.

Yeah I had that with Watchdogs Legion specifically on PS5 even to get to single player. I could bypass it but only by disconnecting from the internet in the system settings which is a pain. I'm surprised too but I guess Sony relies on these big third party publishers to such a degree that they let it slide.

Important to note that Ubisoft will also brick all of the Ubisoft games you bought on Steam if your Ubisoft account is closed.

https://twitter.com/UbisoftSupport/status/168308086616607949...

Wait what the heck. How is this shit even legal ? I have a few of Ubisoft games on steam and Ubisoft's official site. I used to feel bad when I was young and pirated because I didn't have money to buy video games. Now they are just justifying reasons to pirate. Which I definitely will start if the products I bought are taken away. This is an insane *Terms and conditions.

Because the games bought on steam just unlock the game inside Ubisoft Connect - steam is just a download manager at that point. You still technically own the product on Steam, Ubisoft can't change that - but since your associated Ubisoft account doesn't exist anymore the game won't launch. I'm not saying it's great, just explaining how it works behind the scenes.

That's why I just don't buy their games. I really enjoyed Far Cry 3 and would really like to get the rest of the series, but just can't put up with their account system even at discounted prices.

Because the steam "version" is just an unlock inside Ubisoft Connect. The game isn't managed through steam internally(although steam does have the ability to download the game and its updates).

What? This is beyond the inconvenience of 3rd party launchers that PC gamers often whine about. I'm glad I play on PS5.

Ubisoft’s ecosystem has always been especially terrible- I don’t know anyone that enjoys using it.

I suspect this is much like the EA userbase.

EA is a terrible company for gaming. Among their many shady and abhorrent practices, they re release the same game every year with minor to no changes: FIFA (now called something else).

The userbase that plays these games do not care. They are a sustained revenue source. A majority of them do not overlap with gaming and tech communities online. They simply play the games and move on. It's a large silent community that we don't often interact with.

Ubisoft has a similar userbase in its assassin's creed, far cry etc series. To them this won't be any cause for concern.

EA is a bunch of wanna be tech uncles in the bay area who are secretly wishing to fit in with the tech CEOs but don’t have the business model to do it.

See Unity (run by an ex EA CEO who spends a fortune on reputation management services wiping a certain lawsuit of the internet to the point obscure NY italian restaurants show up above his name in Google) wasting the opportunity to become the engine company in games and deliver solid value on ridiculous ads plays trying to become an ad tech company.

These are companies that could have solid business models and solid value. But greed.

EA is actually a parasite. It’s the Vampire Armand from Interview with the Vampire. It takes no risks, it doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t know how and want to - instead it buys already proven ideas, scales them with fat cheques and rides them until they are out of favor, while squeezing the people who build them year after year for 10% layoffs.

And thus it keeps itself alive, decade after decade and the people who run it a fat paycheck, the road littered with the husks of sucked dry studios and broken dreams.

One of many fun aspects: Many projects run on contingent workers who can only work for months out of a year (otherwise law would make them permanent), paid starbucks wages but without starbucks benefits. These workers are tunnels to EA with deals straight out of overpriced schools which approach young people with “100% placement rate” and “job guaranteed” in the hip game industry - tie them with insane student loans and then funnel them into EA.

EA then dangles them the idea that the best performers will be made permanent - appealing to youthful optimism bias - and many of them run 2-3 years with intermittent unemployment before realizing that almost nobody gets made permanent.

By then they are so deep in debt and unable to pay their loans, lack appreciable skills and stuck in a low end job that just hoping keeps them going or drives them to work at Starbucks for better benefits.

It’s pure evil.

While I agree with the mechanics of what you're saying, there definitely is a subset of people who don't really play games, they play a game. There's a few big franchises this applies to, EA's various sports games, F1, Football Manager, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and I'm sure some others.

What I don't agree with here is that the users don't care. No one is capable of having such passionate opinions on a glorified spreadsheet than a Football Manager fan. Likewise CoD players - they dared to try something new with whichever one was largely based in space (I thought it was one of the best), and got eviscerated by their player base, who really just want to play Modern Warfare 2 again.

I'm a sports fan and I see it as an annual subscription model. They update rosters and make small tweaks, and if I don't care I can stick with the older games. I've seen Jetbrains use a model where you optionally subscribe for continued updates, and I've seen it in audio production software too.

Madden for PS5 is $70.00, or just under $6/mo. If you spend half as much time playing Madden as you do watching Netflix or Youtube, then it's not out of line with the average cost of entertainment.

There are good points to be made about whether EA are meeting their full potential on quality of updates though.

> The userbase that plays these games do not care. They are a sustained revenue source. A majority of them do not overlap with gaming and tech communities online. They simply play the games and move on. It's a large silent community that we don't often interact with.

What's with the need to use such an insulting tone, simply because you don't like a certain type of games?

I buy F1 every single year, and I'm an avid gamer and part of the tech community. The game doesn't require massive changes every year, there's simply no need for it. Improved graphics, and an up to date grid, cars, circuits and regulations is what I want from such a game.

As a fellow F1 player, I do feel less comfortable buying these games at full price and that's why I don't buy them every year, even though of like the updated grid and tracks. I wish there was a cheaper upgrade option, since I'm clearly not buying a full game. Your point that it doesn't need a full overhaul is completely correct, but we are still paying full price.

I do agree with you on the price point. And sometimes I do feel like I'm overpaying just to have the game up to date. Obviously I don't know any of the financials behind making such a game, but I would imagine that licensing makes up a fairly large chunk of the price.

I know nothing about this one in particular but typical game license deals are something like 25% of revenue to the IP holder. A strong dev like EA may bump that down a little bit and a mega IP (Harry Potter, Marvel, etc) might bump it up, but it's not going to be super far off.

It's not an insult to point out the obvious 'ignorance is bliss'. You can still like bargain bin fast food while admitting such food is garbage.

That's the thing happening with these companies, changing things to be more consumer-unfriendly while riding on nostalgia or branding. Pointing it out doesn't make it an insult to those still enjoying the game.

> It's not an insult to point out the obvious 'ignorance is bliss'. You can still like bargain bin fast food while admitting such food is garbage.

It does feel like an insult. And it also feels like an insult to say those players are ignorant. I'm fully aware of what I'm buying every year, but it meets my expectations of such game.

politelemon said:

> A majority of them do not overlap with gaming and tech communities online. [...] It's a large silent community that we don't often interact with.

Considering you, woutr_be, are indeed overlapping with this online tech community, aren't silent at all, and we're interacting with you right now,

why are you taking offense with a category of people you aren't part of?

The Walmart userbase.

> they re release the same game every year with minor to no changes: FIFA (now called something else).

That's just the Switch version (called Legacy)

EA declined to pay the FIFA fee, the new game is called "EA Sports FC"

https://www.ea.com/games/ea-sports-fc

>they re release the same game every year with minor to no changes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_(video_game_series)

Please stop spreading disinformation. Aside from the usual graphical changes and annual roster updates you can see a list of major changes under each release.

>The userbase that plays these games do not care.

So what exactly is the problem if they're clearly meeting the expectations of their userbase?

I think there is an argument to be made that a game franchise known absolutely to see new, regular annual releases could be better served as a GAAS (Game As A Service) instead of as standalone releases that demand to be purchased each time.

Food for thought.

Paradox Interactive recently did this for the Europa Universalis series, and honestly it's a good deal for new adopters. That being said, it's more expensive than a humble bundle sale (which happens often, at least annually). The EU4 game receives at least 2 DLCs as well as other music packs and sound packs a year, so it makes sense to get the subscription (which could still be more affordable for some people though).

Fifa 23 for PC came out for €60 and dropped to €40 in November 2022, and then jumped back and forth between those prices. That is €5 or ~€3.50 per month, paid annually, and you keep content if you stop subscribing. What would you expect a GaaS model to bring?

You mean EA Play? I’ve subscribed for a month or two at a time when I wanted to play some FIFA or another EA title. You certainly don’t need to purchase the standalone titles.

Vast majority of profits are from their gacha mode so it wouldn't matter, but traditions™ to reap the harvest each year are stronger for now.

Save a couple GB of hard drive storage in exchange of a big PR problem and sending your image down the drain.

Stroke of genius.

You're not wrong, but basic account data + game ownership information is probably one or two KB at most, instead of GB.

1-2KB per player, so a couple GB across all accounts.

They probably are not going to delete all accounts, and thus not going to save "couple GB of hard drive storage"

Ah gotcha, that's fair.

It's about avoiding legal risk. User data is a legal liability to store.

They could easily pseudonymize the data by removing payment info, personal info, etc. but keeping the games because why wouldnt you let people keep their games as a game company

Lets say they did this. They remove all personal info, including the email address for signing into the account. So technically the games are still attached to the account, but there is no way for you to sign in to it and there is no way for you to prove that you are the owner of the account.

It isn't any different from the user's perspective than just deleting the data.

I mean there is, you send out randomized credentials "please use these for your next login". And if someone lost access to their e-mail address, the proof of ownership would be the same as it is today (aka sending receipts, keys, etc.).

But lets really be honest: These kind of companies dont give two sh*ts about security leaks and GDPR infringements, as is demonstrated almost every other week by news. Privacy or legal compliance is most certainly not the reason they are doing this.

Email isn't PII. They'd have no reason to delete it.

> Email isn't PII

What's your email address?

Only if you hoard more data than you need to.

But what if an AI needs that training data in the future, huh?? :)

Do you have a source? It sounds odd to me that storing data for say 2*N users would be a significantly bigger problem than for N.

Ubisoft: Ubidead

Does that also include console copies I wonder?

I have blacklisted EA/Origin and Konami already, now Ubisoft is entering the list. Do not support money-milkers.

I understand game developers want to make money but what is the logic here?

If we delete their accounts permanently, they are going to rebuy our games!!

Because "engagement".

And because these are mega-corps run as money factories, the product of which is practically incidental. This is what it looks like when you have MBA/Growth specialists steering the ship based on "data". And the big table says "engagement numbers need to be higher". Then this makes perfect sense. What better way to boost all your numbers, incentivise activity, drop some permanently dead accounts (reducing the deonominator making first derivative numbers better), recoup purchases from returning accounts and pivot to the gold mine that is "not your games"/rentierism.

Publishers want to make money. Game developer studios under contract with publishers only get a share of the revenue. That's why big publishers found their own or buy game dev studios to... <drum roll> make more money for themselves, and outcompete independent developers.

Ubi is mostly first party. The studios are the company.

> I understand game developers want to make money but what is the logic here?

I think the logic here is that they don't want to get a huge fine from CNIL (French data regulator) and possibly other GDPR countries that choose to interpret the requirements in a similar way. There's a reason so many different services are rolling out inactive account deletion policies now.

The GDPR is all about personal information.

What is personal about user `mikepavone22` owning FIFA 2019?

Or is this because they demand personal information for your account, such as your date of birth? Because they shouldn't be able to restrict your access to a service based upon them gathering your personal details.

Once the data are tied to email, IP address, SSN, eID, ID card or even a name, they are personal data. Sure, "owns FIFA 2019" is not sensitive data like "suffers from depression" or "voted Green" would be, but it's still data about a person.

Many people confuse identifiers with personal data. Next time, assume personal data means all columns of the "user" table and everything that can be sensibly joined to them. "Anonymized" means setting all non-synthetic identifiers to NULL. "Pseudonymized" means replacing all non-synthetic identifiers with generated ones. "Sufficiently" means you ask yourself: "Would I be plausibly able to identify rows related to this one person I personally know stuff about?"

But obviously, keeping user accounts to be able to provide them with their games is a given. No data protection agency would be able to convince a court that you should have made the games inaccessible without explicit instruction from the user. It's a textbook example of legitimate interest.

> Once the data are tied to email, IP address, SSN, eID, ID card or even a name, they are personal data.

I don't use these game services, but do they really mandate that you provide this?

>>Does that also include console copies I wonder?

Console copies don't rely on your Ubisoft account so no, it does not. You might lose progress in games where it's stored on Ubisoft servers though, like The Division.

The only game I still play from time to time is Rock Smith 2014 on a X-box I bought specifically for that. I wouldn’t even care to connect to any account if this wasn’t required to access the store.

There is two account required to access the whole game actually, one that is X-box/Microsoft account without with I guess the console is as useful as a brick, and one for Ubisoft which saves your progresses, give access to a few bonuses most notably the song Desolate Motion[1].

I don’t know where the record about acquired songs is supposed to be store, I would except it to be a Microsoft side handled stuff, but I remember that sometimes Ubisoft servers would be down and that would make bought tracks unavailable.

I had a look at Rocksmith+ but was utterly disappointed with the monthly subscription fee model they went with.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZaAOaPaczU

I started learning guitar during Covid and I purchased Rocksmith 2014 as a complement to Justin Sandercoe’s excellent series of courses.

I’m curious about why you bought an X-box specifically for Rocksmith. Does it perform better with an X-box than a PC?

I purchased the game from Steam and it runs fine – if a little hot – on a Windows 10 laptop. So far, the only problem I’ve had on the PC was note detection when playing open strings for the “String Skip Saloon” game.

>I’m curious about why you bought an X-box specifically for Rocksmith. Does it perform better with an X-box than a PC?

I doubt it, but I already didn’t have any Windows box to run it at home, and wanted something as dummy as possible to only play the game with any other distraction around. Would they buy a dedicated device, I would buy that if it just run and let me play.

Thanks for the response. My Linux laptop is about 15 years old but I was able to use the Dell XPS that I got when we had to work from home due to Covid.

Might want to add Blizzard to that list. I used to own a copy of Warcraft 3, but Blizzard revoked all existing copies when they re-released WC3 as "Warcraft III: Reforged". I would have to purchase the game a second time to play it again.

Oh I cant wait for them to try this on in Australia, The ACCC will rake them over the coals.

My biggest problem with Ubisoft is that this is a company that owns the IP to some very storied AAA franchises(AC, Far Cry, Rainbow Six, Prince of Persia, fuck Might and Magic even), but the foreseeable future for these titles is that Ubisoft will milk the nostalgia as much as possible with gachalikes and unfinished 60 dollar games releasing in Beta with season passes and p2w.

If Blizzard deal goes through this would easily be the next company to be bought(extremely cheap valuation for premiere IP).

How is legal? When I buy something, I expect me to own it, that's why it's called "a sale" and not a "a lease" / whatever

I can't imagine a single reason how one party in the contract singlehandedly decides to change the nature of the contact

> When I buy something, I expect me to own it

Well there's your problem, you never bought the thing. They use the language like 'buy' and 'sell', but in reality you're renting. This should be illegal IMO.

>How is legal? When I buy something, I expect me to own it

It's 2023. That ship has sailed long ago...

I sometimes don’t have time to play games on steam for perhaps a decade or so (work, kids…), but I like to resume playing as time permits. Should I be worried I'll lose my account and games?

As long as Gabe is CEO I don't think Valve would pull-off something that stupid. Once he's gone though anything could happen.

I recently re-logged in to my Steam account for the first time since 2014 and everything was just fine. I had no idea how to work anything but managed to play my old friend at Counterstrike. I sucked.

I had a humble bundle subscription. There were a couple of times when I logged in, I found out I was unable to redeem certain games because I didnt do it before some deadline.

Sometimes, for a decade or so? Steam was released in 2003. So you've been on steam to play twice, maybe, since then?

Not whom you reply to, and maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but yeah. My account is from Sep 2003, I have around 300 games there (mostly from Humble Bundles), by 2012-2013 I almost stopped playing. Then I had a phase where I put maybe 100h in Rocket League to play with friends back in 2017, then 2021 to play Outer Wilds[0].

That's pretty much it. I still want all of those games, thanks.

[0] Which so far I consider the best single-player gaming experience in history

>Which so far I consider the best single-player gaming experience in history

The only use case for "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" memory erasing technology would be so you can play Outer Wilds for the first time again.

+1 for Outer Wilds

From a technical, emotional, and spiritual level, I agree with your comment on Outer Wilds.

If people reading this don't really "play games", make this the one you try.

Maybe in a couple of years, as time permits. Thx for the suggestion.

Piracy is almost always a service problem.

- Gabe Newell

The Cloud:

Outsource things that are important to you, as an individual, to a company that has so many customers it can only treat them as numbers.

They don't, and can't, offer their service in such a way that the value to the customer is matched by the importance with which it's treated by the service provider. This mismatch is at the core of all these cloud provider shenanigans, because it doesn't scale.

Counter example: Steam kept my account unused for a decade as I went through a self imposed gaming exile due to having kids. Had to jump through some hoops to prove it was me due to some old email address that was no longer accessible, but the process worked and everything was still there.

Ubisoft seems to really want Empress to crack more games :P Meanwhile I even understand why some people send her quite a lot of money via crypto to crack a game instead of spending the money directly on the game.

>Meanwhile I even understand why some people send her quite a lot of money via crypto to crack a game instead of spending the money directly on the game. To be fair, those people could be running an internet cafe and want to deploy the illegal copies to 100+ computers.

I like the idea of not having to log into all my old accounts in order to delete them. Maybe an opt-in option to extend the auto-deletion duration beyond the default would be nice, but ultimately this information should be deleted. Are we so special we have to save everything?

This is easy for me to say, though- I quit videogames last month after a long decline in use, mainly because I was using them as my late father abused alcohol. Hopefully my child is even better able to recognize the symptoms (if it's genetic) and get to the root cause(s).

There's a part of me that would be glad to see an email that my Steam account had expired and all the games I paid for access to (I don't feel like I own them anymore, though I am aware that many can be played without Steam) are no longer within easy reach. I don't want to log in to Steam to remove each game from my acc, though, so I'm leaving it all in limbo for now, which works well enough. Maybe my kid will want to play some of them, and I'd be willing to play, too, as a together-activity.

Eventually I'll be more balanced and can handle these middle grounds better.

I used to think I would always play World of Warcraft! I'm glad I grew out of that.

You'll own nothing and be happy.

Yours sincerely, Ubisoft

Where’s the line for a company stealing what was rightfully bought?

I’m only asking because this seems pretty close to that line.

When services do this, does logging in with a token via an API reset the clock?

this remind me, our university use google workspace for managing emails for all the student, I'm using the iOS mail app to consult and send emails,

but last year google increased the price (or) reduced the storage so the IT in the university removed the inactive account, they removed my account so when I went back to the university to fix the issue in the console it showed him I didn't connect for more than 2 years (yet I show him the then last week email that the IT department sent it which talk about the new storage limitation

As these log-in-or-lose-it policies pass through the tech world I wish password managers could reliably log into all my accounts. Ostensibly the feature exists but I've found it unreliable.

    ... wave of proprietary platforms is playing havoc not only with our personal libraries, but game preservation more broadly  ...

and

    ... Nobody asked for Uplay or Ubisoft Connect

I still frequently see an argument in favor of forcing Apple into allowing alternative stores, so I don't know how it's different. "Nobody asked for Ubisoft Connect" but seemingly everybody is asking for "Microsoft Office 365 Xbox Live Gold App Store for iPhone".

This is why buying DRM-free is important (e.g. GOG and Bandcamp).

That depends more on the producer than the store. Try buying Assassin’s Creed II or any later AC games without DRM.

This is why I stopped buying games from Ubisoft and EA. The kind of shit they pull on their online gaming platforms and the way they treat there employees is a crime against humanity.

Now I stick with independent game companies, they actually want to make the gaming space better.

Steam is pretty good. I really appreciate how much work they put into making games playable on Linux so I don't have to support Microsoft's or Apple's walled garden approach to platforms.

Ubisoft is doing you a favor, none of their games are worth playing. I seriously don’t even know how they’re still in business.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone took them to court over this and Ubisoft gave a Fox News-style legal defense where they argue that their content isn’t fun enough to be considered entertainment that has any monetary value.

We're long overdue for a "digital property" law that defines specific rights around purchasing media, for consistency if nothing else.

To my knowledge no country is seriously working on this, which is a bit surprising.

Perhaps not so surprising? Mergers/monopolies, lobbying, government gridlock, etc.

I stay away from any games that require me to log into a proprietary system to play them (for example EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard).

There is already a glut of other games to play so why bother.

Steam is a proprietary system. Do you use Steam?

You don't need to be logged into Steam to play the games it serves you.

I am increasingly interested in games that are open source, or at least not reliant on online services to function.

Definitely not talking about legal stuff here, but what if all these user-hostile action lead to more pirated copies?

Thats not much of a what-if: It would make sense to buy games and then download a cracked version instead of the official one, simply because the one you bought can be disabled & taken away at any moment. And, of course, cracked games have better linux compat because they dont have the DRM(s).

Buy it to support the franchise and get sequels, of course.

Thank the gods my account including my copy of Anno 1800 is still live after 10 months of inactivity

Again I ask: Is it really piracy when the sales, well, aren't?

This must be a GDPR thing, right? Discord recently received a big fine for not deleting accounts after a period of inactivity.

This looks like some regulatory induced certification bureaucraziness stunt that creates all sorts of funky stuff already within such megacorpos. Because time is money, the solution is usually the one they can take with the least resistance. Consequences down the line are an afterthought, and I'd bet someone mentioned that this would cause problems and it got waved away for not being important / other solution(s) being too expensive, this sort of thing, as usual.

They could be using GDPR as an excuse to do this. Or, to be more charitable, their legal people have been reading FUD about the GDPR rather than the actual regulations. GDPR has plenty of provision for legitimate interests, particularly in favour of the data subject: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...

Legitimate interest is the most fragile basis in GDPR and should not be relied upon, apart for server logs as suggested by recital 49. Contract (art. 6(1)b) may be better here, but keep in mind that art. 5(1)e still applies.

Unsurprising and it is not your video game.

Cloud-based games tied to ‘accounts’ are a scam.

I've had my ubi account go inactive for multiple years, and still not been deleted (just checked) so I'm guessing this pro-piracy guy on twitter is lying about the reason for his account being deleted.

The main "pro-piracy guy" in that case is Ubisoft, they are really putting in some work to make the legit way of playing games seem like a great way to get ripped off.

So far pirated games have: no login requirement or DRM troubles, no dependency on an online service, potentially better performance, and no risk of losing access. In other words, you can actually own the game that way.

If you'd read the article, you'd know that the legitimacy of the tweet has been verified by Ubisoft. They apparently really do close accounts due to inactivity

they really do close account. my account was deleted. probably because it only has giveaway games and i never played any of them.

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