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What happened to owning something you've paid for forever?
These companies need to realize if they keep fucking over their paying customer, it'll be more convenient for people to just pirate their product. At least FitGirl won't knock on my door and demand me to delete his repack off my hard disk just because I haven't visited his site in a while
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.
I haven't bought a triple A game brand new since like 2014 or something. I wait until they have some sort of sale on them first. Literally didn't buy Cyberpunk 2077 until very recently when they finally knocked it down to $30 a few weeks ago. It actually shocked me to walk by the games isle recently and see that triple A titles including yearly sports games are like $80 now. Crazy IMO. I might go back to reading books.
One more company to add to my "Pirate Only" list
Don't even bother playing. Their games have been shit for years.
They’re making the case for pirating games even better.
What fucking morons
I saw a great quote,
"It's not pirating if buying it isn't owning it".
It's definitely still pirating. I think the quote uses the term "stealing".
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.
This is why Steam got the lion's share. Ubisoft is mad disrespectful.
Imagine buying something from these people after this.
Yes, sometimes I don't play a game for 5 years, but I bought and own it, and I know it'll be there when I come back to it.
....unless it's Ubisoft, then purchases aren't really purchases, and you don't have any right to expect your property to be there when you get back 🤦♀️
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.
Well guess I won't be "renting" any games from them then. If I buy something it means I own it, in perpetuity. In fact I'm fairly certain Europe has laws against this, though Ubisoft will probably just have to pay a "fine" that is more a gentle slap on the wrist. We need to stop fining these companies, it does not stop them from breaking the law repeatedly. Stop arresting pirates, start arresting CEO's.
If the EU slaps you with a fine, it's usually not a slap on the wrist but something that seriously stings.
How long is "too long"? If I lose my Anno empires I will shit bricks
I've heard they are doing this to comply with things like GDPR. If that's the case, and they are deleting accounts to not be storing personal information longer than allowed, then before closing your account, they should email you an encrypted bundle of your data that you could later send back to them to restore your account. It wouldn't be against those laws if they send it to you to keep... and it would provide you with a path back to full restoration.
It's always ethical to pirate Ubisoft games
This is kind of my biggest fear with all these digital games platforms. I have over 2100 games over most of the platforms, it just became so easy to finally be able to get all the games I grew up salivating over. What's to stop Valve or GOG suddenly "having" to make similar, or competely new changes of unbeknownst fuckery due to pressure from the spooky all-knowing investors?
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.
And then they wonder why they can't compete with Steam and end up crawling back to Gabe for every game.
This is why I'm a big supporter of physical media if possible. Sure the actual game may not be on there or something because it's too big or whatnot, however with what the hell is going on with digital companies in the modern videogaming world, yeah no they simply just can not be trusted much with the amount of power they hold. This includes but not limited to: Ubisoft, Steam, EA, Epic Games, etc.
EDIT: Yeah GOG is fine apologies for that, however the well majority of games in the digital world are simply just licenses that these companies have control of.
What's wrong with gog? Just download the offline installer and do with it whatever you want.
"We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account"
So why do this? Corporate greed.
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?
Huh. I've got some games on Ubisofts store.... Well, maybe not anymore.
You'll have to explain to me why I shouldn't just steal any future Ubisoft titles if they steal all mine first...
If I liked their games, I'd be quite upset, I'm sure.
I've not been buying Ubisoft games since the sexual harassment scandal back in 2020, and this only reaffirms my choice not to buy anything from them. It's not just scummy, it's pointlessly scummy.
Admittedly, physical copies of games don't resolve this issue either: legally speaking when you own a physical disk, all you own is the disk itself- not the contents. The only way to actually fix this issue is better consumer protection laws.
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.
Schematics or die
Surely if we get the schematics, we would need a die of some kind as well, right?
Jokes aside, what do you expect is the alternative to licenses? You don't "legally own it" because it's an endlessly duplicatable infinitely durable item. There's literally no way to enforce ownership the same way with actual physical objects outside of keeping track of who owns what (and unsurprisingly, that's what a license is).
You're attacking the wrong thing here, licenses aren't the problem. It's the revocation of them that is.
More garbage decisions from a garbage company
Don't buy games you don't own
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.
This proves why we need to regulate that digital or not, games we purchase are considered our property. Not at the mercy of deletion for zero reason. Otherwise, pirate away for all I care guys. If they treat us like this, fuck'em and their sales.
A part of me wants to start spreading a #PirateUbisoftGames hashtag.
...but another part of me doesn't want to bother because it's just Ubisoft games lol
Guess I'm no longer buying games by Ubisoft. I spend hundreds in their store and they're going to delete my account if I'm inactive to long? You can't be making this shit up.
I just had a horrible experience with Assassins game purchased through Steam. I had bought the game few years back. Played some and stopped. And deleted my Ubisoft account. This week I downloaded the game again hoping to play it. I created a new Ubisoft account but the game wouldn’t launch.
Hours spent with the support got me nowhere. In summary, their response is that since the original Ubisoft account was linked to the purchase, they cannot now link the game to the new account.
I provided the Steam proof of purchase but that didn’t help.
Steam support didn’t help either.
I can’t play a game I purchased and own.
This should be illegal!
This is just a shame
They said if you receive an email, it's 30 days of no activity once you receive the email. Apparently it's being sent to people who have been inactive > 1 year.
Ubisoft is a C tier developer/publisher who generally doesn't get my dollars, although they have had some one-off hits in the last decade (Wildlands, Riders Republic, Anno games). I couldn't be bothered to shell out $80 for the latest AC or Farcry copy and paste slog. Seems their servers are getting full. Doesn't really inspire confidence in them as a service provider.
Maybe related to these changes, maybe due to something else, I don't know, but a Ubisoft game I have installed through Steam (Far Cry New Dawn) stopped launching for me. I tried verifying game files through Steam (more than once), but that by itself didn't help. What worked however was uninstalling Ubisoft Connect, then verifying game files again through Steam (which sadly installs Ubisoft Connect again), then launching the game (which initiated a Ubisoft Connect update for me). Hope that helps someone.
Ha! I deleted my own account before they could, jokes on you Ubi!! Jokes aside, fuck ubisoft. I primarily buy games from GOG. Recommended everyone to do the same 🐖
Thanks for the heads up, 10 year old account was almost gone, phew!