They’re making the case for pirating games even better.
What fucking morons
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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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".
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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.
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Yes but then again I'd be pirating Ubisoft games. Ain't got time for that bloated crap.
"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?
They're hoping this will actually entice people to come back. Following that "get people in the door first and then worry about what you'll sell them" business model, it's the same logical reason that Costco has super cheap hot dogs that they lose money on, and Epic Games has free games every week. It's just to get you to into a position where you can be marketed to.
That's the more "amicable" business strategy though. The more sinister possibility is, well, a constantly running app (the Ubisoft launcher is configured to start on boot by default, and even if you turn that off it spawns a background process as soon as you click on it at least till you reboot), always online with full user permissions and filesystem access is a very powerful thing, you've gotten yourself a pretty capable Trojan virus that people are willingly installing and granting whatever permissions you need! Plenty of Windows users are also in the habit of using the admin user with system access for literally everything, which makes it even easier for them to exploit.
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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...
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.
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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.
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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.
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And then they wonder why they can't compete with Steam and end up crawling back to Gabe for every game.
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.
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Y'ARRR MATEYS!
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!
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
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Fuck Ubisoft
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.
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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 🐖
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I really can't imagine that this complies with EU law.
Which makes it even more strange considering Ubisoft is based in the EU.
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Well that definitely won't get people to put on their pirate hats...
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I logged into steam after like 10 years no problem.
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.
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Yet another reason I won’t buy their games. Hurray.
Not surprised, coming from Ubisoft. Didn't they try taking down the DRM servers for some of their games, effectively making them impossible to use, until public outcry forced them to relent?
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Yup. Fuck Ubisoft. The last game from them was Child of light, and it will stay that way.
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Makes me wonder, how much data does it take to hold every users account info and library details? Not the games themselves, no profile pictures or anything, just the data that they must have in order too know who owns what. That has to be a huge consideration when you build an online store, right?
Did they run out of space? Are they deleting "old" accounts to free up servers for the absolute flood of new Ubisoft accounts that they're massively inundated with every day?
But seriously, what would an actual real world reason be for needing to delete accounts after X amount of time?
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.
Napkin maths to illustrate the point: Steam's game IDs are short numbers, typically close to 5 digits long. ASCII characters are one byte each, so let's assume 5 bytes plus one more for a separator character per game. If you wanted to store 8 billion accounts with 50 games each then the IDs would be about 2.4 TB, so a consumer hard drive worth ~$100 would do the job at least in the raw terms of data capacity
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Another reason to not buy digital games.
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.
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Another reason to pirate games. They can ban your physical copy from running too.
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.
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