Direct from the horse’s mouth: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/help/account/article/closure-of-inactive-ubisoft-accounts/000079595
Edit: The Ubisoft page linked here has almost completely changed in the last day.
This is illegal in France, btw. Ubisoft is a French company. :}
I thought frances main business was exporting stuff that is illegal in their country?
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
I’m generally too lazy to even download the fitgirl repack of UbiSoft stuff. It is that convenient to not engage with UbiSoft cookie cutter crap at all.
If you read the page link to it doesn’t say anywhere that they will delete your old game. OP is being disingenuous.
If they delete your account with purchased games in it, how do you play the games you paid for?
This post is a bunch of clickbait. The only reason this FAQ exists is because they need to comply with GDPR requests (like deleting someone’s data when they’ve died), not because they would delete inactive accounts to save space or some strange reason
Even then, deceased people’s accounts can go to their next of kin. GOG does this with provided legal documentations and will.
That is true. I will agree that the wording seems deliberately kept vague.
Except we’re not taking about dead people here, we’re taking about very much alive people who have lost the games they bought with their hard earned money which is bullshit and the GDPR outlines that personal data shall be kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed;
Considering that these accounts were made to buy games and play them when gamers want, these’s no reason for Ubi to delete these accounts outside of being cheap, greedy assholes of a games company.
This is one of the reasons I stopped buying games from steam or the various DRM enabled/account locked stores.
Now I just buy from gog, at least I can have a local backup of all the installers even if they stop providing them for a reason or another. Having to wait or miss out on some games have really lost all meaning.
If they don’t want my money I’ll just use them for something more useful.
EDIT: After re reading this comment it felt like I was astroturfing for the company, but I’ve no affiliation with them, I just like the fact of owning what I buy. I know about the difference of licensing and real owning, but I feel that if I can just use an installer whenever I want it’s a lot closer to owning it.
GOG user here too, they can transfer ownership of deceased’s games over to the next of kin if they have the proper legal docs and will. It’s one of the last DRM-free bastions of PC gaming.
Are you actually downloading all the stuff from GoG locally? I hear this argument often and it is a good one in principle. Until you try to backup a large library. Before I got my Steamdeck I bought a lot from GoG as well and set up a script to backup to my NAS a few times a year. My GoG library is considerably smaller than my Steam library (~60 games vs. ~1.000 games) and it is still taking up multiple TBs on my NAS, even though I’m only backing up windows .exes. If GoG would go under suddenly, I don’t think a lot of people will have their library backed up, nor can back up their library fast and sufficiently enough to make a difference. The true utility of Steam and other online platforms may be their storage capacity.
Are you actually downloading all the stuff from GoG locally?
To be fair, I do not, but I could if I wanted to, and that makes all the difference.
I only keep a copy of the games I enjoyed and I think I will replay and the ones that I plan to play, so - even if for any reason I don’t have access to the net or the service is down - I still can install them.
Someone could say that I could just install them directly, but I put them in a separate, slower, external HDD as installers and occupy my internal drives’ space only when needed.The only reason I don’t backup them all is that I don’t see, personally, the point in having thousands of installers and tens of TiB of games I know I will not use ever again. But someone could just want to keep them all because they like archiving, or because they are into video game preservation efforts.
And again having the freedom to do so, the choice to do so, is all that really matters.If GoG would go under suddenly, I don’t think a lot of people will have their library backed up
I would have the ones I cared about, and I’m pretty sure the whole of GoG’s library would suddenly appear in the net, easily accessible, for everyone. Again.
And I would not feel the least moral sting if someone was to retrieve from it a copy of what they’ve already paid, without the need to circumventing protections or modifying software that could be seen, in some jurisdictions, as illegal and without the risks connected to malware disguised as cracks, or the possibility of bugs involuntary introduced by the legit ones.Point being that it is true that most people will not use the full extent of their freedom, because they don’t care of it or are not interested in it, but having that freedom is the point in itself.
Great post. Even if GOG was to go under, they’ve said before they’d give everyone a heads up before they close. Just like when Playism closed in 2021.
Planned exactly how the world wish to existing. You will pay for owning nothing, that’s all. And people still praising steam thinking their virtual library is kind of vault. Yup. This is just the beginning.
I mean do they email you with a heads up with decent lead time to log in and reset the clock?
Does it matter? Storing use data is incredibly cheap in the grand scheme of things.
Especially the very small amount of data that should be required to list the games an account owns.
Exactly. Don’t make a store/launcher, if you don’t want to deal with the data in the first place.
30 days of notice. You have to be inactive for at least 4 years, as well.
This is… not great, but honestly I don’t care as much as I did initially. Maybe give more warning, though.
Yeah this is reasonable but it would be nice if they gave 90 days a few warnings for edge cases. Honestly 4 years is really generous I can see them knocking that part down if they raised the notice time.
All those alarmist “company X will delete your account” is basically that company X implements GDPR rule that you should delete data that you no longer need, including customers who left you.
Hence European companies sending emails to inactive accounts with an information that the account will be deleted unless one logs in once to stop being inactive.
GDPR demands everyone keeping as little data as possible. This is the result of it. And it’s good.
The GDPR outlines that personal data shall be kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed;
Considering that these accounts contain games that user has bought with their money that they own and want to access at any time they want to play, this is nothing more than UBI being a shit company hiding behind the GDPR and screwing over the consumer and while you think it’s great to have your digital goods you paid hard earned money on be accordingly thrown in the trash, most gamers think it’s a dick move.
Well, they already fucked with my Rayman Legends save file, even though it was supposed to be on cloud. I have the game on CD but they still require to make an account. Dumb all around.
Unless this page was edited after it’s posted it says that they only close inactive accounts that have no games or subscriptions associated with it. If you have purchased a game or have an active subscription you are fine.
Clicking on the link again, Ubisoft has indeed almost completely rewritten the page.
Only took a few people who already lost games and a bit of Internet outage and a few YouTubers bringing it up to get them to change their shitty policy.
Excuse me, wtf?
Guess Ubisoft isn’t moving out of my boycott list anytime soon.
JFC the very first line on the Ubisoft page states that they do not automatically close inactive accounts.
Rage over nothing.
And then that same page says the various ways they close inactive accounts…
They say they might and they say that they will email you before they do.
About them deleting your games library because I can’t see any information on that anywhere.
This is such a non issue.
Literally from the link that was posted
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.
Did you even read it.
They are not closing your account randomly they’re closing old accounts as is required by law, you are wand that this will occur and given time to log in and prevent it from happening.
And there isn’t anywhere on that page where they say they will delete your old game so I don’t know why that bit comes from.
Please cite the law in play then.
Also the article literally states that once a account is closed, the account cannot be recovered so please point out how one would go about accessing the digital games you bought after they closed your account.
Edit to add things I found about the GDPR and ubi being assholes.
The GDPR does not specify a specific period of inactivity after which user information must be deleted. However, it does require organizations to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure that personal data are erased or anonymized when they are no longer necessary for the purposes for which they were collected. This means that organizations should have a process in place for regularly reviewing and deleting personal data that is no longer needed.
And a PC gamer article from 2021.
Seems to me in my IANAL analysis is that there is UBI could very easily justify not deleting a user’s account with games attached considering the point of the account is to buy their games but they don’t because they’re a crappy game company.
