They’re making the case for pirating games even better.

What fucking morons

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

One more company to add to my "Pirate Only" list

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.

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 🤦‍♀️

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.

How long is "too long"? If I lose my Anno empires I will shit bricks

And then they wonder why they can't compete with Steam and end up crawling back to Gabe for every game.

"We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account"

So why do this? Corporate greed.

It's always ethical to pirate Ubisoft games

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.

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...

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?

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.

If I liked their games, I'd be quite upset, I'm sure.

More garbage decisions from a garbage company

Don't buy games you don't own

Thanks for the heads up, 10 year old account was almost gone, phew!

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.

have some dlc there. had. no big deal, came with Assassin's Creed on PS3 I think. gave it to kids years ago. $20 maybe. got too old for games. can barely type

It's like they want people to pirate their games.

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!

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

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.

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.