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Ubisoft Revokes Digital Keys For Games Purchased Via Unauthorised Retailers
RogueyWon writes: For the last several days, some users of Ubisoft's uPlay system have been complaining that copies of games they purchased have been removed from their libraries. According to a statement issued to a number of gaming websites, Ubisoft believes that the digital keys revoked have been "fraudulently obtained." What this means in practice is unclear; while some of the keys may have been obtained using stolen credit card details, others appear to have been purchased from unofficial third-party resellers, who often undercut official stores by purchasing cheaper boxed retail copies of games and selling their key-codes online, or by exploiting regional price differences, buying codes in regions where games are cheaper to sell them elsewhere in the world. The latest round of revocations appears to have triggered an overdue debate into the fragility of customer rights in respect of digital games stores.
It's not about piracy it's about control, and what you "BOUGHT" isn't really yours.
In this case UBISOFT has a dispute with gray marketeers and decides to take it out on the customers instead of taking it to the courts with the people they have a problem with they lash out at the customers, taking advantage of the fact the customers will likely have to suck it up.
STOP FUCKING GIVING UBISOFT MONEY.
By this point, anyone who gets bitten by this or any future shady behavior from a software house with such a sterling DRM reputation deserves whatever they get.
What they don't deserve is our pity. Ridicule maybe. I could even be convinced that "Mocking them" is the appropriate response.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
ok, i don't understand this.
Ubisoft sold keys ad different prices. Some of the "cheap" keys were activated in "expensive" areas. Rather than identifying the resellers and shutting them down (though they may have done nothing wrong), Ubisoft identified the keys, and revoked them.
Note, Ubisoft made a profit selling these keys to authorized distributors, and the users paid for a (at the time) valid key. But Ubisoft thinks they could have extracted greater profit with a different sales plan, so they revoked them all to try again. Too many "save, restart" games played by Ubisoft.
Learn to love Alaska
me in BC buying a car from a guy who bought/brought it in from Alberta and sold it through his car dealership in BC. Then Ford comes in and repossesses my car because I didn't get it through a dealer in BC and because the prices are lower in Alberta so it was unfair to the dealer in BC since it wasn't sold through an authorized dealer.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
You still have the ballot box. Vote against Ubisoft with your euros, dollars, or whatever: stop buying Ubisoft games. Buy games in the same genre from their competitors and email your purchases (and reasoning) to Ubisoft support.
Yes, buy them from the likes of Microsoft who, after 9 years, changed their Xbox policy so that once you delete local content of a delisted game, you lose that content. They made no announcement, gave no notice of games being delisted, just changed their polices and screwed over their customers.
Or from Steam, who forces patches on you that can completely change the product you purchased. Bought a GFWL game? It's now a Steam Edition game.
Or Origins... *giggles*
They're all just as bad as the other because no one is willing to put up the money to fight them.
FTFA -
Ubisoft claims (for what it's worth) that the only digital keys that they revoked were those purchased fraudulently with stolen credit cards.
No one has a right to keep stolen property. If you buy a watch in a pawn shop, and the police come for it because it's stolen, you forfeit the watch. Don't get me wrong - I absolutely detest Ubisoft, ever since XIII, and will never buy another product of theirs...I hope their corporate building burns down, they lose their IP to someone, and the name Ubisoft becomes a curseword...
But at the same time, clamoring that the stolen goods you purchased on the black market were taken away from you doesn't garner sympathy.
First sale doctrine doesn't obligate Ubisoft to honor the key.
Exactly right! What a lot of people don't understand is that the First Sale Doctrine is a defense not an offense. In other words, if you buy a copyrighted item, like a book, and resell it, the First Sale Doctrine protects you from getting successfully sued by the copyright holder for doing so. In other words, it is a defense. It does not however, put any obligations on the publisher to provide any support to ensure that these later customers can use the product. I'm not saying Ubisoft is doing the right thing here, but this really has nothing to do with the First Sale Doctrine.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
So you're saying Microsoft went and remotely erased your games or did you? If it was the former, then you may have an argument. If it was the latter, then the blame is solely yours.
Actually, in my case I didn't even get a chance to download it. I purchased a game December 3rd, sometime between now and then it was delisted, when I went to download it less than 60 days after purchase it was no longer possible.
I bought some Ubisoft games at Big Lots on clearance for $5 in CD/DVD form.
One of the games had a discount code for half off the Ubisoft web store. I bought a few titles and applied the discount code to get half off my order. I entered my debit card and paid and waited for the software to ship. Two weeks later my order was canceled, out of stock on every item I ordered. My money was refunded. I tried the discount code again but now it doesn't work.
The games I bought for $5 at Big Lots, the keys were no longer valid.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
It's a marketing tactic called price discrimination.
The same product (usually a product with a very low marginal cost) is offered at different prices in different markets with the price tuned appropriately for each market.
A product may be offered at $60 in the North American market because that's what the market accepts as a fair value. On the other hand, $60 may be too high for a market such as eastern Europe, China, or South Asia where the per-capita income is much lower. Since the marginal cost of the product is very low, the product is sold at a lower price in regions with lower income. However, this opens up opportunities for grey-market activities where third parties purchase the product in the lower priced markets and resell them in the higher priced markets at a price below that of the original manufacturer. The third party then pockets the difference.
Grey market activities ultimately harm lower-income markets because these markets contribute substantially less to the manufacturer's bottom line. If revenue from the manufacturer's primary markets is threatened, they'll simply end price discrimination or cut off the weaker markets all together.
Except then you have to deal with the fact that every other keygen and crack contains malware and keyloggers.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Eventually? You haven't ever bought a game, merely a license to use it. Ubisoft seems hell-bent on demonstrating why, exactly speaking, this is a bad thing. I honestly can't tell if the whole company is doing some kind of performance art or executing a serious business strategy at this point.
But it's okay. We're due for another video game crash. Let bullshit burn.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And that is why It's a bad idea to use software that relies on server side authentication. Case in point, I just reinstalled my security cam software, but it won't accept my *paid-for* license because it doesn't exist anymore. So my legally bought software is now useless.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Exceptions do exist, IF the developers are not complete cunts.
For example, the final patches of Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey all removed the CD checking requirements of their respective games (back when CD verification for games was a thing). It was replaced with a master server authentication scheme which would check to see if your CD key was flagged as being pirated and if so, block the game from running until you entered in a legit key.
However, if the master server [i]cannot[i/] be contacted for any reason, the games err on the site of caution and assume that the user is legit. Fancy that! The online authentication system of these games actually trusts the user unless proven otherwise. If proof cannot be obtained one way or the other, it doesn't penalize the player in the slightest. This is rather important since the Prey master server was removed several years ago - if it assumed the user was a filthy pirate, it would have been impossible for ANY legit copies to run.
This is what I want to see more of with regards to online authentication. If you can't authenticate one way or another, assume they're legit. It's not as if pirates won't use cracked versions regardless.
I hope they didn't try this stunt on Australian customers. We have "parallel importation" legislation forbidding retailers from trying to prevent people monopolizing sales channels againt people who import cheaper from overseas. Back in the day, the ACCC actually forced retailers to stop supplying DVD players that where not multiregion, although the bloody conservatives put a stop to THOSE shenanigans. Hell back then the ACCC even sued Sony for going after mod-chippers.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
That's not really true of Steam. The reason I (like many people) have huge Steam collections, is that they frequently DO offer games (including recent AAA ones) at a significant discount.
Wrong.
The marginal cost of production is not the same as the total cost of production. The marginal cost of production is the cost to produce one more unit of a product. In the case of easily replicable digital products the marginal cost is negligible, especially when distributed digitally. The total cost of production includes other factors such as the massive amount of capital sunk into developing and marketing the product. Fixed costs need to be recouped for a project to break even and eventually turn a profit. If the price were depressed to the marginal cost of production the company would never recoup any of the fixed cost and hence never break even much less turn a profit.