In a response to a post from the AntiDRM Twitter account, Ubisoft Support has clarified that users who don’t sign in to their account can potentially lose access to Ubisoft games they’ve purchased. The initial post from AntiDRM featured a snippet of an e-mail sent to a user from Ubisoft notifying them that their account had been temporarily suspended due to inactivity and warning that it would be closed permanently in 30 days. Responding to the ominous e-mail, the Ubisoft Support Twitter account stated “We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account” and noted that account closure could be avoided by signing in to the account again.
I wonder if this is an attempt at cutting down on bought or stolen accounts somehow. Buying or breaking into old accounts is a thing, so I wonder if this is their solution (a bad one I might add).
I think it’s more of a “they have to host your shit somewhere” even if it’s just cold storage think about having to task employees with backing up 7 year old drm onto cold storage. The man hours are better spent elsewhere. I don’t love it, but I get it.
Hosting your shit costs them literal pennies at absolute most. “This user owns these games and keys” is bytes of data. If they have cloud saves it’s slightly more, but about 100 orders of magnitude off of affecting their bottom line in any way. Old games they do or don’t support have nothing to do with inactive accounts. Active accounts own them too.
There is zero financial rationale for this. It’s not anything resembling a rounding error on the budget sheet. It’s basically free.
The curious thing is that there is a financial rationale for maintaining the minimal data, and allowing account recovery. If I bought a game or two via Ubisofts store a few years back, and I remember that game and go through the steps to recover my account… I might see more games that I’d actually rather like to buy.
The cost of keeping a minimal set of account information is a minuscule cost, with a potential upside.
I think they do this to discourage people from letting their accounts go dormant and risk loosing their games. Which makes some sense, lock you customers in, use their sunk cost to encourage activity.
I mean, how much data do they really have to store, though? They only need to store one copy of the actual game. The save files shouldn’t be unmanageable.
That could be part of it as well. Such a move could serve several purposes after all.