this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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It's not. You don't own the game you lease it with the clause that the storefront can ban/delete/deactivate your account for any reason. This is true for Steam, GOG, Itch, Epic, EA, Microsoft, etc.
I think you're speculating in order to make excuses for a corporation. Show us the clause that applies in this case, and I will retract my statement.
Edit:
It's disappointing that several people replied to me with walls of text to lecture about things that were not disputed, and in some cases not even relevant. We know online game stores typically license them rather than selling them, folks, and Valve's license terms are not Ubisoft's terms. Kindly read before replying next time.
One person actually brought an Ubisoft inactivity clause to the table. (Thanks, @LittlePrimate@feddit.de) Interestingly, that clause seems to be present only in the terms of service for certain regions. A quick search doesn't find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that's due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.
So depending on which regional ToS the gamer(s) in question agreed to, Ubisoft accepting money and then revoking access might or might not have been fraudulent behavior.
More importantly, it's ethically wrong, and no amount of legal maneuvering will change that. Screw Ubisoft.
They indeed just "license" the games to us:
For termination, it's not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:
The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.
Source
It's not fully speculation. You can go to every store and look at their TOS. In https://legal.ubi.com/StoreTermsofSale/en-INTL we see 1. Scope
Also note:
So I'll do this for ubisoft but last I checked it was in Steam, EA, Gog, and Epic's. Itch is the only one I hold out hope to be better but this is pretty boiler plate stuff.
This license is just that, a license.
So we now need to look at the EULA and Privacy Policy.
So the EULA of the store https://legal.ubi.com/eula/en-US Clause 1 backs of Clause 1 Scope of the Terms of Sale.
Clause 8
So Ubisoft reserves the right to terminate your account and thus the EULA agreement and thus your license.
For fun, lets do a bigger storefront because ubisoft is small.
Valve is smarter and calls this directly not a term of sale but a subscriber agreement. You are a subscriber to their service of steam and this is the agreement:
https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#2
Establishes that these are licenses, not purchases and that you have to have a steam account and running the steam client.
Valve reserves the right to cancel your subscription if they decide to cease providing such subscriptions to "similarly situated subscribers." E.g. as long as they do it to everyone in your "situation" it's legal. So Valve could very well delete inactive accounts legally without refunds. It's in the EULA, you've agreed that as long as they do it without direct discrimination that it's fine.
So again, you can go through every storefront and realize you have no ownership or right to a refund if they decide to shut down. Also don't see this as "pro-corporation" I am not defending anyone here. I am pointing out that people have not understood the loss of ownership in the digital world we now live. I've been sitting here waiting for the day that people go "hey wait, they can just delete my account without anything I can do?"
https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#10
Read 10.C. Valve can do it any time.
Most likely other storefronts have similar clauses
10 doesn't have a c. 9 is about account termination and has a c but there's no mention of account deletion due to inactivity. "[if] Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally" can be interpreted as encompassing subscribers that have been inactive, but it sounds more about when a game's servers shut down or valve stops distributing it in a region and all players lose access.
Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I'm in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they'll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.
The law is written by capitalists for capitalists and shouldn't he taken into consideration. EULAs are essentially privately-owned laws. It is theft, plain and simple.
Sure, "laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army."
I was simply talking about the current legal definition. It's hard to call it theft or fraud when the terms are made clear before the sale. An example of this to a lesser degree would be game studios making multiplayer games. Is it theft if a studio puts a game out on Steam with the clause "We can only support multiplayer for as long as our budget allows us." and then goes under a few years later? A lot of these multiplayer services are things someone would have to pay for like Playfab or Gamelift. Not something easily open-sourceable. You could argue "Well don't write your game like that" but then you are essentially killing the multiplayer game service industry without consideration of its existence or benefits.
That depends on the country you live in. In Australia for instance anything that looks like a "sale" must be an actual sale of a product and can't be something else sneakily disguised as a sale. It's illegal for services like Steam or app stores to deny you access to software you've bought on their platform in Australia.
That doesn't mean it hasn't happened before though.
Hmm yet steam has certainly banned lots of accounts, probably some of those owning games and are citizens of Australia. So clearly there is a clause around it.