this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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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
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.
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?"
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.