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https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-delete-inactive-accounts-games/
https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-delete-inactive-accounts-games/
I'm starting to feel better about boycotting them after the unaddressed sexual abuse cases.
What are you talking about? They totally addressed that. Someone from HR even stepped down! /s
I used to work in a small Ubisoft studio, and while I was there one of the managers investigated an employee for sexual harassment. He took it super serious, and, as far as I can tell, did everything right. Then he took the case to HR and... Left the company about 6 weeks later.
The sexual harasser also left, eventually, but I think the order of things tells a story.
Ubisoft be like "We have forced you into our own half-baked launcher, but no one said we'd be willing to bear the consequences and put up money to maintain our database, okay?! The squarespace mysql package for three fiddy has to be performance enough!"
I just stopped buying/playing any games released by ubisoft. They don't deserve my money or time. Its always the same game with a diferent skin anyway.
Until through some "error" ab account with games gets trashed. The reaction of Ubisoft's social media team is what worries me. They didn't go "no worries folks, this is just for empty accounts and we give warning even then". They went "we don't want this to happen, but y'all make us do it because you don't log in like we want you to".`
Probably just the idiotic knee jerk 'all corpos are the same' mentality that has no basis in reality, same for the political variant of the mentality.
It's hilarious how one of the better companies in the industry is being compared to one of the garbage fire companies as if they don't have wildly different histories in how they treat their consumers and the platform they run.
Valve, is a platform. They have little reason to remove games themselves. But they do work with, and comply with, video game corpos doing this horse crap (not to be confused with horse armor which is also still crap). So they're at least complicit. See OP.
The core issue is that "buying" on any of the platforms (except GOG) is not buying but leasing for a one time payment. While Gaben is pretty altruistic it's only a matter of time until someone less so is in charge and decides X isn't wanted anymore and then poof because the EULA (also subject to change at any moment) allows it.
This is the key thing now. Apart from places like GOG you don't really 'own' games. You lease a license, that can be revoked. Or in the case of the 'always online or have to connect to whatever server' you get that game until they kill the connect server, even on single player games. Steam is at least decent (for now) at keeping those still yours, but as mentioned all it takes is Gaben to no longer be in charge and it will go away too.
Some games still work and just give you that failed to connect, others are just dead and can't be played ever again. Some certainly still work after severs shut down but others are dead.
The days of decade plus old games still working is starting to fade away and it sucks.
Minor point but its all technically down on the developers. You aren't forced to use Steam DRM and several games don't use it at all. For instance Witcher 3 on steam is DRM free and it functions basically as it does on GOG. Where you can just move the game to wherever and launch it.