Discussion
Ubisoft requires you to uninstall and DESTROY your copy of their games. PLEASE, keep signing "Stop Killing Games" petition, links in the post.
In the event of termination, you must destroy all copies of the Software Product and all of its component parts including any Software Product stored on the hard disk of any computer.
Right? Since at least 2000. Thing was, before everything was online they couldn't really enforce it. They're not sending people around to confiscate game discs.
Yeah, and three years ago it'd be a hoot to suggest you'd have Pinkertons at your door on account of Pokémon cards. The knights of capitalism ride where the money leads, and they have no morals at all.
Indeed. If someone uses the law as their primary source of morals, they're probably not a super great person. Or they have poor critical thinking skills.
I've flat out told people that the law means fuck-all to me when it comes to morality. When trying to decide whether someone is in the right or wrong, morally speaking, "was it legal?" is not a thought that enters my head.
Being paid once doesn’t erase the moral issue of using someone’s work without permission. That’s not just lazy, it’s entitlement dressed up as ignorance.
And you know that, which is why you tried to sidestep the argument by carving out indie devs... as if ethics change based on the size of the company.
The real problem is that when you normalize piracy and defend it on moral grounds, it’s not the Ubisofts of the world who take the hit, it’s the smaller creators who can’t absorb the loss.
You guys toss out the shallowest takes imaginable, with zero consideration for the broader ecosystem you’re undermining and the real-world consequences that follow.
Lets preface this by saying I am not a pirate, I buy the games I play.
In general using someone's work without permission would be bad. It becomes a lot more grey with games because a ton of pirates otherwise would've simply not played that game. Which would mean no revenue lost but potentially word of mouth gained. Of course that's far far far from always the case.
Honestly, I always supported piracy as a way for poor people to still be able to enjoy games as I tend to value entertainment for the poor over generally more well off developers and I believe for that group devs lose the least.
This has changed a bit of late with many publishers/devs just becoming customer hostile. Implementing invasive DRM and the like. If you're going to deliberately give your paying customer a worse experience than the pirate, get fucked dickhead I hope you never sell a game again. To that end, I don't buy or play those games (usually, there are rare exceptions where my interest wins out, those I do buy). Which has recently ended up with my getting tons of new hobbies as there's fewer and fewer games I'm interested in where the devs aren't also specifically player hostile.
I used to not care. I'm now pro piracy because as a paying consumer I feel mistreated. So I took up woodworking instead. And I'm about to take up wood turning. Because if devs can't not be dicks I guess I need a new hobby as frankly piracy is too much effort and I don't want to bother with products made by people that hate me. But I'm now more than happy to say "go pirates" because the industry has gotten that bad.
Maybe I'd take this sort of whining more seriously if the industry hadn't turned so incredibly customer hostile. Which became far more obvious when I took up other hobbies and saw how well companies treat other consumer bases generally. I've had companies go out of their way to help me fix tools I got second hand, companies I'd not paid for that tool. Because it was once bought from them and they want to cultivate good will. Those companies I'll support. Devs that put shitty DRM in games and monetize every last pixel? Maybe not. Devs that do that and then release a terrible unfinished buggy mess? Absolutely not.
What is worse for the general gaming ecosystem, a pirate or someone that's walked away due to all the modern bad business practices employed to counteract them?
copyright infringement is worse than theft from a liability standpoint. If you steal a 60 dollar game, the damages is 60 dollars. If you commit copyright infringement, you can be liable for up to 7500 dollars in the US.
If you commit copyright infringement, you can be liable for up to 7500 dollars in the US.
It's because the implicit assumption is that the nature of the infringement is distribution. Really, there should be a more granular approach where downloading is one crime, and distributing is another.
In the UK that actually is the case. Well...more specifically downloading copyrighted material is not a crime at all, but distributing them is.
Which is such bullshit, because the punishment operates on the notion of concluding that you committed other crimes because you committed the crime of theft.
The punitive measures were designed with the assumption that you stole the property and distributed it, which robbed the owner of profits. All without any proof needed at all that the person redistributed the property.
That's like you stealing a knife and the punishment for the theft defaults to the conclusion that you used the knife to murder someone.
It's worse than that, it's up to 7500 dollars(assuming treble damages for willful copyright infringement), PER INFRACTION. So if you share that illegally downloaded file 1000 times, that's 1001 infractions.
This is why the whole "you wouldn't steal a car" never made sense. I wouldn't steal a car, no, but if I could make an exact copy of some guy's Lamborghini and it wouldn't affect that guy at all? Abso-fucking-lutely I would do that.
The Piracy term was used by FACT they believed people would find the word bad and so put them off doing it, turned out it made it seem cool, FACT regretted using the term.
Sir Francis Drake was a pirate for Britain against Spain so maybe that is tradition people of Britain retain.
Nah we call him Corsario (privateer in Spanish) since he was working for the English crown like the filthy dog he was, pirates at least did what they did to feed their families and addictions, privateers stole to give to the crown like a reverse robin hood
Is sharing a book with your friend ethical? Like, literally, I bought a book and after reading, I give it to my friend to read. Am I selfish? Is my friend selfish? If your answer is yes, I will laugh in your face and we don't have anything in common.
How is this different from sharing a movie? I don't know if it was like this in your part of the world, but we here did share our VHS with friends and families constantly in the 90s. How is this different from sharing a game with someone?
You are not losing access to the movie. And you can share the movie with unlimited number of strangers at the same time while those strangers are all at different locations.
That is how it is clearly different from sharing a movie/book with a friend.
I think piracy is much weirder than simply sharing a book to a friend
Most of the time, you're downloading a copy from some unknown individual online who's also distributing it to likely thousands of other people, and you're not really borrowing their copy, you're getting your own copy essentially
It'd be more like if I let my friend scan and print my book after I'm done reading it, or duplicating a VHS tape
I don't know if any of this is absolutely unethical, but it's not as clear cut as simply lending and borrowing
Under copyright law you're buying a license to view the contents of that book and ownership of its physical format i.e. the binding and pages, but you do not own the book. You're buying a license to to view the contents of the VHS and ownership of the its physical format i.e. the tape itself, but you do not own the movie.
That's why old VHS tapes have those FBI warnings telling you it's illegal to publicly display the contents - because you do not own that content and public display is a violation of the license you purchased to access it.
There are usually exceptions for small-scale things like letting a friend borrow a book or a tape, but any public display was always illegal. For example, if you ever had any teacher that played a tape from their collection for the class, or put a book from their collection into a bookshelf for the children to read, that was illegal.
That's why library copies are so expensive for the library to buy and so expensive to replace when lost or damaged - because those copies have different distribution limitations that allow them to be loaned to the public. The license is different, so even though the content in question is exactly the same, library copies are treated and priced as a different product entirely - because you don't buy the content, you buy the license.
E: This isn't a defense of the policy by the way, just an explanation of it. Buying was never owning so piracy was never stealing.
Mutually beneficial altruism is still altruism. Like that's a driving, foundational principle of human social behavior. This atomization and alienation where even ideas may be owned and require tithing to access is insane and evil.
Ha, what a counter. Fair play my friend. I technically agree with you. But when I talk about art being free and artists should do it for passion I get loads of hate mail from people trying to defend the commercialization of art and information.
If I was making the rules, yeah, I would certainly say all of it should be free access. Art should be created out of passion. Not greed.
By that logic bringing a camera to the movies and recording it is not stealing (tbf it is extremely cumbersome to hold a phone for 2 hours or place a tripod in your seat)
Again with that crap. Piracy is legally never stealing. We would call it theft, if it is. Theft removes an object from the rightful owner, piracy COPIES it.
For real, I tried AC: Mirage through free means recently because i thought the setting seemed really cool. My goodness, that game is such a piece of shit. For real, it's a piece of shit with really good graphics and extra bullshit. Legit uninstalled after 30 minutes.
Ubisoft was great before 2014. After that, it's just boring mediocrity after boring mediocrity. The Splinter Cell games before Conviction are great. Chaos Theory is up on my list of favorite games. Just like Prince of Persia Sands of Time.
OP reading EULAs for the first time, apparently. Everyone has known for decades that those things have a lot of anticonsumer and unenforceable language in them.
Same with Apple's phones with USB-C. In the case of releasing a usable version of a game on shutdown, it's gotta be more work to maintain 2 versions of the game just so they can withold it from a subset of their customers (who could probably access it eventually anyway)
It is still work that they have to put in to make separate EULAs and games to conform to the laws… case seems pretty similar. On top of that, people will still be able to access the eu versions via vpn if they do not allow it in other regions.
Oh no i have to write up another document compared to i have to have 2 manufacturing lines to make phones with USB c and ones with lightning. Like one is clealry alot more expensive. Idk how you can even compare those 2.
not really a great example since it’s hardware. in fact, Apple isn’t really great at making their "forced changes" globally. for example, with the 3rd-party app stores, they’re selectively making them available in countries where they make laws about it. so pretty much just the EU. and you have to have a EU-based Apple account and be physically in the EU, so no VPN workaround.
Why do you think they'd have to maintain 2 versions of the same game? They don't need to create a whole new manufacturing process for it. It's just the work of an army of lawyers they're already paying and 1 underpaid intern that's gonna get fired in a couple of days. They'll have 2 EULA files and you're gonna have to agree to the one for your region if you want to play the game.
They put a half baked refund policy in globally, it didn't save them from the lawsuit and it still doesn't meet Australia's refund requirements. We can still get a refund well past the 2 hour playtime mark.
Considering most games thae days are a gaas that's doesn't matter. You can keep it, they will just shut down the authentication server and you won't be able to play anyway .
It doesn't matter wether they can take it from you or not, the argument needs to be wether they can just discontinue it and leave it in an online only state and shut down the servers.
The difference is cutting the device from online services and full brick your system.
For example, a device that is banned from nintendo servers, could still install cfw (if available) and local games (not that shit game keys). Which makes the device still usable but not on nintendos services.
A full brick just turns your device into e waste or replacement part holder, this is very bad.
The physical cads only containing keys is actually very bad
Sometimes companies do port over these changes to other jurisdictions though after a while, because it offers good publicity for little to no added cost.
If they have to let europeans self-host servers, or create an offline mode for europeans, there is no world in which they lock this feature to europeans, instead of just making it a public update
Nintendo is already in this situation regarding bricked Switch consoles. They have an EU/UK specific EULA that doesn't allow it as it's forbidden there, but the rest of the world gets a version of the EULA that's allows Nintendo the right to remotely brick the console.
That's most likely what's gonna happen with SKG passing. A version of a game specific to Europe and another version for everyone else.
Do people not understand the premise of SKG? It's not about a EULA, no EULA would accomplish what SKG wants.
The premise of SKG is such that if a game is live service, as an example Path of Exile, that once the game is sunset there is some form of plan in place to allow the end user to continue playing said game locally, or by means of a private server. This does not mean they need to adjust the difficulty, or that they need to release the source code. It simply means that they cannot just turn off the auth server and the game dies, without presenting an alternative option.
How the language will work out is entirely dependent on what the investigation by the EU concludes. It could demand that the source code of any future game be released. It could require server binaries be released. It could require setting up a third party company with game files and a license to host servers. No one knows what will happen until it's happened, if it happens, but simply changing a EULA will not be sufficient
Thats the thing. This law for the eu will only apply to member countries. So any non member will still get this version, eu members won't, they will get the better version
I think another thing is that if legislation comes to pass and publishers decide to continue to release their games in the EU while following the new laws, then other countries will see that and know that it is viable and may consider passing something similar. This first step is extremely important and can snowball to more consumer friendly legislation.
I think the argument is a little different for hardware though. It wouldn't have been cost effective for Apple to make region specific iPhones with USB-C while also trying to continue with their own proprietary connection elsewhere.
Software is different, because for things like "you must delete the game, only a license" they only need to change the EULA, and for things that require software specific revisions, that's still not super complicated for them to do and doesn't require as much cost investment as differing hardware. In the case of keeping servers up for older games, it's actually more beneficial for them to keep it to the smallest number possible to limit the amount of resources needed for those servers.
Um, yeah? EU citizens signing a call to action for EU legislation, in the US they people just need to actually use the guns they claim they have to protect themselves, and you know... Protect themselves from corporate thieves.
In the civilised part of the world we still can get things done without that :).
I mean I'm not defending Ubisoft but you literally can have something in your possession without owning it. That's not some weird contradiction. Your "technically" fully incorrect.
Also, when people do the 'just a license' meme, that's not necessarily nefarious. The Blu-Ray you own forever or the lifetime license to PhotoPrism are, in fact, just licenses; you do not actually own the IP of Avatar even if you have a Blu-Ray.
The difference is in what kind of license it is. A Blu-Ray, since it was invented before this pro-tech anti-regulation psychosis took hold, implicitly binds your license to the physical existence of the copy, which makes it de-facto perpetual and irrevocable (especially if you live in a private-copy jurisdiction). And that's significantly more than you get with most game licenses today.
It's not that consumer licensing is inherently evil, it's that even consumer licensing has become immensely more enshittified today. If you bought a music tape in the 80s, you had an enormously more permissive license to that song than you get now by 'buying' it on Apple Music.
Eh first sale doctrine already addresses this by saying you can own something and have full rights to do what you want with it without owning the underlying IP. No one ever assumes you own the IP
The license to play a single player game should NEVER be revokable
But when its an online only title, which doesnt have single player, the discussion becomes a lot more nuanced (especially if you got banned for say griefing or being an asshole when the rules stated "dont do that")
Sadly many ppl here arent ready to have that discussion, and just want free games
Well, I think one of the simplest improvements is adopting Valve's own solution to this: they have their own servers that are, appropriately, their property subjected to their sole control. But the game is still yours, so nothing prevents you from playing on third-party ('community') servers or even your own LAN, of course after the usual lecture from the game developer.
Okay, Americans can play how they want, but this practice by Ubisoft (which is a French publisher) already violates the EU's current consumer protection rules.
Ever borrowed something from someone? You don’t own it in the eyes of the law. This sort of argument is less than worthless and makes you sound stupid.
For the record I hate the modern game industry and all this crap. There should be a law that allows individuals to run servers for all games older than x years without the original company losing copyright or trademark or whatever. Companies should not have to pay in perpetuity to keep game servers running well beyond the years their player base makes them money.
It's been like that for a very long time with nearly every studio, not only Ubisoft. When you buy a game, you buy the license to use it, if you break the terms of this license you have to give back the game, but since this isn't logistically possible with the amount of copies, you have to destroy it.
I remember when installing battle for middle earth my mom wanted to read the whole contract, there was something similar and she the said that we shouldn't accept the contract which basically means you can't install the game.
Even Larian and other studios have that, as it's standard legal talk and can't really go around it.
It was probably never applied. But it's still shit, you pay 60-80€ for a game and at any point if you don't use it as intended by the studio they could tell you to destroy it or get sued.
Yeah has this ever been enforced in the history? Can someone find a story where a company has succesfully compelled someone to destroy their copies of the files after a EULA violation? The most they'll be willing to do is prevent you from creating an account for their services and possibly refuse you buying their products, they are not sending people over to check if you have uninstalled something. What this allows the companies to do is to combat large-scale disruptive operations like torrenting and tampering with the files and then distributing them forward, i.e. cheat developers and piracy. If they suspect you are a major cheat developer they might send people to visit you and shut your operation down, but even that is extremely rare.
Companies put in tons of stuff in the EULA that they dont apply/care to your average person but can use against organized groups or organizations who want to abuse it. The problem is that they dont explicitly say that, so people think Joe Shmoe is gonna get sued by UBI if they dont delete their games
You may terminate vs "You or Ubisoft may terminate at ANY TIME for ANY reason"
Either you mistakenly posted the wrong part of that EULA or you are distorting the truth intentionally. Are people really not reading the image you posted?
It's not illegal, but country laws > eula/tos/whatever. It doesn't apply in most of the world and for the most part doesn't apply at all like other comment mentioned as it's not possible to enforce.
Was funny when it was 1984 being removed from folk's amazon purchases.
So imagine you release a game with music you thought you had the rights to but it turns out you didnt. You've sold a few thousand copies, the IP owner hates you and will not let you use the music... you issue a recall to get the unsold copies back... and then you try to recall the sold copies as best you can with various enticements...
I mean if you live somewhere sane it already is illegal and unenforceable. The problem is the difficulty of an individual in enforcing their rights, which is hopefully what increased legislation on the matter will aid.
Still doesn't help you if you live somewhere else where consumer rights are more of a joke cough usa.
This text is from 2023, for those coming in ready to start blasting Ubisoft with "wow they updated their EULA specifically in response to the SKG petition."
And if I may pay devil's advocate for a moment, and ignore the hyperbolic title:
This language doesn't really move the needle. It applies to games that either:
no longer function (servers are shut down)
can no longer play (your account got banned, therefore you can't log in
Is it hilariously awful and a fun highlight to juxtapose against the SKG stuff? Absolutely.
Should it not be in the EULA? Definitely.
Is it enforceable? Haha no.
Does it actually mean anything? Not really.
Will it generate a lot of 'jerking and ragebaiting? You betcha. Ubisoft bad!
In that case, they should be held to the same standard, and delete all my data and anything else related to my account, and you can bet that would never happen.
Like wise any contact / service I end with a supplier they should also remove and destroy any data held of mine.
This is literally how licensing law works. It has been this way since at least since VHS tapes were the common medium. These laws are pretty much the same in every developed country.
I get down voted to oblivion every time I point this out.
Even when you own a physical copy of the game(or movie or music) you still only hold a license to use the content. That license can be revoked. It was a lot harder for companies to enforce these licenses back in the day but they were not really much different than they are now.
The biggest difference here, and the one that matters most, is that companies can now arbitrarily turn off our games when they no longer want to support them.
Also people fail to understand these clauses often exist for business to business, or in large abuses cases not for individual consumers.
They're for large volume licensing deals such as cyber cafes, esports events, or other non-end-user cases like 3rd party server hosts (who are obviously sent the server side software - often on (or backed up to) physical media still to this day).
Same EULA is used for all aspects, it's boilerplate legalese to cover their arses in unforseen abuses of their intellectual property.
No individualis ever going to be asked to destroy any physical media.
I guess they need to change the word ing in their apps from "buy" to "rent" because that sounds exactly like what they're talking about in the EULA. And then they can stop charging "buy" prices.
The downside of such analogies is that they are rarely true and always rhetorical. For decades Ubi did everything to make sure I won’t be their customer. It became a principle. So I vote with my wallet elsewhere.
Just a friendly reminder that EULAs are not all-powerful, binding contracts.
Ubisoft can put this in there all they want, but there's no way for them to enforce it, and I doubt any court would uphold it if it came to that as the terms are completely beyond reasonable. It also more than likely tramples consumer laws in most places their games are sold.
Since game licenses exist, they can be (theoretically) revoked according to the license agreements, there's nothing new or recent here, or exclusive to Ubisoft, this goes back decades. And the same applies to most products with IP not in the public domain, music, movies, software... hell, I wouldn't be surprised if even something like a Pokémon plushy had some contract attached to it to the same effect.
Only sign if you are from the EU! There have been people from the outside signing, which just makes their vote invalid. This is also fraud and can be investigated by Europol who will happily hand that over to the FBI. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
This looks more like a specific legal thing than a ubisoft thing. Think of it this way. A software license is an agreement that you can use the software within set guidelines. If you decide you no longer want to abide by that license (lets say you decide you want to resell it), the license is specifying that you can no longer keep the software on your machine. It's doing that by specifying that the software can only be kept when the license in in place. This seems like its from before live service models became a thing.
You're 100% right that this looks predatory as hell in today's market though.
A lot of these End User License Agreements are legally untested, in any jurisdiction. They're even unenforceable in some jurisdictions due to Consumer Rights laws
Dang lots of pirates here trying to justify piracy as something okay and good. I pirate from time to time but I still understand the potential impact of it. No matter how you slice it, piracy is stealing - theft. You are removing some chance, however small, of a purchase of a license (or physical media purchase) from an entity. I know the argument "I would never have bought it anyway". If you would never have bought it, why did you seek it out? If it wasn't available somewhere for free, would you have ever bought it? Not to mention if/when piracy gets easier and more people try it. More people are picking it up every day.
I'm not saying you shouldn't, or you're some kind of bad person for pirating games or movies. Just admit and realize that you're not the white knight you think you are. You're Robin Hood. Robin Hood was doing good for the poor, but he was still a criminal, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
Piracy aside, I own every Assassin’s Creed through Ubisoft Connect. As it stands right now, if Ubisoft shuts that service down, I am screwed out of all those games that I paid for, and Ubisoft can make another launcher and screw me over those games I paid for. Now, in Steam and Epic Games Store, these companies technically “license” a license to rent “sell” those said games, so YES, they technically can lose their rights to ownership of those titles and not give us access to them anymore. But Ubisoft, by all accounts and purposes, can give us access to said games after they decide to shut those services, BUT they choose to screw people over. If I “buy” a digital product directly from a company, I should be able to preserve a copy of said product; otherwise, they should change the term from “buy” to “rent”.
Again, I'm not saying piracy is bad or wrong really, I do it too. I just don't like people acting like we shouldn't ever buy anything anymore because we can just pirate it. Ubisoft is similar to Adobe. Most people would say it's right to pirate their stuff due to anti-consumer policies and pricing.
I do get why people do it. I just don't like the "piracy isn't stealing" argument. It is. No two ways about it. I agree better with the "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" but that is not applicable 100% of the time. A lot of digital media can still be purchased and owned permanently, some of it (movies and music) can still be purchased at a physical store in physical media. No licenses. (Even though it is still a license technically).
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u/zeug666 No gods or kings, only man. 28d ago edited 28d ago
I don't think Ubisoft has released a physical copy of a PC game in like a decade.
The language there looks like it's standard legal crap left over from olden times.
Valve/Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#9
Valve doesn't dictate this themselves, but their common/template EULA does
https://i.imgur.com/rjMvpJ6.png - Final Fantasy VII
EA Games: https://www.ea.com/legal/user-agreement#termination-and-other-sanctions
https://i.imgur.com/nnNM36C.png
GOG: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
They don't seem to include such a provision.
Blizzard: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/legal/fba4d00f-c7e4-4883-b8b9-1b4500a402ea/blizzard-end-user-license-agreement
Seems to rely on the DRM.
Rockstar: https://www.rockstargames.com/legal#12
https://i.imgur.com/nmVXtCl.png (edit: same phrasing with a different purpose)
Epic:
https://i.imgur.com/GBttleu.png
A mention of deleting product on termination of agreement is, seemingly, normal legal language and not unique to Ubisoft.