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Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

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Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#321

Post by _3u10 »

dtech wrote: post #221
_3u10 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you do. I had a ToS with an anti competitive clause in it, no reselling, was told they needed to transfer all our customers, etc, or they and us could get fined for illegal reselling. Phoned their regulator, was told to register as a reseller, and call back if we still had issues. After the registration had been finalized we contacted our new wholesaler, all that came of it was being unable to add new accounts fo…

Of course you can alter the ToS, I'm sure Steam and the likes are open to contract negations before you buy a $70 game.

It’s better to negotiate after, that way there’s a whole bunch of precedent around sales.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#322

Post by bob1029 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #313
Lazare wrote: post #290

I feel a bit disappointed by the number of people suggesting that an NFT would somehow help here. An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed . (He probably still has the receipts from when…

>no technological problem // What about proving ownership, on the balance of probabilities, to show tortuous damages in a court? Seems like a list of receipts that's somehow certified would be beneficial to that end? Probably first we need legislation to make digital purchases resalable, and to require DRM free versions to be made available if a product is EOL-ed. Companies world copyright against the populous who ar…

Most financial institutions are required to keep transaction records for 7+ years by law, and you could maintain your own copies indefinitely.

I think an Amex statement from 1999 would stand up just fine in court if you had a scanned copy sitting in your Dropbox.

Maintaining a list of receipts and transactions is basic finance. This still has not much to do with technology.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#323

Post by josefx »

mattdesl wrote: post #294
josefx wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you have a license. The data you license is still centralized.The owner of that server rejects your license or simply shuts down the server. How does your blockchain help you? Note that downloading your data elsewehere is still infringement and hacking the DRM is still circumvention.

The idea would be that these tokens-as-licenses would not be revocable. If you hold the token, you hold the license and rights to download and play. This would need to be defined and enforced by the publishers own ToS and/or some hypothetical regulatory body that acts in users best interests - if they break this, such as blocking a specific license holder from access to the game, there would be grounds for a dispute,…

So in order to actually enforce your distributed blockchain license you need two centralized groups (download provider/regulator) to acknowledge it? Still don't see what blockchain adds.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#324

Post by CryptoPunk »

npteljes wrote: post #247
CryptoPunk wrote: post #141

This is why we need blockchain-based smart contracts and NFTs to enforce digital ownership rights. The political system is far too unreliable and corruptible to depend on for robust private property rights. If the nation-states can just maintain a free and open internet, decentralized opt-in protocols can do the rest.

Who exactly will enforce that providers look at the blockchain instead of their own database, if not a political system? People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream. This all is just like saying "if only we'd be nicer to each other", but in tech jargon.

Fair point. Smart contracts can only enforce digital property rights insofar as the digital property is constituted by smart contracts. So this would work with NFTs, as they are blockchain-based assets, but not classical video games, which are not.

So what would work is if the providers of the game assets are governed by a decentralized protocol on the blockchain. An example would be a game which is dependent on a remotely provided computation element to run - say a massive collectively rendered virtual world - and this element is provided by a distributed set of providers who are compensated via a smart contract, mechanistically, upon the blockchain validating proof of work they provide to a smart contract.

Such a game could provide a person with a guarantee that a particular NFT will have indefinite access to that virtual world, because the guarantee will be enforced by immutable smart contracts.

>>People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream

They do it for the same reason Ethereum validators stake their ETH and validate blocks on the Beacon Chain: to earn income. But what they earn is enforced in a decentralized way, according to the rules encoded in the protocol, to make it maximally immutable/interference-proof.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#325

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tdrdt wrote: post #302
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something. right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"

That's a different problem. Right now the problem is that people think they buy something but they don't. Nobody is going to read the terms and conditions before buying. But when you are going to rent something you know the ownership is not transferred to you.

I don't think it's a different problem, there are people posting in thread about basically this problem, I'm pretty sure they were aware they were leasing the game and not owning it, nonetheless they lose access to the game for periods of time and that time loss is not reimbursed in any way.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#326

Post by lobocinza »

causi wrote: post #202
fragsworth wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really practical these days given the frequency of updates developers put out for their games?

I don't buy games in a broken state hoping they'll be good later. Either I wait until they're done or don't buy them at all.

And I refund if it's bad and I didn't know it in advance. Steam refund experience has been great but they started warning me about "refund is not for trying games". Good things don't last forever but they day they start to BS me I will go back to piracy or give up on DRM titles.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#327

Post by user-the-name »

Lazare wrote: post #290

I feel a bit disappointed by the number of people suggesting that an NFT would somehow help here. An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed . (He probably still has the receipts from when…

Exactly. The idea that NFTs somehow help in these kind of situations is utter nonsense. Sure, if Ubisoft minted an NFT and give it to you, they couldn't delete the NFT itself. However, it is always up to Ubisoft or whoever else is using NFTs whether they want to honour that NFT or not. You can present them with the NFT, and they can say "Hmmm... no."

An NFT is like a key to a house. You can use it to open the door until the owner of the house decides to change the locks. You still own the key, but that impresses nobody.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#328

Post by qayxc »

jbverschoor wrote: post #311
Raphaellll wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this interesting?

Because if those items are suddenly would be available as NFTs, they're worth a lot more. Now it's just tough luck for the people... Old agreement about destroying someone's digital assets. People who want their items "back" are forced to play/pay again..

> People who want their items "back" are forced to play/pay again..

Therein lies the misunderstanding. The people didn't "own" the assets in the first place. In no way has ownership been transferred at any point - you only acquired a limited license to run the software in a specified way, no more, no less.

The license depended on an active account and thus was rendered null and void with the termination of said account. NFTs fall into a similar category - if bound to a license, they're just as useless in case something like this happens.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#329

Post by tdrdt »

fivre wrote: post #237
tdrdt wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something. Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms. 'Hire…

Nobody gives a flying fuck whether the terms are legally accurate. This distinction is entirely already covered in the existing terms of service. People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse departmen…

I am not saying people give a fuck it is legally accurate. But since nobody ever reads the terms and conditions this could help to give a quick understanding of what you are paying for.

Everybody knows that renting a car is different than buying a car.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#330

Post by southerntofu »

pdonis wrote: post #94
endisneigh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're on a forum called "Hacker News" and you can't think of a single digital good that's not recreational? In any case the biggest examples would be software.

Are there any examples of software providers revoking access in this way? (I personally have no experience with such things because I will never use or pay for software that is provided in this way.)

With service providers (eg. Google/Facebook) it happens every day to thousands of people, and there's little to no recourse although there was usually no financial transaction to begin with. With software you setup on your computer, i'm not aware of any instance, BUT subscription models (eg. Adobe) are really recent and not so long ago software vendors did not have the means to disable software remotely on your machine, because it was usually not (always) connected to the network, and because software that didn't need it didn't make useless network connections.

I bet in a few years we'll have plenty of documented instances.

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