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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

#411
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…

What if it was all on chain? See https://ultra.io (a Steam competitor) for an example of this:

"All the content you buy from Ultra, such as games, DLCs, and virtual items, are on-chain digital goods you truly own. On Ultra you’re in control of your assets as though they were physical items. These assets can be sold, traded and given away to your friends within Ultra, or outside of Ultra, through 3rd party marketplaces and mobile apps."

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

#412
There's a lot of heritage in archived and emulated computer games from 80's and 90's. Further, I still have some games in their original boxes somewhere and being nostalgic enough to not have thrown them away I own my copies of those games in the true sense of the word. Same for music on compact discs. I have ripped most of them for myself but I still own the original copies in a closet.

Now, 30 years from now or roughly 2050, there will be a cultural and historical blackout because anything people are "buying" now are basically revokable privileges to temporarily hire games, music, and movies. There will be no single server up and running to provide today's games for people who are today young but will be middle-aged few decades from now. And, even before that, judging based on Ubisoft it looks like the "purchases" will be long gone before the service itself.

What a waste.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay I pour hours into content and go begging. What is my compensation if it doesn't succeed?

You write a book and nobody buys it or reads it. What's your compensation then?

What about you write the book, it is good, then others take said book and print it themselves to sell on Amazon for less because they don't have to cover the cost of the time and effort that went into writing the book.

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

#414
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…

"...up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs." That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.

> I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft.

Even on a public chain, this isn’t true. It’s shocking to me how many people in this space really don’t know the basics.

An NFT is just a contract that implements ERC-721/ERC-1155. I can implement restrictions around the transfer functions however I like.

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

#415
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…

What if it was all on chain? See https://ultra.io (a Steam competitor) for an example of this: "All the content you buy from Ultra, such as games, DLCs, and virtual items, are on-chain digital goods you truly own. On Ultra you’re in control of your assets as though they were physical items. These assets can be sold, traded and given away to your friends within Ultra, or outside of Ultra, through 3rd party marketplace…

[deleted]

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

#416
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of DRM wouldn't help if you don't have any way of getting the copy or getting past the license check.

Doesn't DRM-free literally mean that you get a full local installation without any reliance on online licensing or any other digital restrictions?

[deleted]

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

#417
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…

"...up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs." That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.

People have pointed to the fact that Ubisoft is using a separate chain, but I want to point out that even on Ethereum you're not guaranteed to have the kind of universal access that you want. Smart contracts are code, and an Ethereum contract can be coded to rely on a centralized service or to only allow selling through a specific marketplace. Additionally, even on Ethereum Ubisoft could monitor the sales and reject tokens or ban account that go through sales endpoints that they dislike even if they didn't code the restrictions into the smart contract. The blockchain makes that kind of historical monitoring and restriction really easy.

Of course, Ubisoft could in a theoretical world also not do that stuff, but the point is they could also allow you to transfer your games using a centralized service. The NFTs don't force them to be more open or customer friendly, if they were customer friendly they would already be allowing you to download games without DRM or transfer them around. They could already offer you a Steam key with every game you bought from the Ubisoft store; it's corporate politics and competition between Ubisoft and Steam that prevents this from happening, not technology.

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What Ubisoft demonstrates so well here is that the incentive structure behind NFTs also doesn't really seem bias companies towards being more open. There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game.

What you're seeing with Ubisoft is not going to be an exception, this is going to be the norm of how companies work with NFTs. A quick heuristic you can use: releasing a game DRM-free is easier, cheaper, simpler, and more directly beneficial to consumers than building a consumer-friendly NFT system; so whenever you look at a company that says they're going to work with NFTs, do yourself a favor and check to see if their games are currently DRM-free. Do they currently allow game trading/gifting? If they don't, then I think it's a strong probability that their NFTs are going to look more like Ubisoft's and less like the ethical systems that people imagine and hope for. Because I can't stress enough that it's not hard to build the systems and restrictions on the blockchain that Ubisoft has, it really comes down to corporate choice about how they proceed rather than the technology.

In short, NFTs offer no additional positive incentives to be more consumer friendly, and the technology doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before with good-old-fashioned OAUTH or signed public databases. If Ubisoft wanted to allow game transfers, there are dozens of ways they could do it today, many of which could survive as authentication mechanisms even if the company folded. Game ownership on the blockchain is not going to go through the kind of revolution that people suppose. My advice is, if you want a revolution in game ownership then lobby to reform copyright and/or establish a legal digital right of resale. If you want to more directly protect your games, boycott and criticize companies like Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/EA/etc that bundle DRM into their storefronts.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

It'll be bad PR if they don't honor it, though. Purchasers of the NFT don't know the original holder got banned, and they have every reason to assume buying the NFT from that person will give them whatever privilege or cosmetic it's supposed to grant them in-game. Enough people don't have that happen and complain about it loudly enough and Ubisoft will feel pressure to change their policies to honor it. It'd be a stu…

It's bad PR that they delete inactive account with games at all, but they did it anyway.

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

#419
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubisoft is already making NFTs (for cosmetics in this case; same tech though) where they control who can own or transfer NFTs. So...no., this doesn't help. Ubisoft doesn't need NFTs to let people transfer their games to a new account, and they don't need to let people transfer their games just because they've given you a fancy commemorative memento of the time you gave them money in exchange for not owning a game.

You didn't read what I wrote, I'll try and rephrase it. I am talking about NFTs where you as the owner of the NFT control who you can transfer it to, I explicitly mentioned this. If you can do this, then it can be a solution to the current problem. Because then you simply transfer your ownership rights to your new account.

If "the current problem" is "how do I, the player, get around this company's ban on my account," sure. But from Ubisoft's perspective, "the current problem" is "we banned this player and want them to stay banned."

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

#420
“Ownership” is implied when you “purchase” something. If I own it, I should have certain basic rights like the right to keep enjoying it if the publisher goes out of business. To that end, I strongly oppose DRM or at least would favor laws that let me transfer my DRM’d content to another provider (or even require me to, if a provider “cancels” me or goes out of business).

It’s not so clear when the digital work requires ongoing effort from the provider, as in an online game that requires the provider to operate servers. In that case I think that providers should either be forced to provide the service as a rental instead of a “purchase”, or the provider should be forced to provide all information and code necessary for third parties to operate compatible servers.

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