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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

#491
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your correct implementation force Ubisoft to do something against their will? If they want to block someone, opening another account will work only to the extent that they don't really care — otherwise their terms of service would be meaningless since everyone could just crank out sock puppets.

That's the whole point, the producer doesn't have control and therefore you own what you bought, instead of renting it.

I understand that this is the vision used to sell tokens but that's why I asked what reason we have to think that Ubisoft will start doing something which they could already do any time they want without sharing revenue. Their terms of service are what they are because that's how they want them to be, and there's nothing forcing them to use NFTs at all much less implement them with far more generous terms of service.

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

#493
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…

NFT's are stupid. It's just the NFT idiots trying to find an actual legitimate reason for them to exist by saying it solves every problem, which it doesn't.

Sure but there is a paycheck in it for some of the people who post on HN. Always follow the money.

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

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games? You absolutely do. Anyway, I agree with you. Digital marketplaces are becoming more and more important and certainly I'm sure I have a lot of money in Steam, Kindle, and various other services. It'd be nice to move away from the Wild West phase given how much money's sloshing around at this point.

You can still play the games without steam (I often play without internet connection). But of course you'll miss out on a lot of things (multiplayer, achievements etc.) which might be important to you.

For some games this is true. But there's plenty of games which have an 'offline mode' that require you to connect to an auth server before the game will launch.

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I own a physical copy of Diablo 2 that does not work anymore. License is dead and I don't know why. Owning a physical copy is not helping me play the game as Bliz has decided that license is no good. An NFT could have the same experience. Nothing forcing the vendor to honor it. Seems if NFT game licenses worked the way they are being talked about in this thread then there would be no way to ban players for bad behavi…

Game preservation is a solved problem: piracy. Not legal but it works.

No company is going to give a shit about what they sold to whom 10 years ago. Hell chances are they're already out of business.

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

#496
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.

Ubisoft or any other company for that matter doesn't want people to trade their games, DLC or accounts. They killed the used market they aren't going to bring it back.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point that this would motivate a marketplace where Ubisoft is not the only portal for these NFT-owned games. nftgamingportal.com could exist which accepts these NFTs (in addition to many others) despite whatever restrictions Ubisoft decides to impose (which they are free to do... they own the walled garden).

> nftgamingportal.com could exist which accepts these NFTs (in addition to many others) despite whatever restrictions Ubisoft decides to impose Ubisoft's coin is on a public chain right now, and they have restrictions that prevent people from using arbitrary 3rd-party marketplaces to trade the NFTs. So it's a nice theory, but it doesn't seem to be working in practice; being on a public chain isn't currently preventin…

Not really hope, but this is one of the biggest value propositions. If your NFTs give more rights/power to the owner they are going to be more attractive and thus more valuable.

On the other hand being able to have more restrictive tokens enables smart contracts to comply with regulations. But for gaming NFTs it really destroys any added value/utility which is something i should have expected of Ubisoft.

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

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes a good case for decentralization no? Imagine all those items in the blockchain, you can leave for years knowing you can retrieve them anytime. The only con at the point is if you lose your keys. Reminds me of some friends who had Bitcoin and “forgot” about it and only to come back with massive profits.

Blockchain isn't going to let you download a 100gig game a decade later.....

How do the block chains that rely on hoarding hard drives work if you can't download the contents from the disks to verify?

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

#499
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ToS says rent but the UI says buy, what gives? It may be technically correct that it's not a purchase but also purposely deceitful: this has to change.

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

#500
post #28

I paid extra for a disc version of the PS5 for exactly this reason. If I buy a game today I want to be able to play it 20 years from now. I can bet money that none of the mainstream digital stores of today will be operational by then.

The PS5's optical drive is paired with its motherboard[1]. If you replace it, even if you take the disk drive from another PS5, it will not be able to read your PS5 game.

I imagine that 20 years from now you are going to have a hard time finding a working PS5 with its original disk drive.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+5+Teardown/13828...

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