Oh, and thank you for your kind words.

I absolutely agree that seeking to get a refund is a good course of action, and probably should have mentioned this too.

My suggestion to pirate the game was, as you say, simply intended as advice for how to restore access to what you had paid for.

I’m on board with most of your article, but I’m not sure about the last bit:

>I would advocate that any customers who have had their key(s) revoked respond by pirating the game, and then reconsider whether you want to buy Ubisoft games again in the future.

I can see the logic – I assume – in that these people have paid for a game which they have lost access to without reason, and should have access to it. If no reason is ever given, losing access like that may well be tantamount to theft- just as much as Oobi themselves would claim piracy is theft. So it’s less ‘piracy’ than it is ‘restoring access to something they already made a bona fide payment for’.

However, it doesn’t really seem to be the best recourse in my opinion. If no explanation from Oobi is forthcoming, those affected should where possible claim money back from credit card companies, Paypal, or what have you; as well as forwarding info to applicable local consumer rights organisations. I’m not well-versed on the applicable rights myself – if access to a game is through a publisher, should a retailer be responsible for that? – but I would hope that Oobi wouldn’t be completely off the hook for seemingly arbitrarily revoking it, but they may be.

Piracy doesn’t really punish Ubisoft here for misbehaving as they have your money either way; but if they have to deal with complaints; requests from consumer rights organisations etc, that sends them a signal that what they are doing isn’t acceptable.

Reconsidering future purchases is spot on though!

Same thing happened to me mate took me over a week for them to even reply back to me i ended up getting my money back because thankfully i used paypal

My future predicting sphere says that this probably has to do with the Origin India store loophole that allowed users to purchase Uplay keys ridicusly cheap of Far Cry 4 / AC Unity Full of Bugs Edition. If this is the case then they have no right to revoke the keys. There is no fraud there just something that the big publishers don’t like.

If they don’t like it then they just need to close those holes. It’s their job to do so. We are not talking about stealing here, we are talking about bending the system to your will and taking advantage of lower prices but through an official channel. These people may bought the games cheaper than Europe but they still payed for it and have a receipt saying so. I agree it’s grey area and the law needs to catch up but the end user shouldn’t be punished like this and as of now consumer rights in EU are above EULAs. There are ways to block an (out of region) purchase with the best of it being requiring a credit card issued by a local bank or a verified local address by Paypal.

Now if we are talking about actual thievery, meaning stolen cards and all, both Ubisoft and EA should give the offending customers proof of why their keys were revoked, who is the original buyer and how he did it.

Strange that neither Ubisoft nor EA have presented any evidence whatsoever to back up their claims, nor made any mention of involving law enforcement, or indeed taking legal action against the alleged perpetrators.

Here you go.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/01/27/ubisoft-says-deactivated-far-cry-keys-purchased-with-stolen-credit-card.aspx

Will you really continue to recommend people buy from these shady sellers?

Because despite the parent company being a massive turd, the studios under Ubisoft genuinely make brilliant games that people want to play. Pan Ubi all you want, Rainbow Six, AC and Far Cry are amazing, and that’s not all that comes out of the ubi studios so sadly we have to keep giving them money because their games rule. Just like every MMO fan eventually returns to the clutches of WoW and Blizzard, even just for a month. They’re money grubbing scumbags and we know it, but we just can’t resist.

What customer service message? Ubisoft have not alerted people before or after revoking these games.

If Ubisoft are to claim that these keys were fraudulently acquired, perhaps they should also present some evidence to back up these claims.

My point regarding youtubers is not to say that they should deny monetization permission to people promoting unauthorised retailers, simply that if they do grant this permission, they should accept the reality that people will then use these unauthorised retailers, and so Ubisoft should take the hit. Currently, they are trying to have it both ways.

As I disclosed in the article, I do have an affiliate arrangement with G2A, as I do with any retailer who offers me affiliate arrangements. I have no incentive to promote G2A over any other retailer, I make a percentage whether I direct customers to buy from G2A or another retailer. I always link to the cheapest retailer, and I have never given any retailer preferential treatment just because I get a cut from sales. It is worth far more to me for people to implicitly trust me to direct them to the best price that it would be for me to give any retailer preferential treatment, and thus (rightly) lose the trust of my users.

Ubisoft is clearly aware these keys are from resellers. The customer service messages from them state as much. For them to know this means that it’s one massive batch of keys that were resold – they couldn’t possibly track individual people buying an individual key and reselling it there.

The keys may have come from credit card fraud, promotional scams, a diverted shipment of Russian game boxes, money laundering, or one guy buying up thousands of keys in one place and reselling them. In my opinion there’s nothing savy about supporting any of those practices, regardless of your thoughts about regional pricing.

Ubi has to revoke keys to make you claim your money back from the seller, because otherwise why would you stop buying from them? The seller has your money, you have a cd key, and Ubi is out of pocket for both the game itself, and the original purchase amount. Even if you hate Ubi, this is clearly not sustainable.

It’s true that Ubi hasn’t specifically said the keys were purchased with stolen cards. But they have said the keys were fraudulently obtained, and the kneejerk “Ubi just wants more profit” reactions are appalling. In four of the five example situations I listed, Ubi isn’t cheating their customers because you are not their customer. They haven’t ended up with any of your money at any point in the transaction, therefore they don’t owe you anything. Suggesting pirating the game out of anger, after getting your money back… man, that’s not taking the consumer’s side, it’s just spiteful.

Even if the issue is literally just that they don’t want unofficial resellers selling their products, it’s clear that what’s been resold is a batch of keys that wasn’t intended for G2A. Perhaps a better question would be “what is G2A doing that means they can’t become an official reseller?”

Also, I’d bet that the moment a company tried to add a clause saying a YouTuber couldn’t associate with one of his biggest sponsors, people would be outraged. How can you even suggest something like that at the same time as demanding more transparency from Ubi?

I know – SavyG is affiliated with G2A and it’s in your interests to ignore all that stuff since they’re paying you for sales. But I don’t want to support a site where the goal is to promote sales to the point of complete blindness to anything other than the price to the end user. Yes, Ubi should notify users if a game is revoked, but let’s face it, the SavyG article isn’t really about that, and if it is, it’s a huge overreaction.

Yes, but normally when this happens, the affected customers are notified as to why the key was revoked. For example, the Sniper Elite 3 keys that got revoked were apparently stolen, and the publisher issued a statement about it.

But here, Ubi isn’t even saying anything about why the keys are being banned.

I start the game, and I’m greeted with a window asking to enter my key. Nowhere did it say my key had been revoked, just a window asking for a key. So I dig up my key, enter it, and only then did it show that the key had been banned. But as stated in the article, no reason whatsoever as to why it was banned.

I was able to get a full refund within 2 hours of contacting Kinguin support (in store credits, but still better than nothing). So seeing as I finished the game and was about to uninstall it anyway, I’m not too mad about the whole fiasco. I got to finish the game without paying a cent for it AND without pirating.

I do know however that I will stay away from anything related to UbiSoft in the future. While there are some Ubi games that I’m interested in coming out this year, I simply don’t want to bother with all the crap surrounding them.

A while back I had problems with my Deluxe key for Trials Fusion not unlocking the promised content, and I bought the game from authorised retailer Amazon (took over a month to sort out, with Ubi blaming Amazon, and vice versa). Combined with this fiasco, I’m done with UbiSoft.

PS: Fun note: If Ubi revokes your game key, you cannot uninstall the game the normal way (with the bundled uninstall tool). If you click on uninstall, it opens Uplay and asks to enter a key first. So they want you to pay again just for the privilege of uninstalling a game…

Personally I don’t use sites like those, or anything needing a VPN. The most ‘dodgy’ place I use is simply-cdkeys.

I regret buying _Watchdogs and I sure as hell won’t be buying The Division or any other future product from Ubisoft unless they drastically change their attitude towards people.

p.s uPlay is trash, nothing but a terrible Steam/Origin impersonation with old fashioned DRM (that doesn’t even work)

I am a lawyer working I’m IP & Tech and I’m equally troubled by this approach. In the EU Ubisoft have to comply with the applicable consumer regulations as well as the wider EU competition rules.

Selective (or exclusive) distribution agreements are fairly common. These arrangements allow a manufacturer to set up a network of businesses who will be supplied with the products to the exclusion of other companies. It’s slightly more nuanced than this but generally speaking this is how they work.

The terms of these agreements usually prohibit authorised retailers selling goods to unauthorised retailers. However, essentially terminating a consumer’s licence to play a game on the basis that they unwittingly purchased it from an unauthorised retailer is fairly questionable practice.

I wouldn’t stop posting deals from any given publisher for these kind of actions.

If people are going to continue to buy Ubisoft games (or indeed games from any publisher who’s actions I disapprove of) I want them to do so at the lowest price possible.

“We really dropped the ball with AC: Unity. How can we get our customers back on side?”
“Let’s remove games from their libraries that they didn’t buy from our secret list of approved suppliers, even though they didn’t know that what they were buying wasn’t legitimate in our eyes.”
“Great plan! Shall we tell them why we’re removing those games?”
“Nah!”

Completely understandable if you feel you wouldn’t/couldn’t do that since you’re just one of the middlemen. The onus isn’t on you to ensure the deals you link to are from ‘authorised sellers’, unless you want it to be.