I would've expected to see something like thus out of the EU rather than China, but at least somebody's making the first move against the predatory monetisation of apps
Things like this and the screen time laws are why I foresee China as a huge threat in the future. Every other country will be mindless zombies staring at their screens and stupid. Easy to take control of.
But think about the CEO’s freedom of abusing gambling addicts outside of a safe environment with virtually no regulation and that can be used by kids and teens!
I actually wouldn’t have anything against gacha games if they all were marked as Adult-only, even the most dumbass parents would think twice about buying EA FC if it had the AO rating.
Well China doesn’t like companies having power so this is a way to neuter them, especially in response to trying to limit online game consumption already.
Edit: Tencent is apparently the most profitable company in china right now so this is a direct attack at their profits most likely, not just China doing good
If it was only money they wanted they would not do this. The limitations they are imposing will cut revenue to their biggest Game companies. I mean, the laws are not in effect and there was already a big crash on Netease and Tencent stock prices.
To add onto what the others have said, the CCP isn’t shy about enforcing restrictions on digital media domestically. For instance, TikTok in China (Douyin) is quite different from the international version with strictly-enforced time limits, content restrictions, etc.
China doing a better job regulating corporations than the west is nothing new.
Even this current one happened while Tencent was barely recovering from another regulation set last year. Kicking megacorps while they’re down lol as they should.
I agree, this is such a dangerously stupid move by Ubisoft.
I can only hope that this is just a mistake with an intern on their social account misinterpreting the ToS and that this isn't something Ubi plans to enforce. But damn, is it a bad look for them. Which is a shame, because they've been doing some decent work at improving their image as of late, too.
Seriously. For pirates once a game is cracked there is zero worries of what will happen to my copy? Somewhere they will be able to retrieve the game even if they don’t bother backing it up.
But, paying customers opt not to do that to rely on official channels for downloads and installs. To punish them and reminding them how inferior their copy of the game is in the long term to the cracked copy is a bad move. It’ll only take losing their game once to lose faith in the platform and not bother buying again.
The problem is that online storefronts all lease (edit: it’s actually license) you the games you own until your account is terminated. I miss actually owning media.
Correct, GoG is completely DRM free and has the ability to download offline installer packages for all your games. There are even a few scripts out there to do it for you.
Some of Steam’s content does as well, but not all and it’s hard to tell.
It’s not. You don’t own the game you lease it with the clause that the storefront can ban/delete/deactivate your account for any reason. This is true for Steam, GOG, Itch, Epic, EA, Microsoft, etc.
with the clause that the storefront can ban/delete/deactivate your account for any reason.
I think you’re speculating in order to make excuses for a corporation. Show us the clause that applies in this case, and I will retract my statement.
Edit:
It’s disappointing that several people replied to me with walls of text to lecture about things that were not disputed, and in some cases not even relevant. We know online game stores typically license them rather than selling them, folks, and Valve’s license terms are not Ubisoft’s terms. Kindly read before replying next time.
One person actually brought an Ubisoft inactivity clause to the table. (Thanks, @LittlePrimate) Interestingly, that clause seems to be present only in the terms of service for certain regions. A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.
So depending on which regional ToS the gamer(s) in question agreed to, Ubisoft accepting money and then revoking access might or might not have been fraudulent behavior.
More importantly, it’s ethically wrong, and no amount of legal maneuvering will change that. Screw Ubisoft.
10 doesn’t have a c. 9 is about account termination and has a c but there’s no mention of account deletion due to inactivity. “[if] Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally” can be interpreted as encompassing subscribers that have been inactive, but it sounds more about when a game’s servers shut down or valve stops distributing it in a region and all players lose access.
The Services and Content are licensed to you, not sold. This means we grant you a personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable right and license to use the Services and access the Content, for your entertainment, non-commercial use, subject to your compliance with these Terms.
For termination, it’s not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:
for any other reason in relation to your actions in or outside of the Services; upon notification, where your Account has been inactive for more than six months.
The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.
Consequences of the Termination/Suspension of an Account.
You cannot use the Services and Content anymore.
In the event of termination of your Account or of Service(s) associated with your Account, no credit (such as for unused Services, unused subscription period, unused points or Ubisoft Virtual Currency) will be credited to you or converted into cash or any other form of reimbursement.
When you purchase on the Ubisoft Stores, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensed, non-commercial and personal license to use the Ubisoft Products.
Also note:
Ubisoft Products may also be purchased from third parties authorized by us to sell such Ubisoft Products. When you purchase Ubisoft Products from a third party, your purchase is with that third party and not Ubisoft.
So I’ll do this for ubisoft but last I checked it was in Steam, EA, Gog, and Epic’s. Itch is the only one I hold out hope to be better but this is pretty boiler plate stuff.
This license is just that, a license.
These Terms of Sale are incorporated by reference to the Terms of Use of Ubisoft available at legal.ubi.com/termsofuse (“Terms of Use”). All capitalized terms used but not defined herein shall have the meaning given to them in the Terms of Use. Certain Ubisoft Products are subject to the acceptance of an End User License Agreement (“EULA”) and any other additional terms, which will be available to you before you can access, download, install or use such Ubisoft Product. UBISOFT’s Privacy Policy is an integral part of these Terms of Sale and can be found at legal.ubi.com/privacypolicy (“Privacy Policy”). Please read it carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.
So we now need to look at the EULA and Privacy Policy.
So the EULA of the store legal.ubi.com/eula/en-US Clause 1 backs of Clause 1 Scope of the Terms of Sale.
So Ubisoft reserves the right to terminate your account and thus the EULA agreement and thus your license.
For fun, lets do a bigger storefront because ubisoft is small.
Valve is smarter and calls this directly not a term of sale but a subscriber agreement. You are a subscriber to their service of steam and this is the agreement:
Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
Establishes that these are licenses, not purchases and that you have to have a steam account and running the steam client.
Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.
Valve reserves the right to cancel your subscription if they decide to cease providing such subscriptions to “similarly situated subscribers.” E.g. as long as they do it to everyone in your “situation” it’s legal. So Valve could very well delete inactive accounts legally without refunds. It’s in the EULA, you’ve agreed that as long as they do it without direct discrimination that it’s fine.
So again, you can go through every storefront and realize you have no ownership or right to a refund if they decide to shut down. Also don’t see this as “pro-corporation” I am not defending anyone here. I am pointing out that people have not understood the loss of ownership in the digital world we now live. I’ve been sitting here waiting for the day that people go “hey wait, they can just delete my account without anything I can do?”
A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.
Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I’m in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they’ll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.
The law is written by capitalists for capitalists and shouldn’t he taken into consideration. EULAs are essentially privately-owned laws. It is theft, plain and simple.
Sure, “laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.”
I was simply talking about the current legal definition. It’s hard to call it theft or fraud when the terms are made clear before the sale. An example of this to a lesser degree would be game studios making multiplayer games. Is it theft if a studio puts a game out on Steam with the clause “We can only support multiplayer for as long as our budget allows us.” and then goes under a few years later? A lot of these multiplayer services are things someone would have to pay for like Playfab or Gamelift. Not something easily open-sourceable. You could argue “Well don’t write your game like that” but then you are essentially killing the multiplayer game service industry without consideration of its existence or benefits.
That depends on the country you live in. In Australia for instance anything that looks like a “sale” must be an actual sale of a product and can’t be something else sneakily disguised as a sale. It’s illegal for services like Steam or app stores to deny you access to software you’ve bought on their platform in Australia.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before though.
Hmm yet steam has certainly banned lots of accounts, probably some of those owning games and are citizens of Australia. So clearly there is a clause around it.
Didn’t China also recently introduce a limit of hours adolescents can game?
The world would be a better place without those transactions in my opinion. It might sound extreme but in my view this is the first step towards gambling addiction.
We as humanity are becoming really obsessed with everything digital instead of spending more time physically interacting with our peers. And unfortunately I am no exception.
Part of the problem is that there’s no incentive for game companies to ensure that players are of an appropriate age and are gambling responsibly. It’s a Pandora’s box of capitalism in the same way fossil fuels, cigarettes, and big pharma are. Their customers have a demand for their product which is driven by a physiological/psychological/socioeconomic need, so they aren’t subject to normal market mechanics.
I think you could go two ways with that. The psychologist could be under a mandate to give feedback to ensure your game is not going to be an addiction or they could be under a mandate to make it as addictive as possible. The latter is way more likely but I wouldn’t totally rule out the value add of any psychologist to any game.
I never understand how these companies work. Aren’t they just getting portrayed even more negatively now? Sometimes I wonder if it’s just AI making these decisions behind the screen.
Even that doesn’t make sense though. How would people not have caught on when they were banning people but not telling them what for other than you violated some terms of service agreement?
The obvious next step would be to actually go look at the agreement.
So this outcome was 100% inevitable, and moreover 100% predictable. How else could it possibly have gone down.
Oooh, I would really like to see that challanged in front of a German court after such a deletion happened. There are so many different legal facettes here.
Is the deletion maybe necessary due to GDPR? (they have to keep the minimum amount of data)
What’s with the physical copies / codes that were bought. Should they automatically be freed up for re-use once the account that claimed them is deleted? (That would kinda make sense to me.)
What about stricly digitally bought games?
How far are their ToS valid in our jurisdiction?
Damn I really hope they do this to the wrong person and rub them the wrong way so they get dragged to court for this.
Data Protection shouldn’t be a relevant issue - at least not in the sense that it forcss them to delete accounts. When you process data under the GDPR, you have to identify a lawful basis.
I assume that transactions through the eStore would be handled under the contract basis, with the hosting of the game in the library forming part of the contractual relationship. That would enable them to maintain an account for as long as the contractual relationship persisted.
That basically means GDPR doesn’t force them to close an account, they close an account based on their policies because they choose to. That’ll be based on their T&Cs, so things will fundamentally circle back to whether their T&Cs are legitimate and lawful.
It is possible that a data subject could potentially raise a claim for damages under the GDPR, on the grounds that the deletion of their account is a breach of contract that amounts to an availability data breach.
GDPR clearly says, if there is a valid reason for storing your data, they can store it (no timelimit). Like you can store data for invoices etc for 10 years too even when you ask them for deleting your data.
Iguesseverybody also agreed to it when you registered.
I do not see any valid reason why they would delete acvounts, like saving 1 line in a database?
China engages in this kind of “social democracy” all the time just like countries like Norway. But when Norway does it you don’t see people saying “rare Norway win”. I would call having a different standard for China vs a European country sinophobic.
If you’re a left progressive —as most people here on Lemmy seem to be— you probably agree with most of China’s economic policy.
China does sometimes engage in Chinese nationalism in a way that is worthy of criticism; but pretending they are worse than the U.S. in this regard is detached from reality.
The American ruling class has already decided they want war with China. They’re just trying to find a way to justify it to us. We as progressives shouldn’t make it easy for them to justify a war between 2 nuclear powers. Such a war could very well lead to the end of the human race.
China does sometimes engage in Chinese nationalism in a way that is worthy of criticism; but pretending they are worse than the U.S. in this regard is detached from reality.
Care to elaborate? I assure you genocide and the end of humanity are no laughing matter.
The U.S. is currently supporting a genocide in Palestine/Israel. Before that we spent 2 decades in a war —based on a lie— in which the U.S. killed up to 1 million innocent Iraqis.
We are currently occupying many territories, to whom we deny equal rights/status as states including Guam and Puerto Rico.
Over the last century we constantly supported coups of democratically elected governments mostly in South and Central America. (See the Monroe doctrine).
Not to mention the soft imperialism of the IMF and the world bank.
China deserves criticism for their genocide of the Uyghur Muslims.
There may be further valid criticisms if they invade Taiwan. This could go either way depending on what the Taiwanese people ultimately decide. Right now most Taiwanese want to maintain the status quo. Which is strategic ambiguity.
Edit: I might also add the U.S. is currently undermining the Taiwanese people’s desire for strategic ambiguity. Putting its own geopolitical interests ahead of the desires and well-being of the Taiwanese people.
The U.S. record of nationalist imperialism is worse than China’s.
I’m not going to argue on who is worse, sorry, I’m not educated enough to convince someone. But yeah if you pin the middle east genocide to the us (which you should) it’s bad, and I don’t know how it compare to the Uyghur’s genocide.
Edit: I might also add the U.S. is currently undermining the Taiwanese people’s desire for strategic ambiguity. Putting its own geopolitical interests ahead of the desires and well-being of the Taiwanese people.
Just about that, isn’t China doing way more shit on that one ? I know most Taiwanese want the status quo but there are mass campain from China to take Taiwan, and I’ve never heard of the opposite.
This feels like Sega is running a science experiment to conclusively determine how much more money can be made from the live service format, with a control group and everything.
Im frequently been surprised by their choices for years, since at least 2005. Like some companies, you KNOW what they’re like. They do consistent impressive work like FromSoft, Nintendo, Valve. Some companies do consistent work that can be hit/miss, like Capcom. And others just do consistent work that gets a lot of shitty management decisions, like Ubisoft.
Sega doesn’t fit any of those buckets. No consistency except that they’re not consistent. You don’t know what a Sega title will bring. Like they rotate management every week.
Sega doesn’t fit any of those buckets. No consistency except that they’re not consistent. You don’t know what a Sega title will bring. Like they rotate management every week.
Yeah this is a result of Sega’s management strategy where all the employees line up outside in the morning along one of the business obstacle courses. Whoever can run through the course fastest and collect the most coins gets to be CEO for the day. Is it chaotic and ableist? Yeah sure, but it does ensure that if a bear attacked the office that Sega employees would be well trained to deal with the emergency. Also, it isn’t THAT much less efficient than having utterly useless out of touch CEOs running the company who don’t give a shit about their customers or the artistic merit of what they are making. At least with this system sometimes the good thing happens amid all the chaos.
Does Sega spend inordinate amounts of money on building elaborate obstacle courses that have nothing to do with their core products? Yes, but remember all that money and more would just be going to CEO bonuses and stock buybacks for investors at a normal large company, building obstacle courses is comparatively a much more efficient and equitable way to allocate profits (not to mention there is a much smaller carbon footprint to building obstacle courses vs. yachts).
Well there are elevators but they purposefully aren’t turned on until 10:30am after the morning upper management selection process has concluded for the day.
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