PSA: Ubisoft is Revoking Far Cry 4 CD-Keys From 3rd Party Re-sellers - Update 2

[gigastar]

I get that some people dont like Steam, but frankly i dont see how or why sites like G2A are better in any way.

Or do people only look at price tags and ignore any concern for the legitimacy of the service theyre using?

However Ubisoft does have other options here.

From another perspective, even those with illegitimate keys are potential consumers for FarCry DLC; but if you remove their investment (the game), you've removed them as a potential DLC customer. What would the margins be on someone with a fraudulent key who goes on to buy legitimate DLC ($10 a piece, $30 for a season pass) versus someone buying the game on a STEAM sale a year from now for $5?

There are things Ubisoft can do without pissing off consumers, but Ubisoft being Ubisoft, slim chance of that happening.

Theese are people who apparently have been buying thier games at less than half the Steam price. Do you honestly think they would spring for the DLC as well?

 

[major_chaos]

Wow I can't believe people are upset about this. You buy from flagrantly shady gray market key sellers you gotta accept this kind of thing might happen. Complaining about this is like buy a 4K TV for $200 from a guy in a alley who you are 99% sure is a fence and then crying when the police show up at your door to reclaim the stolen property. Buy legit or take the risk, those are your options.

 

[Vivi22]

If the keys themselves were entirely stolen, then I say Ubisoft has the right to revoke them since they were in fact received illegitimately, but just as Steven put it this really just punishes those who were unaware. I think that the best bet for Ubisoft might be to at least offer the game at a discounted price to those who are having them deactivated.

If the keys were stolen alert the authorities and take the people who stole them to court. All this does is punish players who are only going to remember that Ubisoft took away access to a game they paid someone money for, and the people who actually stole from them get off scott free and with more money in their pockets.

 

[Vivi22]

However Ubisoft does have other options here.

From another perspective, even those with illegitimate keys are potential consumers for FarCry DLC; but if you remove their investment (the game), you've removed them as a potential DLC customer. What would the margins be on someone with a fraudulent key who goes on to buy legitimate DLC ($10 a piece, $30 for a season pass) versus someone buying the game on a STEAM sale a year from now for $5?

There are things Ubisoft can do without pissing off consumers, but Ubisoft being Ubisoft, slim chance of that happening.

Theese are people who apparently have been buying thier games at less than half the Steam price. Do you honestly think they would spring for the DLC as well?

People who outright pirate things spend more money on media than people that don't on average, so yes, they very well might spring for the DLC as well at some point.

 

[Kahani]

I am rather tried of this games are somehow legally different from everything else.

Infinitely reproducible electronic goods are different from physical goods, both legally and in many other ways. If you sell stolen cars, you go to jail. If you upload music without permission, you get sued for copyright infringement. If you steal a car, someone no longer has that car. If you download music without permission, it's still available to everyone else just as much as before you did so.

A large problem with issues like this is that existing laws often don't really cover things (note that Ubisoft is only disabling game keys, not bringing criminal or even civil charges against anyone), and in addition that society as a whole doesn't really have a good idea of what new laws should actually say. It's obvious that games, music, and so on are not the same as physical goods and we can't blindly use centuries old laws to deal with them, but it's far less obvious how they should be treated.

Or do people only look at price tags and ignore any concern for the legitimacy of the service theyre using?

I can't help wondering if Steam is actually partially to blame here. Regular Steam sales, along with things like Humble Bundles and various other storefronts doing similar sales, mean that everyone has been trained to both look for regular discounts and to accept them when they see them. If Steam regularly offers games at half price, there's nothing obviously dodgy about finding a game half price on another site.

 

[newwiseman]

Know what I love about ubisoft? They know people hate them and they just don't care, they double down at every chance to tick off their fan base. But they know people will keep buying their schlock so they keep it up.

 

[Eremiel]

Nowhere does Ubisoft state these were purchases done with stolen credit cards. They say the keys were "fraudulently obtained", but they have in the past meant this to include things like "bought at bulk from a cheaper region" and "bought in bulk from humblebundle and then marketed up".

Ubisoft are dicks.

 

[suitepee7]

You cannot assume that all buyers of 3rd party keys are aware that they are stolen, the customer can only guess they might be. With that comes the inherent risk, but then there is always the risk of having your account banned and losing access to all previously purchased games, but that's another topic. The point is that in this situation 100% of the unavoidable punishment comes to the player (who may not be aware there are any issues), and then the 3rd party sellers have the OPTION to reimburse said players if they choose to (I read kinguin was offering loyalty currency as a refund alternative).

Quite frankly, I consider this to be a fucking awful attitude of a company to customers. I am aware that Ubi may have never seen any money from those sales, and they should be entitled to money in compensation... from the people who stole off them. The keys have gone from the company, to a 3rd party seller, who then sells through a 3rd party host, to a customer, and yet their logic is to punish those at the end of the chain rather than the ones causing the problems in the first place. The seller may know they are stolen but the host company may be unaware, and the host company may know they are stolen but not make the customers aware. There are two links who should be thoroughly investigated before appropriating blame to the customers, and in the long run it doesn't really help Ubi at all.

From now on most customers who have this happen to them will remember Ubi as the people who took their game away from them, and do you really think they will pay money twice for the same game immediately after their game key was deactivated? The best way to deter piracy is convenience and customer satisfaction. These companies seem to forget that many consumers choose not to steal games, and many customers want to support the devs who make the games they enjoy. In that light they should make customers who bought off of 3rd parties fully aware that they believe the key was stolen, and perhaps even warn that they have the power to revoke keys they believe to be stolen, but for a first time offence when you aren't even sure if the customer was knowingly involved this is excessive.


I want to make it clear I do not support piracy in any way, I just understand why some might consider it

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

Way to go Ubi, screwing over customers again. it's almost like they thrive on bad PR.
Remember their DRM days? The only person who suffered was the paying customer.

So, this is just a warning to our readers: always make sure you buy your digital games from an officially authorized storefront - just to be 100% sure it won't be yanked out of your library later on down the line...

But who are these authorised store fronts? Just Uplay? Steam too maybe? Anyone else we can buy from? There isn't a list, thats for sure.
Some sites look pretty dodgy, but Kinguin for example, looks like a very professional site.

Or do people only look at price tags and ignore any concern for the legitimacy of the service theyre using?

I can't help wondering if Steam is actually partially to blame here. Regular Steam sales, along with things like Humble Bundles and various other storefronts doing similar sales, mean that everyone has been trained to both look for regular discounts and to accept them when they see them. If Steam regularly offers games at half price, there's nothing obviously dodgy about finding a game half price on another site.

Not sure if I like the word "blame" here, sounds as if Steam've done something wrong, but other than that, I whole heartedly agree.

 

[Albino Boo]

I am rather tried of this games are somehow legally different from everything else.

Infinitely reproducible electronic goods are different from physical goods, both legally and in many other ways. If you sell stolen cars, you go to jail. If you upload music without permission, you get sued for copyright infringement. If you steal a car, someone no longer has that car. If you download music without permission, it's still available to everyone else just as much as before you did so.

A large problem with issues like this is that existing laws often don't really cover things (note that Ubisoft is only disabling game keys, not bringing criminal or even civil charges against anyone), and in addition that society as a whole doesn't really have a good idea of what new laws should actually say. It's obvious that games, music, and so on are not the same as physical goods and we can't blindly use centuries old laws to deal with them, but it's far less obvious how they should be treated.

Or do people only look at price tags and ignore any concern for the legitimacy of the service theyre using?

I can't help wondering if Steam is actually partially to blame here. Regular Steam sales, along with things like Humble Bundles and various other storefronts doing similar sales, mean that everyone has been trained to both look for regular discounts and to accept them when they see them. If Steam regularly offers games at half price, there's nothing obviously dodgy about finding a game half price on another site.

Its the same law applies, there is no difference and the principle of caveat emptor has appealed regardless of goods and services sold. Its a basic principle contract law. You are perfectly entitled to write as many words as you like but you will still be wrong. Digital goods are not special and do not exits outside of existing law. Digital good stil have cost associated or do you think key servers are free to run?

 

[SergejH]

Way to go Ubi, screwing over customers again. it's almost like they thrive on bad PR.
Remember their DRM days? The only person who suffered was the paying customer.

So, this is just a warning to our readers: always make sure you buy your digital games from an officially authorized storefront - just to be 100% sure it won't be yanked out of your library later on down the line...

...
Some sites look pretty dodgy, but Kinguin for example, looks like a very professional site.

And that is probably the worst thing, how you can judge a site. For example GMG looks almost like regular authorized shop, but they are worst, because they selling games in most cases for more, but they are buying them for same as other resellers.
Btw Kinguin is not a regular reseller, they are "reseller of reseller", because they dont sell own keys, just serving as kind of a hub for other resellers. Of course they have provisions even for listing games.

 

[gigastar]

EDIT: Before rubbing off your Ubisoft hate-boners i reccomend you read this;
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/01/27/ubisoft-says-deactivated-far-cry-keys-purchased-with-stolen-credit-card.aspx

Or do people only look at price tags and ignore any concern for the legitimacy of the service theyre using?

I can't help wondering if Steam is actually partially to blame here. Regular Steam sales, along with things like Humble Bundles and various other storefronts doing similar sales, mean that everyone has been trained to both look for regular discounts and to accept them when they see them. If Steam regularly offers games at half price, there's nothing obviously dodgy about finding a game half price on another site.

Perhaps youre right, but then i have to wonder why people dont just wait for the next Steam seasonal sale instead of taking the risk of the thing they wanted being deactivated.

If the keys were stolen alert the authorities and take the people who stole them to court. All this does is punish players who are only going to remember that Ubisoft took away access to a game they paid someone money for, and the people who actually stole from them get off scott free and with more money in their pockets.

Well if people just went through the official channels rather than a 3rd party site that lets anyone sell keys that wouldnt be a problem.

Thats just people being unable to accept that theyre at fault. Something thats a dime a dozen on the internet.

Theese are people who apparently have been buying thier games at less than half the Steam price. Do you honestly think they would spring for the DLC as well?

People who outright pirate things spend more money on media than people that don't on average, so yes, they very well might spring for the DLC as well at some point.

I wasnt talking about pirates, the pirates youre talking about do as they do because there isnt a way for them to get a hold of it. The classic example being translated manga.

Im talking about the people who are realatively short on cash but refuse to pirate for whatever reason. I think thats the demogrpahic theese grey market sites are attracting.

 

[Amaror]

You cannot assume that all buyers of 3rd party keys are aware that they are stolen, the customer can only guess they might be. With that comes the inherent risk, but then there is always the risk of having your account banned and losing access to all previously purchased games, but that's another topic. The point is that in this situation 100% of the unavoidable punishment comes to the player (who may not be aware there are any issues), and then the 3rd party sellers have the OPTION to reimburse said players if they choose to (I read kinguin was offering loyalty currency as a refund alternative).

Quite frankly, I consider this to be a fucking awful attitude of a company to customers. I am aware that Ubi may have never seen any money from those sales, and they should be entitled to money in compensation... from the people who stole off them. The keys have gone from the company, to a 3rd party seller, who then sells through a 3rd party host, to a customer, and yet their logic is to punish those at the end of the chain rather than the ones causing the problems in the first place. The seller may know they are stolen but the host company may be unaware, and the host company may know they are stolen but not make the customers aware. There are two links who should be thoroughly investigated before appropriating blame to the customers, and in the long run it doesn't really help Ubi at all.

I aggree with this. Most of the people who buy in the grey market, buy there because they don't want to pay the quite frankly way too high regular prices of modern videogames. So they will most likely not buy the game in the regular store even if their key gets banned.
So instead of being an a**h*** an punishing customers that didn't do anything illegal, they could have just send a friendly email:

like dear customer please be informed that this key has been received illegally. Please take into account that unofficial resellers may sell illegally obtained products and that these products might get banned in the future. Since you were probably unaware of this, we will not ban you current product.

People would be singing Ubisofts praises skyhigh right now. But no they have to do the stupid thing and piss everyone off. Great job, Ubisoft!

 

[fix-the-spade]

If the keys themselves were entirely stolen, then I say Ubisoft has the right to revoke them since they were in fact received illegitimately,

The trouble is it's a grey area. Ubisoft sells the keys to a distributor, the distributor sells the keys on, Ubisoft seem to be throwing the toys out of the pram because either they didn't want the distributor to sell them or they didn't get the price they wanted.

My guess is that the keys have been bought low from one country's distributor and sold high at retail to other countries rather than being phished or bought with stolen bank details. I would also bet that Ubisoft's contract with the distributor has clauses that that not happen and gives them the power to revoke keys if it does. Ubisoft has various forms of fraud it can claim took place but it's likely their attempt to control the market more tightly. Of course abandoning regional pricing would fix this problem in a heart beat.

If I was being really cynical I'd say Ubisoft is doing this just to drive resellers out of business and get people to buy direct from Uplay, but they'd never be that brazen...

Edit
Well arse, it was stolen credit cards all along. I take back all that crap I said about Ubisoft, I was under the impression that G2A worked like GMG, where you buy from Green Man Gaming specifically, didn't think it was just a hub for other merchants.

Sorry Ubisoft.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

I'm from the Balkans and Steam and GMG sell me games for over 60 euro despite having a separate region for me (I know because I can't buy tons of games that can be bought in the rest of Europe). They are differentiating my region with west Europe, they are aware of the shit tier economy, they refuse to sell some products, yet they don't want to offer prices that are more to the level of the consumer power. I'm getting literally everything that's bad with region "locking" yet I don't get even a single benefit that should come with it. I'm seeing only a huge minus.
So sorry Ubishit if I try to get games for a price that is even then way over my financial power. If you want less people to do that shit, maybe you should start making better games and have a better pricing scheme.

Not that I bought FC4. I didn't buy a Ubishit game since Anno 1404.

 

[Davroth]

I'd imagine the people who bought the game near launch are long done with it.

It wasn't that exciting of a game to begin with.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

Ha, these people pay money and their games are taken away whilst I got the game for no cost at all!

...with the purchase of my new graphics card, that is. No yarr harr fiddle de dees here.

 

[Kiardras]

I was looking for a way to afford Divinity OS, and I checked out a number of these re-seller sites. The whole thing screamed dodgy as fuck and not safe.

 

[alj]

Well if the key where stolen as in they did not pay for them then yes ubisoft has the right to disable the keys. It is however a stupid thing to do and they are assholes for doing it. Tell me who will this hurt ? Will it hurt the company that sold the keys to the 3rd party? No they have there money. Will it hurt the 3rd party retailers? Slightly , consumer confidence will be hurt and a small percentage will ask for a refund. Will this hurt the end user? Yes! EVERY SINGLE ONE, way to make a few 1000 more pirates Ubisoft! What you think they will all go out a buy it again from you .. Ha , fat chance. Oh and lets see , how was it that the 3rd party could sell it at a lower price ? Because you use regional pricing to f***k over certain areas. And how many of the people you screwed over by blocking there key will now not buy far-cry 5 but download a printed ( notice how i say pirated and not illegal ) copy of it.

And if they where a bulk order of keys then i ask you ubisoft, why do you expect to be paid twice for the same thing ? What so if i buy a new boxed copy of the game and don't use it , sell it to someone else they should have to pay again ? Even if i have not used it ?

As a wise man once said , Ubisoft the company that embodies the phrase "because we can get away with it".

EDIT

I see loads of people saying that "oh you know its dodgy" and " they have the right to reclaim stolen goods" or " if you buy a stolen car ..." and so on and so forth. Technically yes you are correct, thats how it works. However think of it like the problem of drug use. Locking up the users does nothing but cost the government money, it does not prevent people using them and it does not stop people selling them. Cut off the supply however and you cut the number of users. Its the same with this, cut the supply of stolen/dodgy keys by going after the people that stole them.

I have always hated the phrase "Caveat emptor" it just makes me think of dodge car salesmen trying to screw people over, i know its a very popular view in the US but come on guys mr big retails is not looking out for you so stop paying to be his shill. It would be interesting to know why that is, values leaning more towards a capitalist viewpoint possibly ? Anyway i digress. Myself i prefer "the customer is always right", not in the sense that the customer should get everything they want, but you should put the customer first, its there money you are spending on your gold plated toilet seat so you better look after them.

 

[Rednog]

Honestly this is the last time I use UPlay.
Back when splinter cell conviction came out I bought the game legit in boxed form from a local retailer (when I lived in another country). Around the time Blacklist came out I figured that I should replay conviction. Between this time I had moved to the US. What's this conviction isn't on my list anymore (they removed it like 7 months later). I call up Ubisoft, my key is banned because "it was a stolen key". I sigh and just figure I'll just move on because I played and beat the game when it came out and I really have no proof on hand. About a week later I was cleaning out my room, lo and behold I find the goddamn box smashed away between some books. I take a picture and send it to ubi, they apologize and reissued a key...so because of their fuck up I have 2 copies of conviction registered to my account.

This shit with FarCry 4 is no different they're using a random shotgun method of just banning people whose keys don't match up with their region. These aren't bans from some giant credit card heist. It's Uplay hamfisting region locking down people's throats.

The biggest kicked in this whole shitstorm for me is that I bought 2 GTX908s both had the voucher to redeem games, picked up Far Cry 4 and Unity. Far Cry 4 removed. Yea screw Ubisoft.