Digital games are not yours

Imagine, you're an average gamer and suddenly you receive an email from Ubisoft. Maybe you stopped playing their games due to bugs, lack of time because of your job, or perhaps your tastes changed, I don't know, but you were a fan of Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, or another Ubisoft title. They bring back good memories, and the games remain safely stored in Ubisoft's cloud, in a world where physical space is sometimes limited. Anyway, you open the email, hoping for an offer, or maybe it's a title you've been waiting to get back into after years. The email says: "Hello X. We noticed that you haven't used your Ubisoft account associated with X email. We have temporarily suspended your inactive account and will close it in 30 days in accordance with our Terms of Service. If you want to keep this account, you can cancel its closure by clicking the cancellation button below."

That's right. You're not dreaming. Ubisoft can delete your account and all your games if they believe it's not worth keeping you as a customer. The clarifications from the Twitter community notes are discouraging: "Adding context, Ubisoft may be required under certain data protection laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, to close inactive accounts if they believe that the data is no longer necessary to be collected. Ubisoft has ensured that they do not close accounts that have been inactive for less than 4 years." Wow. Not only will Ubisoft take away your games, but the law requires it, and furthermore, your account exists to "collect your data." This situation is not as rare as you may think. I myself bought an Assassin's Creed game just last month, but I hadn't touched my account in 5 years. They could have easily deleted it if I hadn't remembered Ubisoft less than a month ago.

Now do you understand? Digital games are not yours. They can be deleted at any time: when the company goes bankrupt and can no longer afford the servers, when some obscure data law requires it, when licenses expire, or when it's no longer economically viable. It's all in the Terms of Service, my friend. This was different a few years ago. There are hundreds, thousands of companies from the 80s that are no longer around, but those who bought a copy of their games still own them today... until death or eBay do them part. With digital games, it's different: they don't work outside their digital environment or platform, and if you haven't downloaded them, a developer's whim can destroy them; a situation as absurd as if someone entered your house and destroyed your belongings. But that's the point: digital games are not truly yours.

Now do you understand why piracy is preservation? It used to be different. A physical game can preserve its original format for decades; certainly, copying it to other formats becomes a preservation necessity, but the urgency is not as great. Today, the urgency to preserve games through copying increases: a company can disappear much faster than a cartridge, but things are not as simple anymore: anti-DRM measures, well-protected servers, and the fact that the hacker who copies a game almost always ends up in jail. In this last case, the company prefers the game to disappear if they disappear; like a merchant burning some of their goods to increase the price of the remaining ones. Twisted.

Anyway, we know that, for now, Ubisoft is not at risk of disappearing; someone might buy it instead, but the situation is a warning of what could happen if economic conditions are adverse for companies. Now multiply this by all the gaming companies and consider that the death of physical games is imminent to see the gravity of the problem. Anyway, let's get back to our phrase: physical games are not yours, they are rentals, as experts have said, and they will disappear as soon as they are no longer useful to their real owners, the companies. What can you do? Not much. As people with little computer knowledge, we can only prefer physical games and make an effort to preserve them. Otherwise... there will be nothing left for future generations in this war against corporations.