We’re all guilty of not reading the terms and conditions, despite knowing that these enormous conglomerates are sneaking some truly horrifying things into the small print. At this point, your data is being sold to the highest bidder anyway, so who cares if EGS knows your Social Security number?
But amid the Stop Killing Games movement, video game publishers have been under a lot more scrutiny, and players have uncovered a worrying disclaimer in Ubisoft’s EULA.
If it takes any of its games offline,“you must immediately uninstall the product and destroy all copies”. So, when The Crew was shut down last year, we were supposed to feed our discs through the shredder. For a company already so blasé about game preservation and its own history, it’s a damning indictment for the future of this industry. But thankfully (and rightfully), the response from gamers was a resounding ‘no’.
Ubisoft Is Awful At Game Preservation
While this clause is featured in a variety of games, fromBaldur’s Gate 3toFinal Fantasy 7 Remake, Ubisoft is particularly behind the curve on preservation. It routinely paves over its originals with remasters (as it appears to be preparing for with Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag), and ties all of its releases to a separate third-party storefront. If you own a game on Steam, for instance, but lose access to the connected Ubisoft account, then you can no longer play that game—not even customer support can help. It’s all too easy to lose a Ubisoft game to the void.
Ubisoft even reportedly pulled The Crew from Ubisoft Connect accounts.
As the industry continues to embrace an all-digital future, with even physical copies becoming little more than download codes written onto discs, it behoves Ubisoft to future-proof its games, especially on these digital platforms. Instead, Ubisoft has built its history on a rotten foundation, and every so often, it decides to kick the support beams. Now it’s asking us to set them on fire and burn them down ourselves. EULA be damned, no. Games that we love, and even games that we hate, are all part of the story, whether it’s Assassin’s Creed 3 or The Crew, and deserve to be remembered and preserved.
Is There Hope For Video Game Preservation?
WithStop Killing Games crossing the one million signature threshold, pressuring lawmakers to take notice, there’s a possibility that companies like Ubisoft will have to make a more concerted effort in the future. As it stands, though, it’s one of the worst offenders and makes it abundantly clear at every turn that it doesn’t care whether its classics are accessible or not. Asking us to destroy our physical copies is a natural extension of that, but one that luckily nobody is taking seriously.
“Make me bi*ch” was one of the top comments on the EULA discovery, while others described it as the “most unenforceable document of all time”. Some egged Ubisoft on to break into their homes and snap the discs themselves, and many more outright laughed at how absurd it all is. But as comical as the idea of Ubisoft sending branded goons to kick your door down and rifle through your games like Abstergo thugs, this is exactly why movements like SKG are so important.
Some communities have even begun work to bring offline games back online,like The Elder Scrolls Online: Legends. Destroying copies prevents such action from being taken.
WhenFor HonorandRainbow Six Siegeinevitably shut their servers down, they’ll be lost forever. We’re seeing that happen more and more, withEA just announcing that Anthem will be taken offline, haphazardly deleting a pivotal piece of BioWare history. That’s the future Ubisoft is heading straight into, where games can vanish into thin air, only to be forgotten generations later. We already saw that with film, where—acenturyago—roughly 75 percent of silent films were lost, with many being paved over by remakes. Gaming has a huge head-start on movies; we shouldn’t be seeing the same mistakes.
Yet here we are, with Ubisoft not only negligent but openly stomping on its own history. It’s gross, and like so many others, I refuse to play a part.
