Ubisoft deletes a user’s account with all its games, excuses itself in the GDPR

A gamer from Norway, identified as “Tor,” discovered that his user account on Ubisoft Connect was deleted by the company, along with his library of games worth hundreds of dollars.

As he explained to PCWorld, Tor sold his computer during 2020 in an attempt to control his addiction to video games, and after a year, he felt that it was time to resume his hobby. However, when he tried to log into his user account on Ubisoft Connect, he discovered it had been deleted forever.

His first reaction was to reset his password, believing that capable had been confused and therefore could not access his account. At that moment, he discovers old Ubisoft emails in spam warning that they were going to close his account, which ended up happening and being the real reason he could not access his account. Tor had bought Rainbow Six and Assassin’s Creed games, among others, worth a few hundred dollars, and this was all spoiled after his account was permanently deleted.

The player found a single email from Ubisoft that warned that the user account registered inactivity and could be deleted, but nothing else. According to the policies of most game stores, the standard procedure requires sending several warnings before resorting to the closure of an account, which did not happen in the case of Ubisoft.

Ubisoft blames European Regulations.

A Ubisoft representative deleted the user account following GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) regulations and not company policies. Article 5.1 of the GDPR is related to the amount of time for which a company can store users’ personal information. Ubisoft set one year to delete the data.

For its part, Ubisoft’s Terms of Policy and Privacy of Service establish that the company can send a warning and delete a user account after six months of inactivity. However, the representative explained that the company does not usually delete accounts with purchased games. Typically, three warnings are issued before any action is taken, and they ensure that a fund with less than four years of inactivity has never been deleted. They also promised they would contact Tor to resolve the situation, which would be complicated considering that all the information that proved what games it had was deleted.

No other platform deletes accounts.

As for Tor, he explained that no other platform did something similar. The GOG or Steam terms of use don’t even mention deleting a user account for inactivity. In the case of Blizzard, you can change the name of a WoW character or delete an inactive Diablo II account in cases of prolonged inactivity. However, these are much longer than those taken by Ubisoft.

This horrible experience serves as a reminder that we do not have actual possession of the digital products that we purchase. In most cases, we are at the mercy of things like this. Unfortunately, it is all that we have left depending more and more on digital formats, especially in the video game industry, so we will have to be careful to prevent things like this from happening.