A hot potato: A human in Kingdom of norway claims Ubisoft deleted his Ubisoft Connect business relationship and all his games afterward a yr of inactivity. The stated reason is GDPR related, but Ubisoft'south business relationship deletion policy is very different from what happened in this instance.

Tor, who but wants to exist identified by his first name, told PCWorld before this month he sold his PC in 2022 to stave off gaming habit. When he decided to start playing games again this by summertime, he found his Ubisoft account closed.

Afterwards resetting his password, Tor discovered his hundreds of dollars of purchased games similar Rainbow Six and Assassin's Creed were gone. In that location was merely one e-mail from Ubisoft alarm of account inactivity, which Tor found in his spam folder. Ubisoft says it cannot recover the business relationship or its games.

The warning e-mail Tor received, in both English and the original Norwegian.

A Ubisoft representative said it deletes inactive accounts according to its interpretation of article 5.1e of the European Union's GDPR law, which concerns how long companies should agree onto users' personal data.

Ubisoft's terms of service say information technology can issue a alarm and then delete an inactive account later on half dozen months. Still, the company told PCWorld it doesn't just purge accounts with purchased games on them. It usually sends three warnings before taking activeness and hasn't e'er deleted an account after less than four years of inactivity. The representative said Ubisoft support would accomplish out to Tor.

Tor said no other gaming service did anything like this. GOG and Steam support don't say anything virtually deleting fallow accounts. Blizzard might change your WoW character's name or delete your Diablo 2 account if either is inactive for a while.

In whatever case, let this exist a reminder that when you lot buy almost digital products, y'all don't fully own them. Also, account deletion warning emails could be problematic considering users may recall they're phishing scams or get filtered into the spam folder, every bit it was in this example.