Ubisoft can close your account and leave you without the games you had on it. The reason: the GDPR

Competitors were coming out to Steam a long time ago. Launchers from EA (which was initially called Origin), from Epic Games, and others like COG have become gamers’ regular companions, but Ubisoft also wanted to present its own proposal with Ubisoft Connect (formerly Uplay).

Now a Twitter user has discovered something disturbing: the company recently sent an email to one of its users indicating that his account had been suspended for inactivity, and that would be “permanently closed” if you didn’t use it in the next 30 days by clicking on a link.

That last action is especially worrying, because Ubisoft itself I replied to that message on Twitter confirming that the closure could be avoided by clicking on the aforementioned link, and that “we don’t want you to lose access to your games or your account”, which confirmed that the closure of the account implied that this user would lose access to the games associated with that account.

As explained in PCGamer, neither the terms of use of the service or the end user license agreement (EULA) mention this type of possibility, but the company reserves the right to suspend or close accounts. In fact, they have a web page where they do talk specifically about “closing inactive Ubisoft accounts“. That article explains how “we can close accounts with long inactivity to maintain our database”, but also gives more information about the potential causes of that decision.

In fact, they explain how the company must “comply with local data protection legislation”, and here it can be understood that there are cases such as those specified in the GDPR that would force accounts to be closed if it is detected that it is no longer necessary to have the record of that data.

This practice was already discovered in 2021, as indicated by in NME. So those responsible for Ubisoft made it clear that this type of message was infrequent and that account closures were even more occasional. “In practice,” they explained at the time, “we have never deleted accounts that have been inactive for at least 4 years“.

Even so, at that time the affected user had not used the account for just under two years and still was warned that that could happen. Ubisoft’s GDPR policy mentioned in that article specified that downtime should be longer than six months, so the exact figure is unclear.

The truth is that these types of measures are unusual in the industry: Already then it was revealed that Blizzard, Steam and COG never deleted accounts, and that Epic Games could rename inactive accounts, but did not delete them.

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