Game:

Far Cry 4 (2014)

Duration: 3:36

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Ubisoft announced this week that they are deactivating Steam keys for Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity that were acquired via “fraudulent” resellers.

A handful of PC games sites are able to obtain Steam keys and resell them to buyers at a heavily discounted rate, evidently, including some of Ubisoft’s newest titles. It’s the internet, so of course, loads of people have already complained about their games being deactivated on the Ubisoft forum, ultimately admitting that they weren’t willing to pay full price for their games. Ouch.

Ubisoft, on the other hand, is claiming that this is actually a super serious legal matter. They said:
“We strongly recommend that players purchase keys and downloadable games only from the Uplay Store or their trusted retailers. We regularly work with our authorized resellers to identify and deactivate fraudulently obtained and resold keys.

In this case, we confirmed activation keys were recently purchased from EA’s Origin store using fraudulent credit card information and then resold online. These keys may have been deactivated. Customers who may have been impacted should contact the vendor where they purchased the key for a refund.”
I mean, that does sound pretty full-on – using fraudulent credit cards in order to resell games is some serious grey market stuff.
G2A, one of the sites involved in reselling keys, responded on Facebook by saying:

“As some of you may already know, steps have been taken to remove games purchased indirectly from a publisher, via main marketplaces in the web. G2A.COM is not in any case responsible for any of these procedures. However, we are well aware of this process and will do everything possible to compensate for that.

G2A.COM will make every possible exertion to prevent this kind of procedures in the future and exclude merchants responsible for such incidents from the marketplace.”

G2A sells keys itself, but also allows other sellers to do so via their marketplace which is kind of like eBay, which seems to be where all the fraud stuff went down. The company does offer a service called ‘G2A Sheild’ that, if you purchase it, makes sure any keys you buy on the marketplace are valid. Regarding that, they said:

“For users who have made transactions without G2A Shield, we will check if the corresponding merchant was responsible for the withdrawal of the code. If so, these users will get a compensation. Any user who used G2A Shield affected by the current process will get either a new code for the game or the money back.”

‘Compensation’ is a pretty vague word, and I have a few conflicting opinions on this whole thing, really. I mean, people bought new games at a discounted rate via an obviously untrusted website, they probably deserve to have their stuff deactivated. At the same time, Ubisoft don’t have anything to benefit by deactivating keys, unless they’re being total jerks and are trying to FORCE people to re-purchase the game legitimately. Knowing them, I guess that is totally, totally possible.

Dragon Age Inquisition was the most successful launch in BioWare’s entire history, according to a recent EA earnings report. EA didn’t say exactly how many games were sold, but they did mention that the single-player campaign has “has been enjoyed for more than 113 million hours” since it launched on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC in November. That’s… a lot of hours.

The earnings report also said that the company was the number one publisher in the world for titles on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, in direct relation to franchises such as, FIFA, NHL, Madden NFL, EA Sports UFC and Battlefield.

Regardless, EA’s profits have actually fallen. Their profit for the period of October – December 2014 was $388 million, which is down from $398 million the previous year. Their net revenue for the period was $1.4 billion, which is down from $1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2014.

They also noted that for the same period there were 3.3 billion goals scored in FIFA 15, 10+ million Sim families created, over 200 million SimCity buildings constructed and 73+ million knockouts in UFC. I love seeing stats laid out like that, in a social way. Kind of hits home how much time gamers really do spend investing in their hobby, and I think it’s pretty awesome.

I’m Alanah, and thanks for watching Button Bash.

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