Game:

Far Cry 4 (2014)

Duration: 2:16

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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.

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