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Ubisoft sends data it collects from gamers in “Far Cry Primal” to Google, Amazon, and others
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- Title
- Privacy firm files Ubisoft legal complaint over data collection, forced online in single-player games
- Published
- Apr 24 2025
- Word count
- 574 words
First paragraph in the article:
From the privacy company that is filing the complaint:
Source.
Wow.
I feel sorry for the employees, but... this company must either radically change its practices, or just disappear altogether. Furthermore, this whole “always online” nonsense needs to be made illegal, and not just in video games.
Here’s the original complaint.
I'm not surprised in the slightest. It was always clear that an always online requirement existed solely to harvest data. Ubisoft is very likely not alone in this practice, but with them being in financial dire straits I assume they're desperate enough to do it a little too overtly.
What a shit company with a terrible attitude towards their customer base.
In fairness, Ubisoft was always a shit company that people gave too much leeway because they liked the games.
Ubisoft was one of the hardest pushers of DRM, micro payments, and social media integration. That's not even getting into the sexual harassment lawsuits.
I don't think it's solely for the purpose of data collection, that's obviously one of reasons, they are collecting all that data. But the original reason for forcing online play was to make piracy harder, and I think it's very likely that that's still a major reason that they are doing it.
They've been doing this for a long time. Assassins Creed II drove me crazy for that reason. I had flaky DSL at the time and it would just end missions I was playing because it lost connection for a minute.
Arkham City also did something like that. It used "Games for Windows Live" originally, and it would only save the game if you had a continuous internet connection. If your internet dropped, it would stop saving the game and wouldn't start again if it came back later.
DRM implementation has changed greatly since the days of those two games and they don't work like that anymore because of all the issues it caused with spotty internet connections being more common than the industry assumed.
Assassin's Creed 2 was the posterchild for the worst possible implementation of always-online DRM because of exactly what you described. However, there was a more recent major Capcom game (still ~2018 or so) where it was found to have increased loading times because there was an online DRM baked into the loading screens.
I don't know if they'll change their ways. They've been doing it for such a long time that it might hurt them if they change. Too bad though, it used to be a decent company once. RIP The Crew
How valuable could this data be? It sounds like it’s just non-PII game usage stats. Am I missing something?
The article says data is sent to Google, Amazon, and Datadog. Those are cloud services providers, not data brokers. These are likely Ubisoft-controlled endpoints, which isn’t to say that data isn’t being sold to third parties later on, but I doubt this is a smoking gun for that. Even so, again, how valuable could this particular data be to anyone outside Ubisoft? This just looks like the kind of metrics / telemetry collected by any SaaS company to analyze how customers are using the product.
I acknowledge that Ubisoft shouldn’t be a SaaS company, and the always-online requirement, frequent network connections, and aggressive DRM are egregious. Ubisoft isn’t blameless here. I just think this particular headline is a bit of a nothingburger, unless my eyes skimmed over some crucial detail.
regardless, Ubisoft is a French stuidio and this always-online connection for a single player game is a huge GDPR violation. That alone is a smoking gun.
But yes, all this is suspicion until the courts audit further.
To add for anyone else reading this. (I think you understand it quite well already balooga):
Not saying that they don't sell the data or anything nefarious, but there is a huge value in just knowing what goes on in your game. Both for design reasons, "which dungeons are actually being played and is any of them giving below par in its rewards?*", as well as technical reasons "have we increased the memory usage since the last patch? Is any of the areas worse when it comes to regarding performance?".
*I don't know if those questions makes sense for this specific game, but there surely are questions that do.
Related anecdote: The telemetry is SpaceChem was used to confirm that the last level could be solved. I remember reading that the designer hadn't solved it, but they just shipped and waited to see what happened.
Of course the player data in that and other Zachtronics games is also used in a player-facing manner to provide histograms with the performance of other player solutions. The histograms do a great job of showing the expected par performance for each puzzle, along with what to aim for if you want to go for the more clever solution. Even though it's just player statistics, the results seem to do a good job of matching what I'd expect if each puzzle had target scores set by the designer.
Yeah, i think that it sucks that it's so hard for the consumer to know what is actually sent, it's basically boils down to "trust us". I have thought about if it should maybe be enforced to send telemetry unencrypted, but it doesn't really solve the problem for several different reasons.
I also don't trust the gdpr "download all the data the company has on you". I have downloaded the data from Facebook/Google and there were only direct artifacts of my actions, nothing like "we estimate this user is interested in games or programming" that could potentially be used for directed marketing. I can think of reasons why/how they avoid it, but the fact remains that they target me with ads and i can't see their data around that.
I believe this is more about choice. Give the player a choice to send or not send the data. Do it as a question when they first run the game - "Ubisoft would like to collect your gaming statistics like length of gameing session, if you use mouse or gamepad... so that we can make better games in the future. Are you okay sending this data to Ubisoft?" and everyone will be cool about it. Theproblem is them doing it without us unable to make a choice.
I guess (and I'm not digging into it) that they have some sort of EULA or Terms of service where they write about this data collection and by accepting this - because you want o play the game, remember? - you are basically saying "yes" to data collection.
There are reason's why I haven't bought AC4: Black flag (the only AC game I love and want to play) on PC... And now I see I made a good choice. I don't want to support such behavior.
This could be true. The thing is they should also be responsible for lying to their customers in that case. And that could get them punished by law. Well, their current behavior should get them punished as well.
My stance is quite easy on this - Middle finger to all publishers/studios who does that. What am I going to play? Actually I have quite a lot of other games that were made for gamers and not for publishers or shareholders. I also have quite a lot of games from the old times - on CDs and DVDs - that are not encumbered by any of this shit stuff. And there is GOG as well, which provides modern offline installers for many really good games.
So once again - Ubisoft, Rockstar, EA, Bethesda (and others), F you! You were good - 20 years ago, that is.
That is, sadly, very true.
I come from the time when games were actually playable and finishable without (too much) trouble in their v1.0. The only game I have played that couldn't be finished in it's original CD release was Evil Islands (Great RPG! Well... for the time). I believe there were much more of such games even back then, but I haven't personally stumbled into any other.