this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
319 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
30540 readers
181 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hosting your shit costs them literal pennies at absolute most. "This user owns these games and keys" is bytes of data. If they have cloud saves it's slightly more, but about 100 orders of magnitude off of affecting their bottom line in any way. Old games they do or don't support have nothing to do with inactive accounts. Active accounts own them too.
There is zero financial rationale for this. It's not anything resembling a rounding error on the budget sheet. It's basically free.
The curious thing is that there is a financial rationale for maintaining the minimal data, and allowing account recovery. If I bought a game or two via Ubisofts store a few years back, and I remember that game and go through the steps to recover my account… I might see more games that I'd actually rather like to buy.
The cost of keeping a minimal set of account information is a minuscule cost, with a potential upside.
I think they do this to discourage people from letting their accounts go dormant and risk loosing their games. Which makes some sense, lock you customers in, use their sunk cost to encourage activity.
I mean, how much data do they really have to store, though? They only need to store one copy of the actual game. The save files shouldn't be unmanageable.
That could be part of it as well. Such a move could serve several purposes after all.