Michael @LegacyKillaHD
This is just horrifying.
Ubisoft CONFIRMS they will delete your account & purchased games if you go inactive for too long!!!
Ubisoft… WTF?! Another example of why I’m becoming more & more concerned with the death of physical games.
https://twitter.com/LegacyKillaHD/status/1682653876418224129
Ubisoft Support @UbisoftSupport
Hey there. We just wanted to chime in that you can avoid the account closure by logging into your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email. We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account so if you have any difficulties logging in then please create a support case with us. >> ubisoft.com/help
https://twitter.com/UbisoftSupport/status/1682046437834784768
Makes me wonder, how much data does it take to hold every users account info and library details? Not the games themselves, no profile pictures or anything, just the data that they must have in order too know who owns what. That has to be a huge consideration when you build an online store, right?
Did they run out of space? Are they deleting “old” accounts to free up servers for the absolute flood of new Ubisoft accounts that they’re massively inundated with every day?
But seriously, what would an actual real world reason be for needing to delete accounts after X amount of time?
Totally negligible. All you need to keep is a line in a database with the person’s email, hashed and salted password, and a unique identifier for each game they own - that’s an amount of space that won’t even register on any service nowadays. There might be other optional stuff that takes more space, like display pics, cloud saves etc but you can delete those without deleting the whole account.
Napkin maths to illustrate the point: Steam’s game IDs are short numbers, typically close to 5 digits long. ASCII characters are one byte each, so let’s assume 5 bytes plus one more for a separator character per game. If you wanted to store 8 billion accounts with 50 games each then the IDs would be about 2.4 TB, so a consumer hard drive worth ~$100 would do the job at least in the raw terms of data capacity
Your sums are right, but a ‘hard disk somewhere’ is not a robust, always on-line database. Running a 3TB Postgres instance on Amazon RDS will set you back something more like $1k/mo. Still absolute pocket change for Ubi, though.
https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSPostgreSQL
It certainly adds up, and it makes maintaining the databases more complex and costly as a whole.
Imo this is just lazy, they could at the very least “archive” old accounts and move the bare minimum data out of the main DB, as to make it possible to reactivate the account later on. Why can virtually every platform keep old account arround, but not Ubisoft?