Ubisoft stops selling "keys" to reduce reseale losses

[Shadowdancer]

In a totally surprising move (not, the surprising part is that it took so long), it looks like Ubisoft will cease selling "good" old-fashioned product keys in bulk to all kinds of resellers. Instead, only select resellers will have access to a system that immediately activates products in Uplay accounts.

This is at least in part to solve the problem of keys being hoarded during sales, transported from low-cost regions, or plain out stolen through fraudulent payments, but of course also gives them much more direct control over their sales channels in general.

 

[Iskariot]

I got quite a few UBI games via nice cheap keys.
Oh well, it is what it is. UBI has quite good sales too, and it is easy to get a 20% discount on all their games with their own UBI point system.
I rarely buy games on the first day of release anyway. I cannot remember buying any game at full price lately.

In general UBI games are worth the money I think. Just never buy their DLC at full price! They are simply not worth that kind of money.

 

[Shadowdancer]

That "Genba" service mentioned in the article actually looks neat, kind of a generalised reseller platform that handles the integration with publishers. It could give rise to more smaller resellers of games whose publishers offer their own CDNs and communities, and it has some big names on the logo wall already.