Video Games

Ubisoft’s very long bad day continues with a lawsuit over alleged data sharing

Company accused of sharing data without consent

Marco Wutz

Ubisoft

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Ubisoft and the feeling that this is all one very long and very bad day for the company continues, as it has been targeted by a class action lawsuit in the US.

According to GamesIndustry, the lawsuit accuses Ubisoft of sharing the data of customers with Meta, the tech company behind Facebook and Instagram. Allegedly, making a purchase on the Ubisoft store or even merely accessing the page as a Ubisoft+ member while being logged in to Facebook results in Meta’s Pixel tool harvesting user data and transferring it back to Meta – all that without Ubisoft asking users for their consent, emphasizes the lawsuit.

Pixel, so the plaintiffs allege, can only be used on a website with the “knowledge and cooperation” of its owner, implicating Ubisoft. You can access the full lawsuit on CourtListener for all the fine details of the case that’s being made.

Ubisoft’s stock prices fell drastically earlier this year after Skull and Bones as well as Star Wars Outlaws failed to become commercial successes. These setbacks spooked the company into delaying the Assassin’s Creed Shadows release date to 2025 and changing some of the details around its business model, which will no longer feature any early unlock phase or be exclusive to Ubisoft’s store on PC – very consumer-friendly changes, all in all.

More recently, reports suggested that Chinese video games powerhouse Tencent and Ubisoft’s founding Guillemot family were considering a joint buyout to get Ubisoft off the stock market.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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