14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Ubisoft has decided that it would be wise not to punish players who purchasing Far Cry 4 keys from third-party retailers. Although the French publisher deactivated more than 1,000 keys about a week ago, most of them have now been reinstated.
In a statement for Eurogamer, Ubisoft announced that “after further investigation into the matter of keys that were fraudulently purchased on EA's Origin store, we are reinstating keys for consumers who already had successfully activated and started playing the games.”
This means that the keys that haven’t been activated yet, but were bought with stolen cards, will remain deactivated, as Ubisoft points out: “any remaining fraudulently obtained and resold keys have been deactivated.”
Late last month, third-party retailer Kinguin confirmed that around 1,600 Ubisoft keys had been deactivated by the French publisher.
Even though none of the keys has been directly sold by Kinguin, the third-party retailer acts as an interface for other smaller retailers and some of them resold these keys.
Apparently, a Russian individual made an offer to these merchants that couldn’t be refused. Even though the price was so low that anyone could tell that they weren’t obtained legally, some of these merchants, 35 according to Kinguin, took the offer.
Kinguin won't have to refund anything for the revoked Far Cry 4 keys
Kinguin announced that all these merchants had agreed to reimburse the amount spent by those who purchased any Ubisoft game deactivated by the French publisher more than a week ago.
However, this won’t be needed anymore as Ubisoft has decided to reactivate these keys and warned those who purchased them from third-party retailers to look for authorized resellers when buying games.
“We are working with EA to prevent situations like this from happening again, and we will continue to deactivate keys that are found to be fraudulently obtained and resold.
“We strongly recommend that players purchase keys and downloadable games only from the uPlay shop or trusted retailers,” said a Ubisoft official.