They indeed just “license” the games to us:

The Services and Content are licensed to you, not sold. This means we grant you a personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable right and license to use the Services and access the Content, for your entertainment, non-commercial use, subject to your compliance with these Terms.

For termination, it’s not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:

for any other reason in relation to your actions in or outside of the Services; upon notification, where your Account has been inactive for more than six months.

The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.

Consequences of the Termination/Suspension of an Account.

You cannot use the Services and Content anymore.
In the event of termination of your Account or of Service(s) associated with your Account, no credit (such as for unused Services, unused subscription period, unused points or Ubisoft Virtual Currency) will be credited to you or converted into cash or any other form of reimbursement.

Source

https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#10

Read 10.C. Valve can do it any time.

Most likely other storefronts have similar clauses

It’s not fully speculation. You can go to every store and look at their TOS. In https://legal.ubi.com/StoreTermsofSale/en-INTL we see 1. Scope

When you purchase on the Ubisoft Stores, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensed, non-commercial and personal license to use the Ubisoft Products.

Also note:

Ubisoft Products may also be purchased from third parties authorized by us to sell such Ubisoft Products. When you purchase Ubisoft Products from a third party, your purchase is with that third party and not Ubisoft.

So I’ll do this for ubisoft but last I checked it was in Steam, EA, Gog, and Epic’s. Itch is the only one I hold out hope to be better but this is pretty boiler plate stuff.

This license is just that, a license.

These Terms of Sale are incorporated by reference to the Terms of Use of Ubisoft available at http://legal.ubi.com/termsofuse (“Terms of Use”). All capitalized terms used but not defined herein shall have the meaning given to them in the Terms of Use. Certain Ubisoft Products are subject to the acceptance of an End User License Agreement (“EULA”) and any other additional terms, which will be available to you before you can access, download, install or use such Ubisoft Product. UBISOFT’s Privacy Policy is an integral part of these Terms of Sale and can be found at https://legal.ubi.com/privacypolicy (“Privacy Policy”). Please read it carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

So we now need to look at the EULA and Privacy Policy.

So the EULA of the store https://legal.ubi.com/eula/en-US Clause 1 backs of Clause 1 Scope of the Terms of Sale.

Clause 8

The EULA is effective from the earlier of the date You purchase, download or use the Product, until terminated according to its terms. You and UBISOFT (or its licensors) may terminate this EULA, at any time, for any reason. Termination by UBISOFT will be effective upon (a) notice to You or (b) termination of Your UBISOFT Account (if any) or © at the time of UBISOFT’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product. This EULA will terminate automatically if You fail to comply with any of the terms and conditions of this EULA. Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.

So Ubisoft reserves the right to terminate your account and thus the EULA agreement and thus your license.

For fun, lets do a bigger storefront because ubisoft is small.

Valve is smarter and calls this directly not a term of sale but a subscriber agreement. You are a subscriber to their service of steam and this is the agreement:

https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#2

Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.

Establishes that these are licenses, not purchases and that you have to have a steam account and running the steam client.

Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.

Valve reserves the right to cancel your subscription if they decide to cease providing such subscriptions to “similarly situated subscribers.” E.g. as long as they do it to everyone in your “situation” it’s legal. So Valve could very well delete inactive accounts legally without refunds. It’s in the EULA, you’ve agreed that as long as they do it without direct discrimination that it’s fine.

So again, you can go through every storefront and realize you have no ownership or right to a refund if they decide to shut down. Also don’t see this as “pro-corporation” I am not defending anyone here. I am pointing out that people have not understood the loss of ownership in the digital world we now live. I’ve been sitting here waiting for the day that people go “hey wait, they can just delete my account without anything I can do?”

A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.

Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I’m in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they’ll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.

Sure, “laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.”

I was simply talking about the current legal definition. It’s hard to call it theft or fraud when the terms are made clear before the sale. An example of this to a lesser degree would be game studios making multiplayer games. Is it theft if a studio puts a game out on Steam with the clause “We can only support multiplayer for as long as our budget allows us.” and then goes under a few years later? A lot of these multiplayer services are things someone would have to pay for like Playfab or Gamelift. Not something easily open-sourceable. You could argue “Well don’t write your game like that” but then you are essentially killing the multiplayer game service industry without consideration of its existence or benefits.

Hmm yet steam has certainly banned lots of accounts, probably some of those owning games and are citizens of Australia. So clearly there is a clause around it.