Ubisoft and Genba aim to thwart key resellers with silent key activation

Ubisoft and Genba Digital have partnered on silent key activation, a method of selling games through third-party stores that aims to prevent game keys from popping up on key reselling sites.

According to VentureBeat, the move builds on an existing partnership between the two companies, and 10 digital game stores including Chrono.gg and Fanatical have already signed on to use the tech for the sale of Ubisoft games.

Rather than directly purchasing a key for a game from one of those third-party sites and then redeeming it on Ubisoft's Uplay platform, a store would prompt a user for their Uplay account info. Following that Genba verifies the account and activate the game automatically on that player's Uplay account.

The system means that neither retailers or players ever directly handle game codes and, as Genba Digital CEO Matt Murphy tells VentureBeat, that cuts down on opportunities for those codes to be redirected toward unauthorized sites.

“The only thing that the e-tailer would get — which doesn’t go near the user — is a token from us, which we use to link to a particular keycode,” he explains. “That token is valueless because it doesn’t mean anything [outside of] the Genba database.”