Ubisoft sued for shutting down The Crew

Two Californian avid gamers are suing Ubisoft in a proposed class motion lawsuit over the developer and writer’s current shutdown of racing recreation The Crew. Ubisoft launched The Crew in December 2014 and shut down its servers after a decade as a consequence of “server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” After the servers shut down, the sport turned completely unplayable as a consequence of its lack of a single-player, offline mode. When the shutdown was introduced on Dec. 14, 2023, Ubisoft did supply refunds to individuals who “lately” bought The Crew, however given the age of the sport, a whole lot of gamers had been unable to take part within the supply.

“Think about you purchase a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, solely to find that every one the paddles are lacking, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable excessive rating is eliminated,” legal professionals wrote within the lawsuit, which was filed Nov. 4 in a California court docket and reviewed by gamerlifemedia. “Seems the pinball producer determined to come back into your property, intestine the insides of the pinball machine, and take away your means to play the sport that you just purchased and thought you owned.”

The lawsuit alleges that is “precisely” what occurred when Ubisoft shut down its servers for The Crew in 2024 — all of a sudden leaving customers unable to entry one thing they bought and assumed they owned. The lawsuit says gamers had been duped in two methods: First, by allegedly deceptive gamers into pondering they had been shopping for a recreation after they had been merely licensing it — even when a participant purchased a bodily disk. Second, that Ubisoft “falsely represented” that The Crew’s recordsdata had been on its bodily disks to entry freely, and that the disks weren’t merely a key for the sport. Ubisoft is violating California shopper safety legal guidelines, the lawsuit alleges.

Each plaintiffs bought the sport properly into its lifespan, in 2018 and 2020, respectively, on bodily discs. The lawsuit says neither would have bought the sport “on the identical phrases,” i.e., value, figuring out the sport’s servers might be taken down, rendering The Crew completely unplayable even in an offline mode. The lawsuit additionally covers the backlash to Ubisoft’s determination to shutdown the servers and never embrace an offline model of the sport; it cites a number of video games that turned servers off however patched in an offline choice, like Knockout Metropolis and two of Ubisoft’s personal video games, Murderer’s Creed 2 and Murderer’s Creed 3. Ubisoft responded to the criticism and vowed to incorporate offline variations of its present video games in The Crew franchise, like The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest — however the lawsuit says this does nothing to amend the issue of The Crew’s server shutdown.

The plaintiffs are on the lookout for the court docket to approve the lawsuit as a category motion, that means different The Crew gamers might get entangled. They’re on the lookout for financial reduction and damages for these impacted by the server shutdown. The lawsuit follows a marketing campaign from YouTube creator Ross Scott to induce corporations to “cease killing video games,” a motion that kicked off after The Crew announcement was made. The Cease Killing Video games motion is petitioning the European Union to power recreation corporations to maintain video games in playable states. It at present has greater than 379,000 signatures.

As media continues to go an increasing number of digital, the difficulty of proudly owning vs. licensing — particularly in video video games — turns into extra of an issue. Whereas some individuals are taking video games into their very own palms (like with the player-created The Crew Limitless), the onus is basically on corporations and what they do to protect their video games and servers. However in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom lately signed a invoice into regulation that requires corporations to inform customers they’re shopping for licenses, not video games themselves, in on-line storefronts. The regulation itself, launched by California assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, is definitely partly impressed by Ubisoft’s shutdown of The Crew. The regulation, nonetheless, doesn’t do something about the truth that video games are licensed and never bought outright, nor does it cease an organization from rendering a recreation unplayable, however it does, in concept, supply transparency on the difficulty.

Ubisoft declined to remark.

Replace: We’ve up to date this story to notice Ubisoft declined to remark.