Ubisoft sued for shutting down The Crew

Earlier this year, Ubisoft shut down all online services for its 2014 racing game, The Crew. As an extra step, Ubisoft also went and removed the game from customers' digital libraries. Now, the company faces a lawsuit for making the game defunct. 

Two people who bought the game have filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft claiming the company violated California consumer protection laws. The filing claims that Ubisoft misled customers by not properly disclosing the ‘limited license' nature of their game purchase.

As many gamers already know, digital games have included legal language in their terms and conditions for many years now, stating that users own a license to play the game and not the game itself. Given how common this is, especially in the T&Cs of an online-only game, it seems likely that Ubisoft will be able to use this as part of its defence.

The lawsuit argues that Ubisoft sold players “a key to open the gates of a remote server, which Defendants could on day decide to fail to maintain”.

Following Ubisoft pulling online services for The Crew, a petition known as Stop Killing Games began gaining traction, seeking to obtain political intervention on the issue of game preservation. This also prompted Ubisoft to begin working on an offline mode for The Crew 2 and the most recent game in the series, The Crew Motorfest.

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KitGuru Says: I think the age of the online-only single-player game should come to an end. If a game can be played solo, then there should always be an offline option. Multiplayer games can also live on for generations by offering gamers the option to host their own servers. This is the exact reason all of Valve's classic games are still playable today, and many other old-school multiplayer PC shooters. 

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