“Imagine buying a pinball machine and, years later, walking into your living room to play it and discovering that all the paddles are gone, the ball and bumpers no longer exist, and the screen that proudly displayed your best score has been removed,” the lawyers of two American players imaged in a complaint. Filed on November 4 in the California court, it targets the French publisher Ubisoft, reports Polygon. It follows the closure, in March, of the servers of the car racing game “The Crew”, released in December 2014, due to “constraints linked to server infrastructure and licenses”, according to the firm. After this closure, the game became unplayable due to the lack of an offline single player mode. When announcing the shutdown of “The Crew” servers on December 14, 2013, Ubisoft offered refunds to players who had purchased the game “recently”, thereby excluding many players, recalls the specialized site.
Launched as a class action, the complaint, which aims to show that Ubisoft is violating California consumer protection laws, claims that players were deceived in two ways. The first concerns the nature of the purchase. The company is accused of having hidden that it was only selling a temporary license of the game, and not the game itself, even in its physical version. The second concerns the latter. The plaintiffs accuse Ubisoft of making them believe that the disc contained the game, when it is only a “key” giving access to “The Crew” from the company’s remote servers. According to their lawyers, the two players would not have purchased the game on the same terms if they had known that the servers could be closed without offline mode as compensation. Faced with the outcry from players when announcing the closure of “The Crew” servers, Ubisoft warned that the other titles in the franchise, “The Crew 2” (2018) and “The Crew Motorfest” (2023) , would be entitled to an update. It aims to not make them inaccessible after the end of official support, unlike the first game.
The plaintiffs are seeking financial compensation and damages for all those affected by the disappearance of the game. This approach echoes the European “Stop Killing Games” campaign launched by YouTuber Ross Scott, after the controversy sparked by Ubisoft . It aims to stop the practice of publishers which consists of removing, at a given moment, video games sold to customers, by encouraging the competent authorities to investigate the matter. This practice is judged to be an attack on consumer rights and the preservation of games.
