Ubisoft studios are known around the world for flagship sagas like Assassin’s Creed and The Crew. Recently, a controversy arose around one of the classics of the car racing franchise, while Californian players have just launched a major action against Ubisoft. Just that!
The Crew disappears from digital storefronts
In December 2023, the Ubisoft teams made a radical decision for the first opus of The Crew saga. Indeed, the publisher discreetly removed The Crew from digital storefronts and confirmed that the online game would no longer be playable from April 2024. The game was therefore no longer available on the Steam, Xbox and PlayStation. The Crew is an open-world racing series developed by Ubisoft Ivory Tower, which has attracted over 40 million players since the original game’s release in 2014. Many fans didn’t understand why this flagship game was no longer playable overnight, and some even decided to try everything!
“After almost a decade of support, we will be decommissioning The Crew 1 on March 31, 2024. We understand that this may be disappointing for players who are still enjoying the game, but it is necessary due to the server infrastructure at coming and licensing constraints.”
Ubisoft
(Source)
These players at war with Ubisoft!
Two California consumers are currently suing Ubisoft for shutting down racing game The Crew. The players launched a proposed class action a few days ago accusing Ubisoft of violating California’s consumer protection laws. They claim Ubisoft duped consumers into saying they were buying a gamewhen in fact, “they were only renting a limited license to access a game that the defendants choose to maintain as they wish”.
But that’s not the only aspect this complaint targets, and players also claim that the product’s packaging “falsely represented that The Crew itself was encoded on physical discs that consumers could purchase or digital files that consumers could pay to download, when in fact the physical discs and downloaded files that consumers paid for was more akin to a key that they could use to open the doors of this remote server, which the defendants might one day decide not to maintain.”
The complaint also notes that Ubisoft has previously shut down online servers for older games while preserving their offline functionality, as was the case for Assassin’s Creed 2 and 3. The plaintiffs want the court to approve the action in justice as a class action and demand monetary compensation and damages for affected playersand especially those who join the complaint. In short, the fans who launched this appeal expect a lot from the studios, and only the future will tell us the outcome of this legal procedure which is gradually gaining momentum!
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