French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, with support from the Stop Killing Games initiative, has filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft over the 2024 shutdown of the racing game The Crew. An announcement on the UFC-Que Choisir (Google translated) says Ubisoft’s decision to close the game and revoke licenses “violated fundamental consumer rights,” and that “players were never fairly informed about the potentially temporary nature of access to the game they were buying.”
The Crew launched in 2014, but became unplayable in April 2024 after Ubisoft closed the servers it depended upon; adding insult to injury, it began stripping people’s licenses to the game a few weeks later, presumably to prevent them from playing it on then-hypothetical fan servers. It proved to be a PR botch of truly epic proportions, to the point that Ubisoft promised to never, ever do it again—even as it doggedly defended the initial decision by reminding gamers that they don’t actually own their games.
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