Can Anything Be Done About Ubisoft’s The Crew Shutdown?

The Crew is one of my favourite racing games which in March 2024 will be taken round back and receive a round in the back of it’s head leaving us with just its two soulless sequels. Basically the game servers are getting shut down by Ubisoft in March 2024 which is a perfectly reasonable thing for games developers to do with old games, but the Crew is an online only game meaning that after this date, it will be worthless and completely unplayable, and that includes those with physical copies. This stacks up alongside recent comments from a Ubisoft Executive about getting used to not owning our games in proving that Ubisoft are a scumbag company who keep churning out amazing game concepts and open-worlds with poor execution. So even if you aren’t a fan of The Crew, you can probably get behind the anger of a game becoming worthless and unplayable leading us to the question of what can we do?

Lawsuit Against Ubisoft over The Crew?

Recently a video was shared by Accursed Farms (Chilledsanity), who is best known for various Half Life themed series including Freeman’s Mind. This 27 minute video covered the shutdown of The Crew covering his thoughts on the game and issues. The question the video covers overall, is the legality of this whole issue as whilst the Ubisoft terms of service claim the shutdown is something they can do, in actuality this is an “untested legal grey area that may not hold up in court” leading us into “the perfect scenario for taking legal action”.

The Crew as a franchise has had over 21 million sales since its launch in 2016, based on a 2019 sales figures report, though that of course does include The Crew 2. Now in September 2016 the game was given out for free on PC which of course changes the amount of paying customers who own this game, but based on another article from four months earlier, the game had hit 5 million players in May 2016 which are likely to all have paid for the game. Accursed Farms sees this as a lot of “potential plaintiffs” who bought a game under a “perpetual license” and are going to be left with nothing. Now you can see where this is going, an opportunity to fight back against Ubisoft’s BS and hopefully save The Crew, and maybe set a precedent for future game losses?

Now the downside to this is that, Accursed Farms is just one person and doesn’t actually know how to go about this or have the money to go about starting a lawsuit nor the time, this means he needs help. The angle he discusses taking involves consumer law and the argument that “The Crew was sold under a perpetual license and not a subscription.” Accursed Farms does admit that the perpetual license angle may not hold up, but there is supposedly no prior cases which have taken this angle which makes it a bit of a grey area that could “have some teeth”. The good part about this is that even if the potential case is lost, there is the possibility that the fog can be lifted on this grey area and give us a better idea on where we stand on game ownership in the eyes of the law, this extends beyond just Ubisoft and The Crew.

This is all based upon US law and Ubisoft are a French company which also goes for The Crew developers Ivory Tower. This means that EU law may be different as we have seen with consumer protection law opportunities in the past, most notably with YouTube’s anti-Adblock, which was argued as an invasion of privacy.

The video below covers all of the details that I’ve missed and I urge you to watch it if the idea of “games as a service” is something that concerns you with gaming, though just make sure to set some realistic expectations from this, the chances of something happening are very slim.