Two people in California have filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft after the company turned off servers for 2014’s The Crew, an open-world racing game released on PS4 and Xbox One, making it impossible to play the game.
In 2014, Ubisoft launched The Crew as an open-world, always-online racing game with a campaign and multiplayer mode. It was a fairly successful game for Ubisoft, spawning two sequels—The Crew 2 and Crew: Motorfest. But in December 2023, Ubisoft suddenly delisted the racing game from digital stores and, in April 2024, completely shut off its servers. This means that even if you bought a physical copy of the game, you can no longer play it. Now, two gamers in the United States who weren’t happy about this are filing a lawsuit against Ubisoft.
As reported by Polygon, on November 4 Matthew Cassell and Alan Liu filed a lawsuit in federal court. The main complaint of the recently filed lawsuit is that the two plaintiffs believe Ubisoft has “duped” consumers by telling them they are buying a game when in reality they are only “renting” a “limited license.” The lawsuit also says that Ubisoft rubbed “salt on the wound” by not making the single-player portion of The Crew playable offline.
The plaintiffs are seeking the court’s approval to make the lawsuit a class action suit, letting other Crew players get involved. The lawsuit is seeking both monetary relief and damages for those impacted by The Crew’s servers being killed earlier this year.
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed,” explains the lawsuit. “Turns out the pinball manufacturer decided to come into your home, gut the insides of the pinball machine, and remove your ability to play the game that you bought and thought you owned.”
Ubisoft facing more legal backlash over The Crew
Earlier this year, Ubisoft’s decision to kill The Crew’s servers and make them unplayable led to a firestorm online, and fueled a movement dedicated to fighting back against the ongoing practice of companies killing online games and making them unplayable after people have bought them. Currently, that group is looking for signatures to force European Union lawmakers to address the issue directly.
Meanwhile in the United States, a new law in California is aimed at forcing publishers and storefronts to acknowledge that, even if you click a “Buy” or “Purchase” button to “buy” a game in an online storefront, what you are actually purchasing is just a license and that the companies can potentially bar your access to the game in the future.
Funnily enough, Ubisoft announced in September that it was planning to make sure The Crew 2 and Motorfest get offline modes that will let people keep playing the games even after the servers are shut down. I wonder why they scrambled to announce that?
In the lawsuit filed last week, the plaintiffs say that this promise does nothing to help the original Crew game and that Ubisoft is still in violation of California consumer protection laws.
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