Full title: Ubisoft says you “cannot complain” it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren’t “deceived” by the lack of an offline version “to access a decade-old, discontinued video game”
Ubisoft’s lawyers have responded to a class action lawsuit over the shutdown of The Crew, arguing that it was always clear that you didn’t own the game and calling for a dismissal of the case outright.
The class action was filed in November 2024, and Ubisoft’s response came in February 2025, though it’s only come to the public’s attention now courtesy of Polygon. The full response from Ubisoft attorney Steven A. Marenberg picks apart the claims of plaintiffs Matthew Cassell and Alan Liu piece by piece, but the most common refrain is that The Crew’s box made clear both that the game required an internet connection and that Ubisoft retained the right to revoke access “to one or more specific online features” with a 30-day notice at its own discretion.
I gotta thank Ubisoft for saving me money by consistently saying dumbass shit so I don’t buy their crappy games. The one Elon tweet was still pretty funny though I won’t lie.
The way of the future…VCRs went away. DVDRs went away, replaced with DVRs and membership streaming, where you can “buy” a movie on Amazon Prime, but if they lose the rights to the movie, so do you - oh well. Your Tesla will brick, if Elon gets mad at you, and your video games will stop working if “the man” unplugs the server. Oh, and dont get caught pulling out your old dusty VCR to record the Super Bowl to watch later…thats a copyright violation. The oligarchs want to make sure the plebes eventually own nothing. If the masters can take it all away, the peasants will do what they’re told, be quiet about it, and smile when in sight of the masters.
And people will still defend this company
Does anyone defend them? I think what happens is that people get mad at them but then still buy the games anyway because they’re absolute fucking idiots. I believe this is what happens.
People are still buying the games. Call it what you want but if you give them money it’s your fault they keep doing this.
Same goes for the people who whine about how broken COD is yet still buy it every single year. People often wonder why the game industry is the way it is, but then you realize the average person has a gold fish brain and will keep wasting their money on crap just to be disappointed over and over. Companies absolutely love that kind of customer and would rather rely on them than actually try.
Yea that’s exactly what I’m saying. I blame the consumers. It’s not like they don’t have options.
Yeah, that’s true
This is why I will always have some nostalgia for physical media. I still got CDs I bought in the 90s (which I’ve copied onto my hard drives a long, long time ago) and while they need a like coaxing to work at times, they are forever mine and no one can take them from me.
I was very hesitant to go on steam specifically for their ‘you don’t own shit even if you paid and followed the rules’ garbage.
Steam is crazy in how it’s still usable and not completely enshittified after existing for so many years. I don’t know how they do it
It’s called staying away from venture capital. It really is as simple as that. Because Valve has a lucrative business model they have no need or desire to raise capital from outside investors, therefore there is nobody to squeeze them for value at the expense of their customers.
If you watch Cory Doctorow’s talk where he coined the word “enshittification” he explains how the process works, and it starts with outside investment. Enshittification is just a catchy term for value extraction, from the perspective of the customer.
Damn, now I understand the hype!
I think there is an implication that if you buy a game which is online by nature (e.g. an MMO) that the servers can and will shut down eventually. My cupboard is filled with defunct MMOs. And people do not “own” any commercial software per se, they run it under licence.
So I don’t see that Ubisoft has any legal obligation here. But as a good will gesture they really should put the server code in escrow, or open source chunks of it so that games can continue to enjoy life after the company itself has no economic incentive to continue running it.
I find it so strange that people hate Ubisoft for this, but would rush to defend Valve for starting this trend.
It’s because valve has always been transparent about it. They’ve also put in place a lot of protections for gamers, which is why I trust their store. Their stuff is also a license, but I have yet to see something pulled out of my inventory. Actually there was a game once, and it was a Ubisoft game now that I think of it. I believe that’s when they put in more protections.
Ubisoft wants to make everything cloud dependent and then want us to be happy that we can’t play our games anymore. They lost all of my trust. If it’s not a purchase, then it’s a rental in my eyes, and I’d never pay more than $20 for a rental.
It’s because valve has always been transparent about it
Gonna stop you right there. It’s only recently, after being forced to. That Steam highlights that you are buying a licence.
Yeah, but it’s always been a license. I’ve never been unaware of that, it’s only now that publishers are starting to abuse that fact that they’re making it obvious. Again, I’ve never been burned by valve, so I trust them. Maybe that’ll change some day, but for now, that’s why they’re doing better.
Ubisoft deserves to go bankrupt, get dissolved, and have their IP’s sold to people aren’t malicious.
No, make it a entirely employee-owned company, so they can vote the execs out, sanitize the culture, and keep the thousands of worker out of unemployment
No, let them die. Better to start fresh than start cursed.
The workers, the gamers, and the industry are glad you’re not in charge of anything, punishing them for things they have no control over, and wasting good talents and infrastructure.
The workers and gamers would own the fucking companies if I was ‘in charge’. I have no intention of letting poor management ruin any of the games. I would kill Ubisoft to signal the end of an old rotten era and the beginning of a new, better era. Death is not a thing to be shunned and rejected as much as accepted as a vital step of the natural cycle. Like an over grown predator in the wilds, its death would sustain and entire ecosystem unto itself spurning the creation of newer smaller life.
Why are you defending Ubisoft like they actually give a shit about their workers? They clearly don’t more than any other tech company otherwise they’d be more like Larian less like EA or Activision. There’s more reasons to kill them off and break them up than let them live.
How old are you?
If they don’t sell the game but a long term rental license, then they should not say “we’ve sold 1234557890 copies of <game>”.
The thing is with MMOs or online only games do you have a valid expectation of the game surviving forever?
It was deliberate choice by them to make even the single player campaign online homie. It ain’t an mmo, and it never should have been built like this.
Don’t even play like that wasnt fucked up, ok? If your actual argument is “i think companies should get to do what they want” them say that, with your whole chest, not this Weak socratic-method-bootlick-bull…
Take that stand and defend it. Or you could also stfu
It was deliberate choice by them to make even the single player campaign online homie.
As one would expect from an online racing game. Anyone buying it would know in advance that single player offline modes do not exist when they bought the game.
It ain’t an mmo, and it never should have been built like this.
It kind of was and it was intended to work as it did by the company that made it.
If your actual argument is “i think companies should get to do what they want”
My argument us that this is a game designed to be played online only. When you bought the game the packaging/materials do not talk about offline play so you shouldn’t expect it to work in a way it expressly isn’t designed to do. Adults should be aware of what things do when they buy them.
It ain’t an mmo, and it never should have been built like this.
It kind of was and it was intended to work as it did by the company that made it.
Adults don’t dance around semantics in debate when they’re called out. I told you to stand up and this is your response? Mebbe you’re not even hidin! Maybe it’s the only way you can talk?
I guess you disagree, but I find your speech pattern embarrassing and tiring.
Be better eh? For me
Your perspective seems to be you should get whatever you want regardless of the actual product you were sold and the terms of that sale. That’s not rational. You bought an online only game. If you wanted a single player offline mode to exist then you should have bought a game that had one.
“You will own nothing and like it”
Some call it piracy when you download games, movies, music, software or books. I call it an online public library. In 2003 I used to get video games from the public library, install them on my PC and play them. You had to have the disk in your CD drive to play the game so when the game was due back at the library you could return or renew it. If game makers don’t provide hard copies then downloading is no different than using the library.
Tell you what customers absolutely can do: decide to stop doing business with you.
All I want Ubisoft to do is make more Rayman games. Yet they doing things like this.
This is why I just pirate games from big developers. They’re fuckers so fuck them anyway.
The use of the words ‘buy’, “own” or ‘purchase’ in connection with DRM rental should be an international felony, and grounds for immediate break-up of businesses that use them.
