The Crew Servers To Shut Down
Ubisoft recently announced that The Crew, a racing game that takes place across the entire USA, will be shut down on March 31, 2024, because the servers will be switched off. This is quite frankly a scandalous move and has provoked a backlash from those of us who bought the game back in 2014. This game includes both single and multiplayer modes and therein lies the problem. So many games today require us to log on to a game server even if we are playing solo as a single player which to me doesn’t make any sense at all. Unless of course, it’s to the benefit of the developers to scrape data from gamers, which is the more likely scenario, not to mention the hideous DRM checks.
Whether this situation is a legal grey area is a moot point and since I’m not a corporate lawyer, I can’t state an opinion on the EULA (End User License Agreement) which in most cases states that the end user is licensed to use the software:
EULA 1.1: ‘THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED TO YOU, NOT SOLD.’ = license expired/you don’t own it
8: ‘Termination by UBISOFT will be effective upon (a) notice to You …(c) at the time of UBISOFT’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product.’
Most EULAs and TOSs (Terms Of Service) are crammed with legalese and in my opinion serve only to protect the software developer. How many of us have actually read any of these documents? Does anyone ever read an EULA before installing a game? I doubt it very much.
Gamer To Take Legal Action
YouTuber, Ross ‘Accursed Farms’ Scott is considering a class action lawsuit against Ubisoft because he considers the termination of the game to be a grey area that needs to be challenged. He doesn’t expect to win the case even if he manages to get to court, which he doubts will ever happen. But what exactly are our consumer rights when we buy a game? It would appear that we don’t have any if said game can be torn from our hands at any moment:
Ubisoft grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensed, non-commercial and personal license to install and/or use the product… for such time until either you or Ubisoft terminates this EULA…
So there it is in black and white. We have no comeback whatsoever and the EULA does not mention a ‘license in perpetuity’ anywhere in the text.
One possible scenario would be for Ubisoft to patch the game enabling single-player which is the mode in which many of us have been playing the game anyway, but I’m not holding my breath.
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There is something to be said about having hard copies of any media you may own because it it true, when you purchase digital , you don’t really own it.
We also see it right now with funimation shutting down and sending their customers to crunchyroll with funimation wiping there servers clean , leaving behind A LOT of pissed off people, sure you can keep going with crunchyroll (for more money) but none of your media will follow you …… BS
I have a hard time handing money over for anything digital , including cloud services because what it amounts to is you pay for the service , making someone else rich , when they get rich enough they either shut it down and you lose everything or they sell out , you might or might not lose everything but one thing is for sure , the incoming service will more than likely charge you more money and not honor whatever agreement you previously had.
Games, movies or music? buy the hard copy , you’ll be glad you did and you can always transfer them to digital.
Cloud storage ? buy yourself an external HDD
Stop giving money away to someone or something that may or may not be there tomorrow.
Well that’s fine, Ed, but to acquire a game today, you have to give money to the merchant, be that Steam or any other provider.
And as for hard copies, I take your point, but apart from consoles, games are all digital nowadays and we ditched our VHS/DVD players years ago.
“we ditched our VHS/DVD players years ago”
Speak for yourself, I still have mine that are in perfect working order. I can still convert old VHS and DVD’s to digital and I can burn digital to DVD as backup if needed.
This problem isn’t limited to games. For years I used ReplayTV with a lifetime license. ReplayTV would update program guide data nightly enabling one to record their selected shows automatically if the license for the machine was valid. The company was sold and a few years later they announced that they would no longer provide the program data updates which would make the units useless. After a lot of backlash they unlocked all the units and provided a user group what they needed to operate their own guide data service which was offered to users for a nominal fee.
The same thing has happened with various home automation products over the years leaving their users with hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of useless products.
Perhaps there’s a business opportunity for someone to take over orphaned product servers to provide continued support for a fee.
Buyer beware!
I notice many places now having the players/members splitting the cost of the servers amongst themselves so that they can keep on playing. How many people would be willing to do that? But the fact remains, once the developers say they are done, there isn’t much we can do.