Promising things to your audience and not fulfilling them has a small drawback: the audience, instead of understanding you and returning smiles, gets angry. If you promise that your game will never have microtransactions and introduce them the following year, if you swear that the DLCs will be free and proceed to schedule a paid one… Or if you assure that it will always work online and proceed to shut it down as soon as it goes a little wrong. This is what happened to Ubisoft… and it faces a trial where it doesn’t have it easy.
The Crew, forever
In 2014, Ubisoft released The Crew, an open-world game that required you to always be connected to play, featuring a campaign, multiplayer mode, and a devoted community whose following led to two sequels. However, in April 2024, without consulting the players, they decided to shut down the servers permanently. In other words: no matter if you have it on a disc, you will never be able to play because you were required to be connected to the Internet to do so.
And now, Matthew Cassell and Alan Liu, two people angry with the company, have decided to file a lawsuit as it should be, under the idea that Ubisoft has broken its promise to consumers by telling them they were buying a game when, in reality, they were renting a limited license. It should be noted that without the servers being active, you can’t even play the single-player part, because Ubisoft has decided not to make it available offline, something that, according to them, is “rubbing salt in the wound.”
It is not the only lawsuit that Ubisoft faces for the decision to kill its own game, and now the plaintiffs are waiting for other players to join the legal attack, seeking monetary compensation. As they themselves say: “Imagine you buy a pinball machine and years later you go to play only to find that the flippers, the pinball, and the springs are missing, and the monitor is no longer there. It turns out that the creator of the machine has decided to come to your house, dismantle it, and take away your ability to play the game you bought and thought you owned”.Someone in the company is deeply regretting their decision to pay for the servers right now.