Dead Game News: The Crew

Thanks for your loyalty. Bye.

Using the classic "b-b-b-but the steam numbers don't show the whole truth" isn't a valid argument. Steam is the Flagship store to buy games and most people will be on steam. End of story. Ubisoft launcher is universally despised. Secondly, that 14 million or whatever number you gave for ubisoft games is a way worse metric to use because 1) they were NOT saying ACTIVE players - they were saying total lifetime ubisoft game copies sold. 2) it includes literally every single ubisoft game ever, including games like siege which obviously are going to carry most of the bulk of the sales , 3) that number is from 2016, and 4) they offered the game free to players multiple times throughout its life cycle. Many people would just download the game just to have before the 30 day free period wears off and likely never even played it, but that counts as a sale.

Let's not kid ourselves here, absolutely no one is playing this game. But it shouldn't matter because that's not the point. No need to cope about this old dead game, the point is that they shouldn't be allowed to just "shut down servers" without allowing an offline version to live on. Doesn't matter if the game has 1 million or 1 people playing. Even wasting your time trying to say the game isn't dead sets a terrible precedent because it makes people LESS willing to give a shit about games that aren't mainstream trash.

ubisoft would drag a lawsuit like this out for years lol

classy action needing a class action

Ubisoft tends to apply patches to games that have online features

I hope something gets done about this crap. All I can say is that New Zealand's consumer protection laws suck - they're good on paper, but everyone here is too lax to enforce them more than once in a while. Companies here are about as exploitative as they are in the US because they know there won't be any (worthwhile) repercussions for breaking consumer protection laws.
A shame about this game in particular though. I always thought it looked decent, but never bought it because Ubisoft sucks in basically every possible way.

Best of luck on your venture, man. Ubisoft can't keep getting away with this.

I don't own The Crew myself, but I really support your idea. Something needs to be done about this rapidly growing problem. 👍

The problem with doing this in the EU is they also have strong 'artists rights' laws that give a creator a lot of control over even sold works. If a painter sells a painting they often still have some say over what happens to it. This viewpoint in the EU part of why we have idiotic lengths to copywrite. It used to be 14years if registered with an optional 14year renewal. Nothing if not registered. Now you get about a century on a scribble on a napkin with no effort on your part.

Considering that the public are counted as "consumers", I am in no way blown away at the contempt of those with vast amounts of money towards the rest.
Are you a consumer? Do you merely exist to suckle the teat of drip-feed content until you kick the bucket? Are you merely a nod that mindlessly opens your mouth like Pac-Man to gobble whatever is in front of you?
"Consumer" rights. "Consumer" price index. "Consumers say- Consumers feel-"
Kindly take shelter under my nuts with that jargon.

Try contacting Jeremy at The Quartering. This sounds right up his alley. If you want to sue them in Europe do it in Poland or Hungary. They'ed be sick I bet. They are a French company so I'd avoid that country.

We need pirates to bring this game the life support. Just like they did with long gone NFS World

I havn't bought a game since Skyrim rreqired an active steam connection and didn't even work out of the box until I d/l'ed 3 Gb worth of patch. I blame all of you who've bought a new game since 2012
- did u not see this coming?!

Ross, a quick update: This video reached Louis Rossman, and he might be able to help make this a more palpable case.

Bro no, wtf... I literally just got The Crew to work on my Linux machine since I jumped ship from windows, and now this...? Haven't had a solid racing game in years, and this is my all time favorite as we speak, and it's just a stress release after a very crappy day's work. And true, I myself haven't played TC2 as it's a completely different game, so yeah this is real sad... Would love to see a single player patch tho, cuz yeah it's cool playing with others now and then and doing challenges, runs from cops, crate missions etc, but seriously I'd love to be able to keep the game going even if offline tbh

Ross, I appreciate your effort or at least an attempt to prevent further cases like this where a gaming company just randomly decides to prevent people from accessing a game they paid for years ago, but as you've pointed out - a court case success that already has a low chance of happening would only work in a specific region like US or France.

So let's say a class action lawsuit does push through. What then? That's just one country where there's a legal requirement for ubisoft to continue providing access to The Crew in some capacity, be it running a small server or issuing a patch. But what about the rest of the world? Every country has its own set of laws and legalities regarding licenses, services, products, consumer protection etc - are we supposed to get a care going in 200+ regions globally to ensure players anywhere on the planet can keep playing this game?

That doesn't sound realistic to me and it's cheaper for ubisoft to either pay off 60$ to owners actually affected or care about the issue, or run a minor server that has a built in region check/block and if you're accessing the game from an IP that's not recognised as whitelisted - you'll just be prohibited from getting past the title screen

These corporations only understand the language of profits and revenues, and until gamers start avoiding ubisoft titles en mass nothing will change

It sounds insane to me that they wouldn't just disable the online features and leave it available as a single player game.

I think this was always a concern and hurt sales of The Crew a bit when it first came out. The always online part always bothered people because we knew it would eventually be used to screw over the players just like this.

I know that highway it's by Miami on crew I play the crew 1 daily and drive to Spotify music lol

Preservation isn't about physical VS digital. Preservation is about DRM.
Physical only protects your right to resell or loan your games. It doesn't protect your right to keep playing after a publisher decides to pull the plug on an always online DRM check and render the game unplayable.

Games as a Service (GaaS) is by far not new. SaaS (Software as a Service) has been offered for decades by Adobe, Autodesk and numerous other companies. And the condition for those are pretty much the same. "On 1/1/2024 we will stop supporting this product. End of story.". So, with this in mind, I would be very surprised if it wouldn't hold up in court.
With that said though, IMHO you would have a bigger chance in Europe in a country like Belgium that has already showed that they don't like to be bullied by big gaming companies like EA. Just a suggestion. I would stay away from France (Ubisoft..) though.

I have actually uncovered the entire map, no grey left on it anywhere, even the water near new york

If anyone including you, would like to sue Ubisoft. Myself as a long time player i'm 100% supporting the idea and decision. Unless "it's your turn Ubisoft" and you just unlock the game for offline playing or maybe allow people or create a official tool to host their own servers and create sessions either free roam or pvp racing.

My tip: The most important explanation for a less experienced judge or anyone would be: You are paying for a product which should meet some requirements to use it, like a car or so and suddenly it lose the values because of the fault of the seller, so it doesn't anymore meet those requirements from that point where it should and you paid for it to meet those requirements. And you didn't paid for renting it but getting it. It is not selled as a subscription but a real-time product so the usage of it should be not limited to what the producer did in this case Ubisoft did which is locking the access to something which is your money for product + for them obviously. From the point you bought the product, in this case full game not early access or free2play microtransactions, It should stay as for your own usage without limits.

Basically it is like Netflix would have no rules, no EULA or anything like that. They would change things or close things without your permission where you did got it for your usage + obviously paid money to them so it could be not your property. Even if a product is their property and they are it's creators, you are paying to have it for yourself as property. If that would be free2play with microtransactions, it is understandable their services might be not staying, they don't have to pay you back. You paid at your own risk to enjoy some additional paid content in a free game which might become non profitable later. The same goes to always online games where they do state that. But in terms when a game is selled as full product, it should not work like that, at least it didn't in case of other games examples.

Take as great example Gran Turismo Sport for PlayStation. Not only it has online services down but you can still access the game, you can even re-sell it to someone in case he would like to just put the blu-ray into the console and install & play it. It remains a product you paid to have access for, while The Crew will not have that if Ubisoft will ignore it which would be extra bad for their reputation in my opinion. 🙂👍

"I'm not a lawyer or anything. I don't know any rules or anything. Just thought my explanation makes sense but I might be wrong as well"

Bro, you are a savior. I hope u will win for us <3

Yes, suing is I believe the only way we can fight for our rights as consumers. I bought the game, the ultimate version, the complete one. It stayed on my backlog, since I'm more interested in playing other games. But that didn't mean I did not want to play it at some point further ahead in time. I really did not expect for Ubisoft to close the servers and render MY GAME unusable. I do believe any game should have at least the singleplayer part patched in order for the experience to survive the closing of the servers tho.

I don't understand how Ubisoft EULA is even legal... It's something that we "accept" AFTER buying the game, and accepting it is the only way to unlock the game we've ALREADY bought.

It's like buying a car and then when you're ready to leave with your new car being told that in order to start the engine we have to accept that the car can be stolen back by the manufacturer at any time. You've already spent the money on the car, and the only way to use it is to accept some shady secret EULA.

Also, for people who think that physical copies of games are good to prevent companies stealing our games, on top of the arguments already made in this video, don't forget that most games nowadays come with incomplete copies of the games on disc. In order to play it properly you have to install a day one patch with a bunch of bug fixes and sometimes even part of the content that was missing when they made the disc.

Don't sue in Delaware lol

There are additional things about The Crew that makes it even more egregious. Asobo Studios, the creators of FUEL and who aided development of The Crew, also helped to develop Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, a game the size of the earth that has a (watered down) physical release in the EU and cached offline modes everywhere.
The EU might be the best avenue for legal action as the 2019 Digital Content Directive requires suppliers to provide tangible media (including streamed games) with their advertised characteristics, including functionality. This means game publishers must be very specific and transparent about if their games are online only or not, and consumers will be able to claim refunds if the publishers did in fact fail to provide sufficient information about how the product/service functions.

Sue in Europe, you might have a chance... would be real interesting but someday someone will have to do that or we will always have this issue!

Ubisoft... more like... no idea, just fuck em. I do not buy their shit for years now. It is just a bad company.

Please sue Ubisoft!!
The Crew is one of my favorite games to this day… it should not get lost

So this is why I can't play crew anymore , 1 or two ..?

Ubisoft games aren't mod friendly for a good reason. They want you to pay for stuff that could've easily been created by a modder for free then call it a dlc.

i also think that they're gonna start doing this to thier other games as well, I can't even access the custom maps by other people in Far Cry 4 anymore.

100% chance that the long terms of service nobody reads that they force you to agree says "You are purchasing a licence to use this software. Ubisoft reserves the right to terminate the software at any time"

Man, I REALLY hope you get this off the ground..If Total Biscuit were still around, he'd probably be a great person for this...

if you bought the physical copy theres no way you could have read their eula until you installed it and it does not say on the case that the game will be rendered useless in the future

Start by reporting Ubisoft to the FTC.

Someone get Karl Jobst involved.
He may be a bit busy with other game related law stuff, but perhaps he could increase the reach to an even bigger audience?

the game was never pirated bc it still had servers and ubisoft could go against that. I hate the fact companies are doing this making games not easily preservable...

I'm almost sure a lawsuit like this would work in most countries in Europe

This kind of malarkey is why I give money to the EFF.

Go off king! 👑

Tie Ubisoft up in a lawsuit and they might completely collapse and sell the company. Things ain’t good in that sideshow

We Need a Multi Million Dollar Gamer who Loves the Crew with some Cash for the best Lawyers <3

The Crew 1 is the Best in Series <3

Let the Game not Die Ubisoft FFS!!!

Are you kidding me? I just bought the crew with dlc like 2 months ago, and now it will be taken, wtf???

Afaik the issue with games is they are classed as software and it was established a long time ago that you don’t actually own the software you buy you just buy a license to use the software. So I don’t think it’s been to court because the courts will just say games are software and subject to a license agreement etc. I could be wrong tho. I’m also not in the USA.