Ubisoft continues its streak of unfortunate situations by getting in another lawsuit filed by a couple of gamers from California (via Polygon), who are unhappy about how the open-world racing game, The Crew, got canned in March of this year. The class action lawsuit was filed by Matthew Cassell who originally got the game in 2020, along with Alan Liu, who got it back in 2018.
Both of the buyers thought, and rightfully so, that once they had purchased The Crew, they would continue to own it indefinitely. But in today’s world, even owning physical media doesn’t mean you actually own the product permanently.
The same can be said about The Crew, which is no longer playable regardless of which version of the game you own, and if you don’t, there is no way to ever experience the game again. Even though Ubisoft plans to make an offline version of The Crew 2 and The Crew: Motorfest, the French developer has no such plans for the original game.
The class action lawsuit against Ubisoft aims to get monetary relief for everyone who purchased The Crew before it was trashed completely. Whether these claims come to pass or not, only time will tell, but since this is a class action suit, which means one party is representing a much larger number of people, it mainly depends on how many buyers of The Crew will back the case.
To combat the possibility of such claims from consumers, marketplaces like Steam have warnings that explicitly state that some games are just licenses and not actual products, which can expire with time, or whenever the developer feels like it.
Ubisoft has seen some tough times as of late, with this being its second lawsuit in recent memory. Most of the recent financial difficulties are because of Star Wars Outlaws, which underperformed in terms of sales. This resulted in Ubisoft’s share price falling to its lowest in the last decade, and so the developer decided to delay the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to February 2025, where it will compete with some heavy hitters like Monster Hunter Wilds and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
