It was about a decade ago when Ubisoft launched yet another racing IP named “The Crew”. It was followed by The Crew 2 in 2018 and their most recent installment, Motorfest. The original was deemed a unique game at the time as it was classed according to store listings as a “revolutionary action-driving MMO” and designed to “leverage new hardware capabilities to connect players online like never before”. What did all this mumbo jumbo mean? That they gave you a car and a recreation of the USA as your open-world playground. You just had to shift into gear and race to your heart’s content.
Sadly, the first game didn’t age like good wine. Ubisoft posted an announcement on 14th December of last year that all editions of the game and currency packs were to be delisted that day. Then we saw the servers slowly shutting down by 31st March of this year, making the game unplayable on any platform. Ubisoft did offer refunds for recent purchases of the game according to Polygon, but this likely didn’t help out for a game that was already 10 years old. There’s also the matter of people who purchased physical copies of the game and how the servers shutting down made their disks nothing less than something to cut pizza with.
What Can You Expect If You Bought The Crew?
Turns out two gamers from California are not happy with this decision. So they decided to sue The Crew according to the same article from Polygon – they are in the process of suing the company in a “proposed class action lawsuit”. The lawsuit mentions players purchasing the game were duped. Here’s an extract from the article:
First, by allegedly misleading players into thinking they were buying a game when they were merely licensing it — even if a player bought a physical disk. Second, that Ubisoft “falsely represented” that The Crew’s files were on its physical disks to access freely, and that the disks weren’t simply a key for the game. Ubisoft is violating California consumer protection laws, the lawsuit alleges.
The two plaintiffs who bought the game in 2018 and 2020 respectively would’ve acted differently if they knew this would happen. Unfortunately, little did they know that within a few years, the game would be rendered unplayable.
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