Last week I downloaded Dark Age of Camelot which I have not played nor paid for 20 years, and my character was still there. I was really not expecting them to keep the data for so long without any payment.
I understand why most companies wouldn’t do that, but they should be forced to open-source online games that get shut down or otherwise made non-functional.
At minimum they should provide copies of the software to anyone who paid a subscription, and then enterprising individuals would figure out how to get private servers running
If you buy a game, which you cannot use in single player mode, without internet access, you are signing up for this happening to you too, one day, guaranteed.
I mean, that’s basically all AAA games in 2024. Even songs PC ports which historically avoided DRM and network requirements is starting to mandate PSN accounts. I 100% would prefer to be able to play offline, more often than not it’s unwanted telemetry or BS bloat but that isn’t something we as users can enforce.
It gets to be way harder to argue in court when it isn’t a “clean kill”, using Ross Scott’s words, so The Crew is going to be one of the best examples we’ll ever get for courts to rule on. I expect Ubisoft would rather settle than let this one go that far though.
I imagine a lawsuit would likely bring up the topic of how hard it would be for a developer to keep the game around past purchase.
For instance, imagine a massively multiplayer online game; everyone playing the game is acutely aware of how much server hardware is needed to maintain that online presence, and it’s unrealistic to assume it would exist forever.
That’s probably why attention was pushed onto The Crew. It’s a racing game that shouldn’t need much from a server, so it’s arguably unfair to tie it to that access and take it offline.
I would imagine it would reveal how sh*tty the ubisoft code bases are and has a reputation cost XD. But if it’s that big of a risk then they should keep the servers running indefinitely.
Pirates have managed to run servers for tons of MMOs. The only thing stopping people from running servers themselves is that they’re not made available.
Don’t get it wrong, the reason The Crew was the perfect game to start the movement is solely because Ubisoft is french, a country that has pretty strong consumer laws that they aren’t respecting.
If you’re an EU citizen, please take the time to sign this citizen initiative to stop killing games. It could be our best chance of preventing such situations in the future.
This guy’s strawman arguments have already been destroyed by plenty of people who actually know what they’re talking about and don’t have an interest in keeping the current situation.
The guy who won’t go 5 seconds without flashing his “20 years of service to Blizzard” badge also was dumbfounded at the possibility of people self hosting game servers like World of Warcraft, even though they’ve been doing it for years. Dude seems like a MASSIVE know it all.
While I agree in principle with the lawsuit, it is interesting that this is the game that people are suing over. I heard the hype and downloaded the crew 2 and it was complete dogshit of a game. I don’t mean from the perspective of finish, just the that the game, as intended, sucked ass. This isn’t the only ubisoft game like this, I don’t know how they manage to generate so much hype and fanfare around these tuberculosis vomit games over and over again.
I’ve never played The Crew nor The Crew 2, but I hate this guilt-by-association type of argument with every fiber of my heart.
Not because it defends Ubisoft (in this case), but because it completely accepts the asshole’s premise that the successor of a product is necessarily a valid substitute for the product itself, and the latter is not worth keeping around - it’s like eating an apple that has been cooked in an oven at 300°C for 5 hours, then arguing that apples are bad for your health.
See:
Overwatch vs Overwatch 2
Halo CE/2/3/W/ODST/R vs Halo 4/5/I (idk about H:W2)
Halo: CE vs Halo: CEA (yes I’m listing Halo twice, sue me)
Risk Of Rain vs Risk Of Rain 2 (both are very good games, but they are completely different from each other)
The quality of the game isn’t why The Crew makes a good target. It’s because it’s made by Ubisoft, which is based in France. And France has some pretty strict consumer protection laws. Were this, say, EA, which is based in the US, the lawsuit would be a non-starter. In adddition to that, France is a part of EU, which means Ubisoft has to comply with EU law in addition to the aforementioned French laws. So if this goes through, they will have to fight this on at least two fronts. The Crew is also a singleplayer game with an online component, which shouldn’t be necessary for the game to function, but here we are.
So to sum up: the lawsuit is not because people are super passionate for The Crew (though some probably are), but because if you’re going to make an example of a game, your best shot is suing a company which is located in a country with good customer protection laws. The Crew just happened to fit that bill.
polygon.com
Aktywne