I’m using the word “feel” because I’m not qualified to provide a legal opinion.
It lasting 10 years doesn’t mean much to the people who were sold the game in the last 6 months without any warning they were buying into the final hours.
Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?
My unsubstantiated theory is the the licences they signed for all the vehicles and real world content had a 10 year lifetime.
Usually those contracts would just require that they stop selling the game, but they may have included something about the servers in the contract too.
Either way they new something was going to change in 2024 and realistically they knew which of these possibilities were viable:
sign new deals with all licensors and continue business as usual
sign new deals with cooperative licensors and modify the game to remove the others
remove the game from sale and keep the servers running for current customers
remove the game from sale and kill the servers - tell people to buy the sequal
I’d they waited until December of 2023 to have that meeting then that feels negligent.
If they had that meeting earlier and continued to sell the game (until ≈100 days to EOL) without warning customers that feels fraudulent.
On December 14, 2023, Ubisoft delisted The Crew and its expansions from digital platforms, suspended sales of microtransactions, and announced that the game’s servers would be shut down on March 31, 2024, citing “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”.
People who paid around us$40 for the game on December 13 were being sold a lemon.
Given that it was released in 2014 it seems likely that their licenses were given a 10 year duration and they always intended to shutdown in 2024 at the latest (of course if its user base failed to reach critical mass they could have pulled the plug earlier).
Does selling a game in 2023 when you plan to kill it in 2024 legally qualify as fraud?
I don’t think he has a great understanding of Australian prices.
The current MKW price of au$120 looks high but if you remove our GST and convert to USD with the average exchange rate over the last 12 months its equivalent to us$70.85. (Donky Kong is au$110 or us$65).
We are currently at a low point with our dollar so the conversion for MKW today would be us$66.49. (DK would be us$61).
Compared to the prices I’m seeing internationally it looks like Australia is getting relatively generous prices from Nintendo.
As a bundled launch title I expect most launch window sales will be digital. There won’t be 2nd hand game cards on the market in any volume until after they drop the bundle.