The consumer defense association UFC Que-Choisir announced on Tuesday that it is taking legal action against the French gaming giant Ubisoft over the decision to deactivate the online servers for the racing game “The Crew,” citing “deceptive” commercial practices and “abusive clauses.”
In a statement, UFC-Que Choisir believes that Ubisoft’s decision to cut off access to the title two years ago by deactivating its online servers deprives consumers “of any use of a game they had purchased, without ever being informed of any specific expiration date.”
The consumer association, which filed its lawsuit in the Créteil court, also deems it “unacceptable that Ubisoft considers, in its general conditions, that players only acquire a simple ‘user license’ of the game that could be revoked at any time by the publisher.”
This action is part of a larger movement among players and is supported by a European citizen initiative called “Stop destroying video games,” which gathered over a million signatures last year.
The group of players behind this petition denounces the practice where some publishers deactivate online servers of a game after a certain number of years, making it inaccessible to its users and therefore unusable.
While this practice is not new in the gaming industry, the decision regarding the racing game “The Crew,” released in 2014 and having nearly 12 million players two years after its release, represents “a particularly clear legal case,” according to Brune Blanc-Durand, a lawyer for UFC-Que Choisir.
Although playable online, the game, which has had several sequels since, had a “solo” part that players could explore without needing to be connected, but it became inaccessible.
When asked about the topic by a shareholder at Ubisoft’s General Assembly in July, CEO Yves Guillemot defended the decision by explaining that keeping a game’s servers online is a “very important” support and “quite heavy services (…) to ensure that the game runs continuously.”
“You provide a service and this service is not eternal. There is an operating period,” he added, stating that Ubisoft includes in its terms of use “the fact that at some point, we will not be able to continue supporting the game.”
“This is an issue we are working on, but it is not unique to Ubisoft.”
