Full title: Ubisoft says you “cannot complain” it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren’t “deceived” by the lack of an offline version “to access a decade-old, discontinued video game”

Ubisoft’s lawyers have responded to a class action lawsuit over the shutdown of The Crew, arguing that it was always clear that you didn’t own the game and calling for a dismissal of the case outright.

The class action was filed in November 2024, and Ubisoft’s response came in February 2025, though it’s only come to the public’s attention now courtesy of Polygon. The full response from Ubisoft attorney Steven A. Marenberg picks apart the claims of plaintiffs Matthew Cassell and Alan Liu piece by piece, but the most common refrain is that The Crew’s box made clear both that the game required an internet connection and that Ubisoft retained the right to revoke access “to one or more specific online features” with a 30-day notice at its own discretion.

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16d

Not every game is an MMO requiring vast server farms. A game like the crew 1 that is past it’s prime is not expensive to keep a few servers running for. It’s a negligible cost.

They could also put in the time to give players the tools to host their own servers, or simply allow offline play. This used to be standard for all PC games. They chose to do neither of these things in an obvious effort to force players towards the sequel or their other games. They should not be permitted to do anti-consumer things like this.

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1316d

Even MMOs have been run by amateurs. If you make the servers available, someone will figure out how to run it.

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-316d

yes scaling past a couple hundred users becomes an engineering nightmare

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315d

Depends on the game for what point scaling further gets difficult. I think Factorio can do near infinite with the clusterio mod and from a server host perspective it’s very easy to setup. You just need enough servers, the mod allows cross server interaction.

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