Ubisoft Sued for Misleading Customers. Plaintiffs Presented Evidence and Claims
Two gamers from California have sued Ubisoft for misleading them about The Crew's situation. They are demanding compensation for each person affected.
Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew in April of this year and revoked the game's license from all its owners. Due to the lack of offline mode, it became completely unplayable. This led to a significant uproar online and also resulted in the initiation of the "Stop killing games" campaign, which is still gathering signatures for consideration by the European Union. Now, for the same reason, a French company has been sued.
Class action lawsuit from two players
According to Polygon, two aggrieved players from California are responsible for the case. It's important to note that it was there where stores were required to inform customers that they were only selling licenses for the game. Gamers have filed a lawsuit accusing Ubisoft of violating consumer protection laws. They claim that they were cheated in two ways.
First, they were led to believe that they were purchasing the game when in reality they were merely renting a limited license to access it. Second, the French company was allegedly "misrepresenting" that the files of The Crew were located on physical disks that consumers could buy, or in digital form, for which they could pay to download.
In reality, the plaintiffs described the purchasable product as "something like a key that can be used to open the gate of a remote server, which the defendants may one day stop maintaining."
The prosecution side is seeking court approval to proceed with the lawsuit as a class action, which would enable other players of The Crew to participate as well. In addition, the two players demanded monetary compensation and damages for each person affected by the "killing" of the game.
The lawsuit also noted that Ubisoft has shut down servers for its games in the past, but still maintained the ability to play them offline. Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed 3 were cited as examples. The company recently announced the addition of offline modes to The Crew 2 and The Crew: Motorfest, but this didn't solve the problems of the first installment in the series.
At the time of writing this text, Ubisoft hasn't responded to the whole matter.
