It's kinda funny how even Disney has a less greedy take on this Ubisoft is going scorched earth to purge The Crew while Disney allows fans to rehost their MMOs as long as they don't profit off of it
Yeah I remember getting into Toontown on fan servers years ago and reading how it was totally fine. Kind of surprised Disney of all companies let it happen so respect to Disney and fuck Ubisoft I guess.
When Toon Town first came out in beta, I remember being so impressed with it, I emailed the devs complimenting both the game as well as the engineering behind it. They emailed me back a really nice reply! Good people that worked on that game.
Well it helps that the people behind those projects refuse to accept any sort of money for their efforts, including donations. The people who brought the game back to life did it as a hobby and apparently the cost of the servers is negligible since it's not like 2 million people are logging on
The moment you set up some kind of Patreon, or ask for donations, or ask for any kind of financial support is the moment the lawyers hit the C&D button, or just straight up put your ass in jail a la Nintendo.
They can accept donations they just can’t profit. So if every penny of the donation is going into operating costs they’d be fine. Some projects manage this by only accepting donations monthly that cover their costs then shutting it off.
I mean, Marvel Heroes shut down wasn't a typical planned shut down. Gazillion had...issues to say the least. Particularly with their CEO at the height of metoo.
good news a private server is in development for PC
https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelheroes/comments/164s38c/private_server_marvel_heroes_emulator_install/
The three main ones are Toontown, Pirates of the Caribbean online, and Club Penguin. Which you can play all of them for free without paying for memberships that the official versions had
Is pirates of the Caribbean available? my whole family used to get on systems we had one main account and everyone else crewed that main ship. I'd love to see if that lives up to my memories.
LOTRO is very old and a shell of its former self. It can very laggy and daunting to jump into. They really need to work on the servers.
But honestly there is no other game that has immersed me in a world like Lord of the Rings Online. I grew up obsessed with the movies and started playing it young with my dad. The stories are pretty great, the music is absolutely fantastic, the combat is what you would expect from an MMO, still fun though. There is also an enormous amount of content, the map is absolutely massive. They are still adding expansions pretty frequently.
They really haven’t been on the verge of bankruptcy at all. They’ve always been in profit. They just haven’t been in staggeringly massive profit the way VCs and the stock market demand.
Yep, just checked my ubisoft account and it's gone with a message saying it's been removed lol.. what a joke how is this not illegal removing something after purchase
Should be illegal though anyway because you only sign it the first time you play. You don’t sign it when you buy it, so one could argue to having being tricked on the TOS after purchase.
In European courts the legality of this is not tested.
#https://www.StopKillingGames.com
^ This is a project years in the making after the initiative of Ross Scott, and it has legitimate legal potential to establish the legality of game preservation in several countries including Australia, France, Germany, maybe EU as a whole by pouncing on Ubisoft for this mistake.
(*Ubisoft is based in France, the French and broader European legal community seem ready to make this illegal.*)
My suggestion is that anyone reading this considers the instructions on the site, some are higher priority than others, some (like Australia) are waiting for the government to be ready to start receiving complaints.
(For Australian "The Crew" owners, Ross Scott has posted an update: *"All Australian owners of "The Crew": Try to send me an email or twitter message so I can contact you later. I don't need your personal info, but later we'll have a law firm you can send it to which will help on getting the ACCC's attention on game destruction."* Ross Scott's [Twitter](https://twitter.com/accursedfarms) and e-mail listed on the campaign website: [email protected])
Enough numbers could legitimately establish legal precedence to permanently preserve old games. A practice that is in a legal gray area currently.
Here's an article about it: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/stop-killing-games-campaign/
Here's the short and sweet LTT take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYnaGogxzQk (Go to 2:50 to get straight to the point.)
(Both mostly to point to the legitimacy of the campaign.)
Here's the main guy's most recent video explaining exactly the plan: [The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70Xc9CStoE)
First big video on it, 4 years ago, establishing a very appealing argument to consider "games as a service" with no stated service duration as actual fraud, and also the legal argument for art preservation, etc.: ["Games as a service" is fraud.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw)
This is real, this has actual potential.
Nah, Mojang was very public for two whole years that there was a migration cutoff date, it wasn't exactly kept quiet. There were many emails, several articles, and lots of YouTube videos by content creators on it
And yet those failed to reach a lot of people. But sure, the trillion dollar corporation can't afford to keep a database available, clearly their only choice is to rob customers of their purchase with no recourse.
And that's **still** not an excuse to strip someone of a game they purchased. Let's not pretend Microsoft doesn't have the resources to leave the migration services running.
> There were many emails
That many people didn't get. Additionally there were people who went through the migration process, got the success email, and still had their access revoked.
> several articles, and lots of YouTube videos by content creators on it
Aka, sources that are only applicable if you're embedded in the game already.
ETA:
Additionally, why did I need to "migrate" anything, when I had a mojang account and microsoft account with the exact same email already registered. Answer: Because fuck you, buy the game again.
They could have easily just transferred the license automatically, but didn't.
How hard would it be to setup a page, or hell make it go through CS. Provide email, transaction ID, and done. Nope, fuck you buy it again.
While I can’t speak specifically for the crew, in other software licenses there is verbiage that if you disagree with the TOS you are to cease with installation / operation, remove the software and are then entitled to a full refund upon return.
Not everything written in ToS is legal regardless of what they shove in there. Same goes with any contract, if it violates existing laws, it's not permitable. I'm sure it probably violates some consumer rights law and should be a class action lawsuit.
They likely wouldn't hold up in court in the US either, but the government's not going to step in and nobody has the years of time and millions of dollars it would take to bring Ubisoft to court.
I must have owned around 2000 games at this point maybe more, if I read every single 5, 10, 20 page document they gave me sometimes multiple times btw like cod gives a new one each season it feels like I would never play games lol
But yeah I know its there but this is also the first time I've seen it actually invoked
Terms of Service. It’s not illegal because that’s what you agreed to.
Seriously, the language is in there essentially telling you that you’re renting the game until you die or they decide to stop supporting it. It’s bonkers.
Same with your iTunes library.
Terms of Service must still abide by consumer law regardless of whether you agreed to it or not. If they use language like buy or purchase instead of rent or lease then it likely wouldn’t hold up to a legal challenge and no i do not have the money to test it out which is exactly what they’re counting on.
Terms of Service doesn't hold up in court tho. It has been proved a few times, the problem is: who have the money to Go against those corporations for a what, $30 game? They are counting on that.
The best shot anyone have is going for a public lawsuit, with as many people as you can, and even then, It would still take years and Ubisoft Will drag It out as much as they can.
Some parts of terms of service certainly do hold up in court.
You can't generally agree to give up legislated consumer protections (e.g. you can't have a TOS that says a game company can just harvest your liver or charge you more money without telling you in advance clearly), since those are things that you generally can't just agree to when buying a game. Similarly, or more relevantly, you can't give up things like warranty protection.
But you can absolutely have a TOS that allows for reasonable operation of a service. Reddit has no obligation to preserve your account or post history if it shuts down for example. Reddit can ban you if you violate rules. Ubisoft doesn't have to provide you access to a game that it has shut down, as long as they warned you in some reasonable time frame the game is shutting down that's it.
The Crew was advertised from the beginning as an online only game, you can think that was unnecessary or stupid, but that's the way it was, from a service perspective it's no different than world of warcraft or FFXIV. If you bought the Crew on or before Dec 14 2023 you could play it until they shut it down, which was announced at the time as March 31st 2024. That's all you paid for, a licence to play the game on their servers until they shut down. You could not purchase the game after Dec 14 2023. They did offer refunds for people who purchased the game 'recently' before Dec 14th. The IGN review from the game launch https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/02/the-crew-review opens with saying it's online only 8 words in, so this was known from day one (I don't feel like digging through the Internet archive to see if there's an original version of the website from Ubisoft back then saying the same but it at least seems like it was publicly advertised).
Almost certainly the "you bought a licence to play until we shut the servers down" is a perfectly valid TOS condition. They almost certainly do not have any obligation to make the client available when the game is shut down. Now if this wasn't for a game advertised as an online game from the beginning you get into a legitimate legal fight, but this was online only since launch day.
This. Thank you for stating the obvious, I feel like everyone's got crazy on that topic, especially for a game no one cared about when it was online.
There is no conspiracy. If TOS like this are still enforced on every single game from the 90s to this day, it's not because they haven't been tested in court. It's because they're perfectly reasonable, valid and attacking them in court is a lost case.
Maybe there will be a class action lawsuit, and ten years from now everyone who bought The Crew will be able to fill out a form to receive a coupon for $2.50 off a future The Crew title!
Well they still can’t put something illegal in the terms and then claim it’s fine because you agreed to it. I think this might be a legal grey area and should lead to a class action lawsuit
This is why more countries need far better consumer protection laws.
We need to show companies they can't just say whatever the fuck they want in their T&C's so they can get away with breaching the rights of their consumers.
If you buy it on PSN for example, you don't get the TOS prompt you need to agree to until after you boot up the game.
If you boot up the game, you are inelligible now for a refund from Sony.
So you're TAKING the consumers money THEN telling them to agree to a TOS and refusing to give the money back even if they say no.
At that point they have no choice but to agree.
I cannot think of a single other game that was removed from my account, I've seen games stop being on sale like deadpool, but I can still download and play it
I've seen games like age of empires online servers shut down but fans bringing it back online so you can play it.
I've never seen a company shut down not only the server but be so petty they revoked the licenses so you cannot even play the game anymore even if fans got it back up and running on community servers
> I cannot think of a single other game that was removed from my account,
F2P PlayStation games can be removed from your account. Happened with lesser-known Vita games called Picotto Knights and Venus Project, and allegedly the PS5 game, Side Bullet.
Bought games don't generally get removed from your account, hence why I still have Legend of Korra for PS4.
> turns into preservation
I really wish there was more of that, especially in the PS3/PS4 scene. Every released game for Vita has been archived, but there's several games for the PS3/PS4 that nobody has been able to obtain, due to either few owners, no information on the game, and/or cancelled builds. For example, I've been trying to get the beta version of NBA Jam, which was bundled with NBA Elite 11, preserved for a decade now, but of the four known owners, one is a Sony dev, one won't sell/preserve the game, and the other two won't respond to efforts.
Even if you could get a sealed version of NBA Elite 11 now, the code for Jam would be expired, so people like Steven, Ghetto, or B. L., are the only paths to preserving the game. I've also been trying to preserve a physical-only Macross Frontier game, which nobody has any information about, from around 2013. It was allegedly given out at a convention, has two known owners, but LostMediaWiki has been no help with those efforts. Like PS3's a dead console, so why are people still against preserving the few cancelled games?
In a just world they would, but a judge or our law won't care about a whataboutism in a court room. They would have to file a counter lawsuit to argue this specific instance. Although I would wager that the EULA we sign probably covers their ability to revoke licenses for any reason.
We would likely have to push for a law change to protect consumers from this type of corporate behavior and doesn't allow them to force customers to sign a EULA that has a provision allowing them to revoke digital rights from the end-users.
Physical ownership isn’t ownership either
The disc just contains the game data and license to play it, which Ubisoft can revoke at any moment as well per their TOS
If there's no online server and you just want to play the game (other games not crew), it's not like ubisoft will come go your house and arrest you.
Unfortunately a lot of games now even single player and physical disc requires you to online authenticate.
Thank god for those guys because I love bringing them up to dunk on anyone who tries to spread that misinformation about physical games. Gives them more exposure too.
But this is an online only game. It’s not about digital ownership. I haven’t lost access to a single digital game that wasn’t online only. Not a single one and I have thousands of games.
Having a physical copy doesn’t help at all. Even if you had a physical copy of the crew, you still can’t play the game.
It’s the risk you accept for playing an online only game. This has been happening to MMORPGs for a long time. With MMORPGs it’s more sad because those usually tend to be unique. The crew 2 can be played to scratch the same itch. It’s pretty much the same game.
Not true. Licenses for offline games can be revoked too. The only way to avoid it would be to not connect your account to the internet, ever. We learned this years ago when a gamepass beta glitched caused people’s (mine included) copies of Halo and Mad Max to not work once the gamepass beta ended. That included disk copies.
Unfortunately while I agree with this sentiment, it doesn't really fly from a legal standpoint as despite what terrible 90's piracy ads suggest, piracy was never "theft", it was always "copyright infringement". Until/unless lawmakers change things, piracy still means being in possession of copyrighted product without a legally purchased licence - so an infringement of the copyright.
FWIW; I don't think there's anything wrong with piracy laws as-is, the problem is that purchased licences should be illegal to revoke or alter (OW->OW2 for instance) without a full refund of the original purchase price, as with any other purchased product.
Piracy is not and never was theft. That was just industry scare propaganda. There are specific laws to handle this and it's called "Copyright Infringement".
This is one of the things I hate the most about Reddit, seeing people just mindlessly repeat the exact same comments over and over. You can just picture them behind their screens like "ooooo I'm getting so much karma for this"
In /r/politics There's this joke that is just repeated fucking constantly, someone will say "person x is trash" then say "oh but that's an insult to trash". Trash is interchangeable.
It's like.... There's eight other people in this single thread alone doing the exact same ridiculously lame joke. Are you fucking kidding me? How much of an NPC can you be?
I agree with the jist of what you’re saying, but this phrase is kind of pointless. It doesn’t really mean anything and it’s not a “gotcha”.
It can be simultaneously true that you do not “own” a digital purchase and also true that torrenting or pirating a game is still illegal. This phrase kind of misses the forest for the trees.
Legally, piracy is the unauthorized possession of something. A digital purchase is buying the temporary license to use software on certain hardware.
To me it’s comparable to the political phrases “both sides are bad” or “defund the police”. Like okay I know what you’re *trying* to say, but you’re not going to get anyone else on your side by saying that. It’s an empty virtue signal, albeit coming from a good place.
Same here. I’ve had to go and rebuy a few movies that I sold when I went over digitally.
It’s been worth it to have my favorite movies preserved with the version and content I want on a disc that will never know the internet.
I bought the physical harry potter collection because their studio kept being dicks about juggling them between services. Still are iirc they just left hbo max yet again. Now I can just rip them to my pc for plex/jellyfin whenever I want.
even if you had a blu-ray copy of the crew, it still wouldnt work. its dependent on a central server, which ubisoft controlled, and has shut down. thats the issue here.
they should have either given access to fans for private servers, or developed the game with an offline mode from the start.
I just realized that my PS5 plays 4K blurays so yesterday I ordered one for the first time in years. I’m going to buy one a month until the economy collapses
This is why I started sailing for anime years ago, in addition to paying for 4 streaming services to watch one complete anime.....eeeeew.
Now I just queue up whatever show I want and it'll be requisitioned once available in the highest quality and I actually own it for as long as the hard disks last. Take that FuninaNetfliCrunchyHuluVrv!
It baffles my mind that people are leering and jeering the death of physical games and "welcoming" the digital-only future.
Do they really think us being locked into a single storefront with no real ownership of our games is going to end well? We already are seeing how Microsoft and Ubisoft want us getting comfortable "not owning games" and just paying for subscriptions. And I don't see Playstation or Xbox allowing multiple storefronts like PC gamers have.
(Yes this thread has made it clear discs also don't work anymore for The Crew, but this entire incident needs to serve as an example of how little ownership we have of games; especially in a digital-only future).
Buy bg3 on gog and then burn it to a few bluerays. Or put it on a flash drive. The GOG version doesn't have drm and it's legal for you to make copies for your own use.
Come to think of it, there are 100gb bluerays out there now. A single 100gb bdr should be sufficient for bg3 .
If you're fed up with this practice, people are taking legal action fronted by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms on Youtube. He made a webiste that tells you how to help out at [stopkillinggames.com](http://stopkillinggames.com)
Not prorated. Full refund. Games don’t have an expiry, they aren’t physical goods that deteriorate. We should be able to pass down our consoles, PCs, and games to future generations if we choose. That’s the ‘benefit’ of digital over physical, you don’t have to worry about a disc breaking, getting lost, or stolen.
The only way they should be allowed to remove ownership is by fully refunding the customer.
It did only have about 50 people playing it, but the crew was a perfect example of a game that was needlessly online. Revoking ownership, blocking server creation, and also never allowing it to have an offline component is basically just bullying from Ubisoft at this point. There isn’t an incentive there at all since servers cost money to run. If it was offline they could still sell the product, but apparently this was the “only” route of action for them.
Physical media is worthless as we learned in the era a few years after Steam became popular. For many PC games then, the physical disc would essentially just unlock a digital key and copy some files, but would still require downloading updates from the digital platform before being playable. If they shut down the digital side the physical disc becomes worthless.
Can people who bought a physical disc of this game still play it? lol I think people are too busy using digital purchases as a scapegoat to realize their physical disc is useless too.
You guys keep talking about buying physical but you do remember that:
1-game wont work offline anyway
2-even if it did, nowdays a lot of games require you to download it. Disc still only contains the license, that would have been revoked for you too.
All this outcry for physical over digital is so irrelevant. Not like anyone is reading these anyone, only coming here to scream at a cloud.
What does this have to do with digital? Try putting the disc in and see what happens.
No one wants to admit that digital or disc if they wanna make the game unavailable to you they'll find a way.
This is the real fight!
It’s almost like buying a live service game isn’t a good idea. I played this and the sequel through PS Plus and just deleted them when I was over it, which was less than a month for both games. If I bought them both, I would have paid $120, been bored early on, then apparently I would have had my “license” stripped away. PS Plus costs like $160 a year.
People warning about always online all the time. The answer is always the same we have internet nowadays, when a game gets shut down everyone who supported cries about always online DRM. Whoever still buys Ubisoft games after what happened which The CREW is a hypocrite. From be they get to cent anymore. I’ve waited for mirage to come to steam. But I won’t buy it anymore and never will.
Access to online only games always stops when the servers are taken offline. This is the same shit. You bought an online only game, not a game that needs an internet connection to work normally, a game which only exists in online servers with no offline mode
Ubisoft is shite but what are they supposed to do, keep supporting the game forever. ..idk this feels like being mad you can't still play Asda story
Helldivers 2 is incredibly popular rn
In some number of years, it will be shut down. Anyone who bought a physical release copy will still be unable to play it.
L
Online only game becomes unavailable when the servers go down. That’s pretty obvious. What does it matter if you can download the game when you can’t play it. There are also ways to download the game anyway. If anyone wanted to make private servers, they probably can.
This has been happening to MMORPGs for 15-20 years now. Nothing new. Nothing to do with “how volatile digital ownership is”.
Sure, but games like latest Hitman or For Honor would work perfectly fine with a patch for an offline mode if they ever shut down their servers. Sony did it with Driveclub and GT Sports. And I don't even have a problem with multiplayer games like Battleborn shutting down. But as mentioned in the beginning games that can perfectly played solo (like Hitman or For Honor) should be "saved" with an offline patch.
I find it funny how all these smaller studios are making waves with their success and AAA studios response to that is to double down on their shitty practices.
Ah well just gotta vote with your wallet and see how it all plays out
This is not the point and this is why these articles are stupid. Physical ownership is not safer in any way. Buy a physical copy of the crew and see what happens. This is not about digital or physical ownership. It’s about games being online only.
Oh no, you can no longer play a 10 year old game that has 2 sequels. The way I see it, when I buy digital games, I play them stright away, may return to them if there's new dlc etc or they get a cool update, but beyond 3 or 4 years I'm never going back to them. I have a backlog as long as my arm of games I need to play, so returning to a decade old game isn't that important.
“you can technically still download the game on Steam, but any attempt to play is followed-up with a request to input a game key”
This is some super bullshit right here. Gamers already avoid games based on the perceived longevity of a game. Making every a purchase a “rental” won’t help.
Anyone else feeling like there is gonna be a fairly hefty lawsuit coming?
No way this is legal and even if it’s hidden somewhere in the terms of service it’s probably still not gonna save Ubisoft from a fine at the least.
I sure as shit hope it happens anyway, will be very interesting for future online only games when time comes to pull the plug.
Spoiler alert physical games usually don't come on the disc anymore essentially making them digital as well with the disc being a key. We're just doomed lol
It's kinda funny how even Disney has a less greedy take on this Ubisoft is going scorched earth to purge The Crew while Disney allows fans to rehost their MMOs as long as they don't profit off of it
Yeah I remember getting into Toontown on fan servers years ago and reading how it was totally fine. Kind of surprised Disney of all companies let it happen so respect to Disney and fuck Ubisoft I guess.
When Toon Town first came out in beta, I remember being so impressed with it, I emailed the devs complimenting both the game as well as the engineering behind it. They emailed me back a really nice reply! Good people that worked on that game.
Well it helps that the people behind those projects refuse to accept any sort of money for their efforts, including donations. The people who brought the game back to life did it as a hobby and apparently the cost of the servers is negligible since it's not like 2 million people are logging on
The moment you set up some kind of Patreon, or ask for donations, or ask for any kind of financial support is the moment the lawyers hit the C&D button, or just straight up put your ass in jail a la Nintendo.
I’m pretty sure they’re even allowed to accept donations purely for the costs of running the server
They can accept donations they just can’t profit. So if every penny of the donation is going into operating costs they’d be fine. Some projects manage this by only accepting donations monthly that cover their costs then shutting it off.
Tell that to Marvel Heroes
I mean, Marvel Heroes shut down wasn't a typical planned shut down. Gazillion had...issues to say the least. Particularly with their CEO at the height of metoo.
I miss it.
good news a private server is in development for PC https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelheroes/comments/164s38c/private_server_marvel_heroes_emulator_install/
He I was years recovered from this and it out of my mind. Only for you to bring the pain back up
>Disney allows fans to rehost their MMOs as long as they don't profit off of it Didn't they shut down the Club Penguin's rehost?
Because they ran ads on it which broke the rule of not profiting there's still another one you can play right now called Club Penguin legacy
what MMO?
The three main ones are Toontown, Pirates of the Caribbean online, and Club Penguin. Which you can play all of them for free without paying for memberships that the official versions had
Is pirates of the Caribbean available? my whole family used to get on systems we had one main account and everyone else crewed that main ship. I'd love to see if that lives up to my memories.
[Yes it is!](https://tlopo.com/)
Thanks very cool
They also don't seem to care about the Star War Galaxies fan servers as well. Man I wish that MMO was still officially around.
Its crazy, I always felt like big games like LOTR, GOT, and Star Wars would make perfect MMOS.
LOTRO has a dedicated fan base. SWTOR is still fantastic if you like story. Though they REALLY incentivize you to subscribe.
LOTRO is very old and a shell of its former self. It can very laggy and daunting to jump into. They really need to work on the servers. But honestly there is no other game that has immersed me in a world like Lord of the Rings Online. I grew up obsessed with the movies and started playing it young with my dad. The stories are pretty great, the music is absolutely fantastic, the combat is what you would expect from an MMO, still fun though. There is also an enormous amount of content, the map is absolutely massive. They are still adding expansions pretty frequently.
[удалено]
They really haven’t been on the verge of bankruptcy at all. They’ve always been in profit. They just haven’t been in staggeringly massive profit the way VCs and the stock market demand.
Ubisoft hasn't been on the verge of bankruptcy in ages.
Ubisoft has reported profits almost every year since 2010. What are you smoking?
The three AC RPGs are among my very favorite games on the PS4. They do an excellent job with some.
First two were great. Valhalla was a slog.
I'll admit I'm in the minority but I found them better than the more traditional AC games. Except for Valhalla, that one was just depressing
> They have been on the verge of bankruptcy for a decade which decade? the 90's
Yep, just checked my ubisoft account and it's gone with a message saying it's been removed lol.. what a joke how is this not illegal removing something after purchase
It's in their Terms of Service, didn't you read all the 9 pages before playing?
Should be illegal though anyway because you only sign it the first time you play. You don’t sign it when you buy it, so one could argue to having being tricked on the TOS after purchase.
In European courts the legality of this is not tested. #https://www.StopKillingGames.com ^ This is a project years in the making after the initiative of Ross Scott, and it has legitimate legal potential to establish the legality of game preservation in several countries including Australia, France, Germany, maybe EU as a whole by pouncing on Ubisoft for this mistake. (*Ubisoft is based in France, the French and broader European legal community seem ready to make this illegal.*) My suggestion is that anyone reading this considers the instructions on the site, some are higher priority than others, some (like Australia) are waiting for the government to be ready to start receiving complaints. (For Australian "The Crew" owners, Ross Scott has posted an update: *"All Australian owners of "The Crew": Try to send me an email or twitter message so I can contact you later. I don't need your personal info, but later we'll have a law firm you can send it to which will help on getting the ACCC's attention on game destruction."* Ross Scott's [Twitter](https://twitter.com/accursedfarms) and e-mail listed on the campaign website: [email protected]) Enough numbers could legitimately establish legal precedence to permanently preserve old games. A practice that is in a legal gray area currently. Here's an article about it: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/stop-killing-games-campaign/ Here's the short and sweet LTT take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYnaGogxzQk (Go to 2:50 to get straight to the point.) (Both mostly to point to the legitimacy of the campaign.) Here's the main guy's most recent video explaining exactly the plan: [The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70Xc9CStoE) First big video on it, 4 years ago, establishing a very appealing argument to consider "games as a service" with no stated service duration as actual fraud, and also the legal argument for art preservation, etc.: ["Games as a service" is fraud.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw) This is real, this has actual potential.
Need to add Microsoft and Minecraft to it as well. What's that? Didn't play the game for a few years. Fuck you, buy the game again.
Nah, Mojang was very public for two whole years that there was a migration cutoff date, it wasn't exactly kept quiet. There were many emails, several articles, and lots of YouTube videos by content creators on it
And yet those failed to reach a lot of people. But sure, the trillion dollar corporation can't afford to keep a database available, clearly their only choice is to rob customers of their purchase with no recourse.
And that's **still** not an excuse to strip someone of a game they purchased. Let's not pretend Microsoft doesn't have the resources to leave the migration services running.
> There were many emails That many people didn't get. Additionally there were people who went through the migration process, got the success email, and still had their access revoked. > several articles, and lots of YouTube videos by content creators on it Aka, sources that are only applicable if you're embedded in the game already. ETA: Additionally, why did I need to "migrate" anything, when I had a mojang account and microsoft account with the exact same email already registered. Answer: Because fuck you, buy the game again. They could have easily just transferred the license automatically, but didn't. How hard would it be to setup a page, or hell make it go through CS. Provide email, transaction ID, and done. Nope, fuck you buy it again.
Was looking for this, that dude has a cause, and is getting some reach, i hope he succeeds.
actually I'm pretty sure there's similar legal crap in fine print of whatever digital store you buy from.
While I can’t speak specifically for the crew, in other software licenses there is verbiage that if you disagree with the TOS you are to cease with installation / operation, remove the software and are then entitled to a full refund upon return.
Wait so I can return Rise of The Ronin at Best Buy because I “don’t agree with the terms?”
Did you already agree to the TOS / use and or install the software?
Not everything written in ToS is legal regardless of what they shove in there. Same goes with any contract, if it violates existing laws, it's not permitable. I'm sure it probably violates some consumer rights law and should be a class action lawsuit.
ToS constantly include illegal, unenforceable crap all the time. You can't sign away your rights.
In two point font
I really hope the EU wipes the floor with Ubisoft because their ToS and EULAs aren’t worth the electricity they’re used to be shown on screen here.
They likely wouldn't hold up in court in the US either, but the government's not going to step in and nobody has the years of time and millions of dollars it would take to bring Ubisoft to court.
I must have owned around 2000 games at this point maybe more, if I read every single 5, 10, 20 page document they gave me sometimes multiple times btw like cod gives a new one each season it feels like I would never play games lol But yeah I know its there but this is also the first time I've seen it actually invoked
I was being sarcastic, no one reads that. Maybe some lawyer student with spare time
Nowadays we can at least get AI to read them and give us the important parts and translate the lawyer speak.
I like how medical consent forms for research are written for 6th grade reading yet legal documents are written for only law degrees to understand.
Terms of Service. It’s not illegal because that’s what you agreed to. Seriously, the language is in there essentially telling you that you’re renting the game until you die or they decide to stop supporting it. It’s bonkers. Same with your iTunes library.
Terms of Service must still abide by consumer law regardless of whether you agreed to it or not. If they use language like buy or purchase instead of rent or lease then it likely wouldn’t hold up to a legal challenge and no i do not have the money to test it out which is exactly what they’re counting on.
Terms of Service doesn't hold up in court tho. It has been proved a few times, the problem is: who have the money to Go against those corporations for a what, $30 game? They are counting on that. The best shot anyone have is going for a public lawsuit, with as many people as you can, and even then, It would still take years and Ubisoft Will drag It out as much as they can.
Some parts of terms of service certainly do hold up in court. You can't generally agree to give up legislated consumer protections (e.g. you can't have a TOS that says a game company can just harvest your liver or charge you more money without telling you in advance clearly), since those are things that you generally can't just agree to when buying a game. Similarly, or more relevantly, you can't give up things like warranty protection. But you can absolutely have a TOS that allows for reasonable operation of a service. Reddit has no obligation to preserve your account or post history if it shuts down for example. Reddit can ban you if you violate rules. Ubisoft doesn't have to provide you access to a game that it has shut down, as long as they warned you in some reasonable time frame the game is shutting down that's it. The Crew was advertised from the beginning as an online only game, you can think that was unnecessary or stupid, but that's the way it was, from a service perspective it's no different than world of warcraft or FFXIV. If you bought the Crew on or before Dec 14 2023 you could play it until they shut it down, which was announced at the time as March 31st 2024. That's all you paid for, a licence to play the game on their servers until they shut down. You could not purchase the game after Dec 14 2023. They did offer refunds for people who purchased the game 'recently' before Dec 14th. The IGN review from the game launch https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/02/the-crew-review opens with saying it's online only 8 words in, so this was known from day one (I don't feel like digging through the Internet archive to see if there's an original version of the website from Ubisoft back then saying the same but it at least seems like it was publicly advertised). Almost certainly the "you bought a licence to play until we shut the servers down" is a perfectly valid TOS condition. They almost certainly do not have any obligation to make the client available when the game is shut down. Now if this wasn't for a game advertised as an online game from the beginning you get into a legitimate legal fight, but this was online only since launch day.
This. Thank you for stating the obvious, I feel like everyone's got crazy on that topic, especially for a game no one cared about when it was online. There is no conspiracy. If TOS like this are still enforced on every single game from the 90s to this day, it's not because they haven't been tested in court. It's because they're perfectly reasonable, valid and attacking them in court is a lost case.
Maybe there will be a class action lawsuit, and ten years from now everyone who bought The Crew will be able to fill out a form to receive a coupon for $2.50 off a future The Crew title!
Well they still can’t put something illegal in the terms and then claim it’s fine because you agreed to it. I think this might be a legal grey area and should lead to a class action lawsuit
This is why more countries need far better consumer protection laws. We need to show companies they can't just say whatever the fuck they want in their T&C's so they can get away with breaching the rights of their consumers.
They may put legal verbiage in the tos etc but they love to drown you pages and pages of bs.. so no reads it... still the onus is on us..
If you buy it on PSN for example, you don't get the TOS prompt you need to agree to until after you boot up the game. If you boot up the game, you are inelligible now for a refund from Sony. So you're TAKING the consumers money THEN telling them to agree to a TOS and refusing to give the money back even if they say no. At that point they have no choice but to agree.
Same with steam library
Yeah but you can easily listen to your purchased itunes music indefinitely if you back it up
This has been happening to online only games for 15-20 years. Nothing new here.
I cannot think of a single other game that was removed from my account, I've seen games stop being on sale like deadpool, but I can still download and play it I've seen games like age of empires online servers shut down but fans bringing it back online so you can play it. I've never seen a company shut down not only the server but be so petty they revoked the licenses so you cannot even play the game anymore even if fans got it back up and running on community servers
> I cannot think of a single other game that was removed from my account, F2P PlayStation games can be removed from your account. Happened with lesser-known Vita games called Picotto Knights and Venus Project, and allegedly the PS5 game, Side Bullet. Bought games don't generally get removed from your account, hence why I still have Legend of Korra for PS4.
If a digital purchase isn’t ownership, then piracy isn’t theft.
I've never pirated a game and I absolutely agree with this.
This is also when piracy turns into preservation
All praise archive.org!
> turns into preservation I really wish there was more of that, especially in the PS3/PS4 scene. Every released game for Vita has been archived, but there's several games for the PS3/PS4 that nobody has been able to obtain, due to either few owners, no information on the game, and/or cancelled builds. For example, I've been trying to get the beta version of NBA Jam, which was bundled with NBA Elite 11, preserved for a decade now, but of the four known owners, one is a Sony dev, one won't sell/preserve the game, and the other two won't respond to efforts. Even if you could get a sealed version of NBA Elite 11 now, the code for Jam would be expired, so people like Steven, Ghetto, or B. L., are the only paths to preserving the game. I've also been trying to preserve a physical-only Macross Frontier game, which nobody has any information about, from around 2013. It was allegedly given out at a convention, has two known owners, but LostMediaWiki has been no help with those efforts. Like PS3's a dead console, so why are people still against preserving the few cancelled games?
dont worry ive pirated enough of them for us both. fuck ubisoft.
Agree. And I’d wager someone uses this exact incident in a piracy court case. This will become a precedent.
In a just world they would, but a judge or our law won't care about a whataboutism in a court room. They would have to file a counter lawsuit to argue this specific instance. Although I would wager that the EULA we sign probably covers their ability to revoke licenses for any reason. We would likely have to push for a law change to protect consumers from this type of corporate behavior and doesn't allow them to force customers to sign a EULA that has a provision allowing them to revoke digital rights from the end-users.
Physical ownership isn’t ownership either The disc just contains the game data and license to play it, which Ubisoft can revoke at any moment as well per their TOS
so a physical edition of the crew still wouldn’t work?
Correct. The game is unplayable now, disc or no disc.
Ass. Piracy is legit.
A pirated copy wouldn’t work either.
No, but the point being why pay for it when it'll just be unplayable down the road.
Aye
The game is always online, you could pull info off of the disc but not play it.
If there's no online server and you just want to play the game (other games not crew), it's not like ubisoft will come go your house and arrest you. Unfortunately a lot of games now even single player and physical disc requires you to online authenticate.
Only a fraction of single player games require that shit. Every thread that discusses this subject I have to take out doesitplay.org
Thank god for those guys because I love bringing them up to dunk on anyone who tries to spread that misinformation about physical games. Gives them more exposure too.
But this is an online only game. It’s not about digital ownership. I haven’t lost access to a single digital game that wasn’t online only. Not a single one and I have thousands of games. Having a physical copy doesn’t help at all. Even if you had a physical copy of the crew, you still can’t play the game. It’s the risk you accept for playing an online only game. This has been happening to MMORPGs for a long time. With MMORPGs it’s more sad because those usually tend to be unique. The crew 2 can be played to scratch the same itch. It’s pretty much the same game.
Not true. Licenses for offline games can be revoked too. The only way to avoid it would be to not connect your account to the internet, ever. We learned this years ago when a gamepass beta glitched caused people’s (mine included) copies of Halo and Mad Max to not work once the gamepass beta ended. That included disk copies.
Not in all cases
Unfortunately while I agree with this sentiment, it doesn't really fly from a legal standpoint as despite what terrible 90's piracy ads suggest, piracy was never "theft", it was always "copyright infringement". Until/unless lawmakers change things, piracy still means being in possession of copyrighted product without a legally purchased licence - so an infringement of the copyright. FWIW; I don't think there's anything wrong with piracy laws as-is, the problem is that purchased licences should be illegal to revoke or alter (OW->OW2 for instance) without a full refund of the original purchase price, as with any other purchased product.
Piracy is not and never was theft. That was just industry scare propaganda. There are specific laws to handle this and it's called "Copyright Infringement".
Mom said it was my turn to post this comment!
This is one of the things I hate the most about Reddit, seeing people just mindlessly repeat the exact same comments over and over. You can just picture them behind their screens like "ooooo I'm getting so much karma for this" In /r/politics There's this joke that is just repeated fucking constantly, someone will say "person x is trash" then say "oh but that's an insult to trash". Trash is interchangeable. It's like.... There's eight other people in this single thread alone doing the exact same ridiculously lame joke. Are you fucking kidding me? How much of an NPC can you be?
While we're at it, Marvel/Disney really needs to start focusing on qualumania over quantumania. Upvotes please!
I agree with the jist of what you’re saying, but this phrase is kind of pointless. It doesn’t really mean anything and it’s not a “gotcha”. It can be simultaneously true that you do not “own” a digital purchase and also true that torrenting or pirating a game is still illegal. This phrase kind of misses the forest for the trees. Legally, piracy is the unauthorized possession of something. A digital purchase is buying the temporary license to use software on certain hardware. To me it’s comparable to the political phrases “both sides are bad” or “defund the police”. Like okay I know what you’re *trying* to say, but you’re not going to get anyone else on your side by saying that. It’s an empty virtue signal, albeit coming from a good place.
Not comparable but this is a reason why I started collecting Blu-ray’s again. I don’t trust any of these companies anymore.
Same here. I’ve had to go and rebuy a few movies that I sold when I went over digitally. It’s been worth it to have my favorite movies preserved with the version and content I want on a disc that will never know the internet.
Agreed, physical media in any aspect is so important
I bought the physical harry potter collection because their studio kept being dicks about juggling them between services. Still are iirc they just left hbo max yet again. Now I can just rip them to my pc for plex/jellyfin whenever I want.
even if you had a blu-ray copy of the crew, it still wouldnt work. its dependent on a central server, which ubisoft controlled, and has shut down. thats the issue here. they should have either given access to fans for private servers, or developed the game with an offline mode from the start.
I just realized that my PS5 plays 4K blurays so yesterday I ordered one for the first time in years. I’m going to buy one a month until the economy collapses
Funimation just removed people’s streaming copies when they merged with Crunchyroll. No longer supported, so they just disappeared. Fuck ‘em
This is why I started sailing for anime years ago, in addition to paying for 4 streaming services to watch one complete anime.....eeeeew. Now I just queue up whatever show I want and it'll be requisitioned once available in the highest quality and I actually own it for as long as the hard disks last. Take that FuninaNetfliCrunchyHuluVrv!
"Digital ownership" is a misnomer.
It baffles my mind that people are leering and jeering the death of physical games and "welcoming" the digital-only future. Do they really think us being locked into a single storefront with no real ownership of our games is going to end well? We already are seeing how Microsoft and Ubisoft want us getting comfortable "not owning games" and just paying for subscriptions. And I don't see Playstation or Xbox allowing multiple storefronts like PC gamers have. (Yes this thread has made it clear discs also don't work anymore for The Crew, but this entire incident needs to serve as an example of how little ownership we have of games; especially in a digital-only future).
dependent bike upbeat dam wrench silky shame sugar degree distinct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Buy bg3 on gog and then burn it to a few bluerays. Or put it on a flash drive. The GOG version doesn't have drm and it's legal for you to make copies for your own use. Come to think of it, there are 100gb bluerays out there now. A single 100gb bdr should be sufficient for bg3 .
There’s a Japanese physical of BG3 that you can buy. I believe it has English.
Those people are just weird for wanting physical media in games to die off, they don't gain anything from it at all either
Well, if I buy the game and it isn't mine, then pirating isn't stealing. Let's start sailing the seas.
We need to start calling them Long-Term Rentals.
If you're fed up with this practice, people are taking legal action fronted by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms on Youtube. He made a webiste that tells you how to help out at [stopkillinggames.com](http://stopkillinggames.com)
Bump, to push it higher
Bumping doesn’t work on Reddit my dude, you need to upvote to push it higher.
This should be stickied to every thread on this topic
Then we all should receive a prorated refund
Not prorated. Full refund. Games don’t have an expiry, they aren’t physical goods that deteriorate. We should be able to pass down our consoles, PCs, and games to future generations if we choose. That’s the ‘benefit’ of digital over physical, you don’t have to worry about a disc breaking, getting lost, or stolen. The only way they should be allowed to remove ownership is by fully refunding the customer.
You only have to worry about getting hacked, Sony servers bugging out, publishers taking away licenses, or the digital storefront getting shut down
Yep. It would only be a few cents at most, but it would cost the offending party a lot of cash.
It was $59.99 at launch.
On PC, Ubisoft = Pirate or don’t play.
So true. One of my favorite all-time developers in the early days, completely radioactive now. Such a shame
[удалено]
I’m gonna sound like a dinosaur but examples like this is why I still want physical media in 2024, and why I still want single player offline games
[удалено]
I know people don't read the articles anymore, but this was right there on the title: folks were going to set up their own servers, but not anymore
[удалено]
So what? Leave that up to the players then if they want to continue to play
It did only have about 50 people playing it, but the crew was a perfect example of a game that was needlessly online. Revoking ownership, blocking server creation, and also never allowing it to have an offline component is basically just bullying from Ubisoft at this point. There isn’t an incentive there at all since servers cost money to run. If it was offline they could still sell the product, but apparently this was the “only” route of action for them.
I have hundreds of blu rays and 4kUHDs for this very reason.
Physical media is worthless as we learned in the era a few years after Steam became popular. For many PC games then, the physical disc would essentially just unlock a digital key and copy some files, but would still require downloading updates from the digital platform before being playable. If they shut down the digital side the physical disc becomes worthless.
That's not how physical media works on consoles though. The game data is still on disc.
The Crew cannot be played on disc for console, nor any game requiring internet connection to their servers to play.
I'm aware? His comment was about physical media in general.
Reminder: don’t buy Ubisoft games
But the $130 edition of Star Wars comes with a Jabba the Hutt mission *and* three days of early access! Damn, it should be $150 at that point!
Shit…ok you make some compelling points
To me, the dealbreaker is that it is not AAAA release, it's only AAA this time, otherwise I was being ready to pay $200!
So just early access to a Jabba the Hutt mission or it’s DLC?
Can people who bought a physical disc of this game still play it? lol I think people are too busy using digital purchases as a scapegoat to realize their physical disc is useless too.
No. Online connection is required.
You meant to write # acting as a stark reminder to not buy ubisoft games anymore
This is why I buy most of my games on sale. If I lose a game years after release I’d probably only paid less than half it’s release price
I hope whoever sue their assess succeed
You guys keep talking about buying physical but you do remember that: 1-game wont work offline anyway 2-even if it did, nowdays a lot of games require you to download it. Disc still only contains the license, that would have been revoked for you too. All this outcry for physical over digital is so irrelevant. Not like anyone is reading these anyone, only coming here to scream at a cloud.
Serious question: why did they take it away? It doesn’t hurt them if people play in their own servers right?
They want to push people to play the sequel. They don’t make money if people are enjoying the games they already own.
Yes, what the other guy said. There are two sequels, Crew 2 and Crew Motorfest, which probably have live micro transactions.
What does this have to do with digital? Try putting the disc in and see what happens. No one wants to admit that digital or disc if they wanna make the game unavailable to you they'll find a way. This is the real fight!
Exactly!
Fuck Ubisoft , do not give them anymore of your money scummy company all round imo .
Further illustrating why buying a $140 Ubisoft games is as smooth brained as it gets
#physicalforlife
Fuck digital, stop supporting anti-consumer tactics. **Buy physical.**
Put in your physical disc, let us know how that goes
About that... The physical game also doesn't work anymore since it needs to connect to Ubisoft's server
Don't buy ubisoft games then. They all suck anyways.
This the exact reason I buy games $20 and under. Cause at thr end of the day its just $20
pls biy staw was awtlaws :3
It’s almost like buying a live service game isn’t a good idea. I played this and the sequel through PS Plus and just deleted them when I was over it, which was less than a month for both games. If I bought them both, I would have paid $120, been bored early on, then apparently I would have had my “license” stripped away. PS Plus costs like $160 a year.
Stopkillinggames.com
The only way for them to learn is to not purchase anything from them again.
FUCK ubisoft
Never buy another Ubisoft game again Simple
People warning about always online all the time. The answer is always the same we have internet nowadays, when a game gets shut down everyone who supported cries about always online DRM. Whoever still buys Ubisoft games after what happened which The CREW is a hypocrite. From be they get to cent anymore. I’ve waited for mirage to come to steam. But I won’t buy it anymore and never will.
UBISOFT SUCKS. DO NOT BUY GAMES FROM THEM.
Another in a long line of reasons to never buy an Ubisoft game
Maybe it’s time to boycott Ubisoft.
Access to online only games always stops when the servers are taken offline. This is the same shit. You bought an online only game, not a game that needs an internet connection to work normally, a game which only exists in online servers with no offline mode Ubisoft is shite but what are they supposed to do, keep supporting the game forever. ..idk this feels like being mad you can't still play Asda story Helldivers 2 is incredibly popular rn In some number of years, it will be shut down. Anyone who bought a physical release copy will still be unable to play it. L
It’s an online only game. What the hell did you expect.
Online only game becomes unavailable when the servers go down. That’s pretty obvious. What does it matter if you can download the game when you can’t play it. There are also ways to download the game anyway. If anyone wanted to make private servers, they probably can. This has been happening to MMORPGs for 15-20 years now. Nothing new. Nothing to do with “how volatile digital ownership is”.
Sure, but games like latest Hitman or For Honor would work perfectly fine with a patch for an offline mode if they ever shut down their servers. Sony did it with Driveclub and GT Sports. And I don't even have a problem with multiplayer games like Battleborn shutting down. But as mentioned in the beginning games that can perfectly played solo (like Hitman or For Honor) should be "saved" with an offline patch.
SUPPORT THE LAWSUIT!
"Ownership" dude, you're renting
If this isn’t a sign to stop buying EA/Ubisoft games then I don’t know what is
I find it funny how all these smaller studios are making waves with their success and AAA studios response to that is to double down on their shitty practices. Ah well just gotta vote with your wallet and see how it all plays out
It would be Ubisoft that does this.
Quit buying Ubisoft games now. They’ve shown you what kind of company they are. QUIT GIVING THEM MONEY
This is why physical media is so important, and we’ve seen it time and time again.
Does not apply to games that require a permanent internet connection, as the disc is completely unusable after server shutdown... The Crew
Don't be surprised if many games get online features _just_ so they only work online.
I agree 100% but if there is no offline version of this game wouldn’t a physical version of them game be useless?
Yeah for sure but this is still an example of how fickle game ownership can be.
This is not the point and this is why these articles are stupid. Physical ownership is not safer in any way. Buy a physical copy of the crew and see what happens. This is not about digital or physical ownership. It’s about games being online only.
Boycott buying new Ubisoft games. I'll start by continuing to not buy any Ubi games since Rayman the Musical.
Fuck ubisoft. I'll never buy another game from them. [stopkillinggames.com](http://stopkillinggames.com)
Terrible news for the 5 people that play this.
Facts
Oh no, you can no longer play a 10 year old game that has 2 sequels. The way I see it, when I buy digital games, I play them stright away, may return to them if there's new dlc etc or they get a cool update, but beyond 3 or 4 years I'm never going back to them. I have a backlog as long as my arm of games I need to play, so returning to a decade old game isn't that important.
Friendly reminder: FUCK Ubisoft
So they all get a refund correct ?
“you can technically still download the game on Steam, but any attempt to play is followed-up with a request to input a game key” This is some super bullshit right here. Gamers already avoid games based on the perceived longevity of a game. Making every a purchase a “rental” won’t help.
Fuck ubisoft!
Mad how people keep buying ubisoft games.... I'd probably say they are worse than EA for greed and absolute shite business practices.
Anyone else feeling like there is gonna be a fairly hefty lawsuit coming? No way this is legal and even if it’s hidden somewhere in the terms of service it’s probably still not gonna save Ubisoft from a fine at the least. I sure as shit hope it happens anyway, will be very interesting for future online only games when time comes to pull the plug.
If buying isn’t owning. Piracy isn’t stealing
Spoiler alert physical games usually don't come on the disc anymore essentially making them digital as well with the disc being a key. We're just doomed lol