The Crew’s servers, scheduled for Sunday March 31, represents a “gray area” in videogame consumer law that he would like to challenge.
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I think the argument to make is that The Crew was sold under a perpetual license, not a subscription, so we were being sold a good, not a service
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the seller rendered the game unusable and deprived it of all value after the point of sale.Goddam right, that’s not a grey area IMO, that shit ought to be illegal. Maybe there should be a term, like let’s say 90 years maybe?
My personal favorite is the “companies are obligated to support it forever, or open source the server software hosted by a third party, hosting paid for up front for at least a year.”
They get to keep my money forever don’t they?
I got the game for free, and I’ve been playing it since every three months for a few days, just driving around. I bought the sequel, but it sucked.
I never used the multiplayer component, I treated it like a single player game. And now it’s going to vanish? This whole world? They can’t be serious. This isn’t a multiplayer only title, it’s single player with an optional mp stacked upon it. At least put an offline patch out… Assholes!
But that’s the crux with only buying licenses. Or games with always online requirements. I hope fans find a way to crack the online code!!
Yeah, no one is arguing games shouldn’t have online, just that they continue to work after the devs are done with them, have an End of Life plan like the late Avengers game, or the gacha Megaman X Dive that got an offline version sold on steam and consoles.
Don’t forget we have to get comfortable not owning our games guys… This is Ubisoft showing us how that works…
This would be a huge precedent for video-game preservation. IANAL but this would mean one of these two:
- service cannot be shut down without release of server source code
- whole game need to be reclassified as software service
Seems like the latter would be an easy loophole tbh.
Also NAL, but it seems like they aren’t arguing for server functionality but rather just the ability to play offline at all, which opens up the third option of requiring games to be patched to remove sever requirements if being shut down, in any case this will be a fascinating case to follow, and I hope they go through with the lawsuit.
True though that’s a bit of a potato/potatoh probpem as the easiest way to patch-in offline would be to run server locally rather than have 2 different architectures of offline and online plays. That’s already how many games work today actually - singleplayer is just a server with only you on it.
Stuff like this is always welcome.
That aldo happened to Bomberman. To play locally, it needs to connect to a server. The servers are no longer active, and as a result, the game isn’t playable.
Blessed Ross Scott
Not sure why he’s being recognized by a Half-Life series of his. I discovered and watched him for his deep dives of old crappy PC games.
This is all well and good, but what of all those MMORPGs that got shut down?
The Crew is a bizarre game to do this kinda treatment for, since the sequel is very similar to the first, less terrible crime syndicate story, more planes and other nonsense. It’s also pretty middling, car handling is really weird, and the lack of rear view mirrors looks pretty weird nowadays.
I’m guessing it’s car licensing that’s causing the shutdown. It’s what happened to Forza Horizon 1 and 2. If that is the case, this game isn’t going to get open sourced ever. Also: why didn’t this guy go after Microsoft to make them playable again?
Horizon can be played offline. When Microsoft bites the dust, I can still pop in a Forza horizon 2 DVD into my 360 and play it.
You just made it look even worse for Ubisoft since the first 3 Horizon games work offline and everyone that bought them can still play it just fine, you just can’t buy them right now.
