Back in December 2023, Ubisoft announced it would power off the servers for its racing title, The Crew, and as of April 1st, 2024, the game would go offline. Of course, this caused a massive uproar from those who paid for the game since this would make the game unplayable without those servers. But things have taken another turn for the worse, as Ubisoft has taken things a step further and started removing the game from people’s Ubisoft Connect accounts.
I’m not making this nonsense up. I wouldn’t have even noticed if I hadn’t logged into Ubisoft Connect because I wanted to log back into The Division 2. It’s not like Ubisoft had told us it was going to do this.
Ubisoft has started removing the game from the accounts of people who’ve paid for it. If this isn’t considered both a “WTF” moment and setting a dangerous precedent, I don’t know what else it would be. Not only does this add ammo to those against the looming all-digital gaming future, but it could also signal other publishers that removing games from our accounts would be okay without much of a thank you. That’s something we definitely do not need. They didn’t even tell anyone they were going to do this.
I fear that the EULA that all of us have to accept, and even fewer of us read, is giving companies like Ubisoft a cloak of protection that they can hide behind and use for any number of bullshit reasons. Before this stupid stunt that Ubisoft had started pulling, the most we had to worry about was having a publisher delist a game or take those required servers offline. In the case of having a game delisted, as long as we paid for it, we’d still be able to download that game, and with having servers taken offline. Even with game servers being taken offline, there have been people smarter than myself who wind up putting up private servers so people can continue to enjoy those games. We’ve seen that happen time and time again.
Ubisoft not only took the servers offline for The Crew, a game that was still playing until March 31st, 2024, “due to upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints,” But they also accessed our accounts and made it so we could never touch the game again. Even if you want to reinstall it on your PC, you can’t. This is worse than delisting a game, not printing any more copies of a game, or merely taking servers offline. It’s worse than everything; we gamers should not stand for it.
With doing this, I’ve lost any trust I’ve had for Ubisoft, and I doubt I’ll be purchasing any more upcoming titles in digital form from them. Which sucks, as I was ready for Star Wars Outlaw, but now, I don’t know anymore. If they can do this with The Crew, what’s stopping them from doing this to The Crew 2, recently released The Crew Motorsport, either of the Division games or any game? Regarding whether it requires a server or not. With this one ill-advised again, I can’t trust them anymore.
Maybe those firmly against this digital future have a point after all. They shouldn’t be allowed to do this, and if they choose to do something like this in the future, they should be required to refund those who paid for the game, provide a credit, or another game in its place. But who am I kidding? That likely won’t happen.
But if you want my honest opinion about this, I can sum it up in four words. This. Is. Fucked. Up.
