Comments from Ubisoft's Legal Team Are Not Going to Improve the Embattled Publisher's Image 1

We understand lawyers are employed to get their clients off the hook, but these comments from Ubisoft’s legal team are not exactly going to help the embattled French publisher’s image.

The company is currently fighting a case involving The Crew, which you may recall was taken offline last year, rendering owned copies of the racer worthless.

Because the title required connectivity to the publisher’s servers in order to function, any remaining physical copies have been reduced to expensive coasters. If you purchased it digitally then it’s worth even less, because you can’t even put your cup of coffee on it.

But two industrious players are trying to sue the firm over its decision, and thus have to prove Ubisoft misled them by flogging them an experience with an expiry date as opposed to something they could play in perpetuity.

Ubisoft’s lawyers, however, have hit back, arguing there’s no reason for players to believe they were purchasing “unfettered ownership rights in the game”.

Now we’re sure there’s some small print somewhere in the software that discloses all this, but we’d personally argue that we expect most games to work in some capacity once its servers have been taken offline – especially one like The Crew which did have a single player campaign.

In fact, we feel like developer Ivory Tower has somewhat acknowledged this in a way, as it’s promised to avoid the same issue with The Crew 2 and The Crew: Motorfest by offering updates which will make both titles fully playable offline.

The plaintiffs have since responded to Ubisoft with pictures of the product’s packaging which points out activation codes won’t expire until 2099, which it argues implies the release should have remained playable “during this time and long thereafter”.

Ubisoft now has until the end of the month to respond.

[source polygon.com]