Youtuber Ross Scott Plans A Lawsuit Over The Crew Closure

With the game delisted in December 2023 and the servers shutting down on March 31st 2024, Youtuber Ross Scott plans a lawsuit over The Crew closure.

Known for the Half-Life machinima series Freeman’s Mind on his Accursed Farms Youtube channel, Scott is looking to bring a class-action lawsuit against Ubisoft as The Crew is only playable online. Originally released in 2014, it means you’ll no longer be able to play whether you own it as a digital or physical edition.

It’s not an issue which only affects The Crew, with other always-conncted games as a service shut down including Overwatch and Counter-Strike Global Offensive. For developers and publishers, it makes sense to funnel all players towards their latest titles, in this case The Crew Motorfest, so they can focus their efforts and avoid spending money on supporting older titles.

In the case of most racing games, including the Forza series, reaching ‘end of life’ means the titles lose all online connectivity but you can still play them in single player. And it seems that Gran Turismo Sport will be similar when servers shut down at the end of this month, despite the fact it’s always required an online connection to play in the past.

The reason Ross is choosing to pick a battle over The Crew is that it was originally sold under a perpetual license rather than as a subscription. He explains in the video;

“Then the seller rendered the game unusable and deprived it of all value after the point of sale. It’s possible that argument won’t hold up either, in which case I think there’s no possible way to stop this practice, at least in the United States. But to the best of my knowledge, this angle has never been tested in court and might actually have some teeth.

“This is a high-profile game that was sold in stores under a perpetual license, and the buyers are going to be left with nothing. This is about as perfect an opportunity as we’re going to get to challenge the system on this.”

And even if it’s not successful, then at least gamers will have more clarity in the future

“One of the things that frustrates me about games as a service is that they’re a legal gray area. No-one can say for certain that destroying a game you paid for is legal, because it hasn’t been challenged. By challenging its legality, we could turn this into a black-and-white issue. If we lose, I want to lose hard. If there’s no chance of stopping this, I want a judge to say to our faces that when we buy videogames we have no consumer rights and no ownership over what we pay for.”

Along with the issue over losing access to a product that you’ve paid for, the other problem with losing games when servers shut down is the loss of that piece of game history. It can be personal, for example, when someone discovered his late father’s ghost car in RalliSport Challenge, along with important when we look back at the videogame medium. And sometimes we won’t know when something is notable until years later. There’s plenty of outcry and disapointment when people discover radio, TV and music archives have been lost or destroyed, but it’s a future we seem to be increasingly moving towards by streaming all of our entertainment.

One solution proposed by Ross as a settlement, and the path seemingly being followed by Polyphony Digital with Gran Turismo Sport, is to patch online games to allow them to still be played offline without further support from the original developers and publishers. And some titles have gone on to thrive as abandonware, such as NASCAR 2003 and Grand Prix Legends.

This seems like the best outcome for everyone, allowing publishers and developers to move on, while also letting gamers continue to enjoy their past favourites, and ensuring the history of gaming remains intact. And while older titles might have a very slight impact on future sales, allowing modding and fan support to keep them alive also provides free research and development for content and features that could feed into future racing sims and games.