- cross-posted to:
- games@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- games@hexbear.net
Ubisoft responded to California gamers’ The Crew shutdown lawsuit in late February, filing to dismiss the case. The company’s lawyers argued in that filing, reviewed by Polygon, that there was no reason for players to believe they were purchasing “unfettered ownership rights in the game.” Ubisoft has made it clear, lawyers claimed, that when you buy a copy of The Crew, you’re merely buying a limited access license.
“Frustrated with Ubisoft’s recent decision to retire the game following a notice period delineated on the product’s packaging, Plaintiffs apply a kitchen sink approach on behalf of a putative class of nationwide customers, alleging eight causes of action including violations of California’s False Advertising Law, Unfair Competition Law, and Consumer Legal Remedies Act, as well as common law fraud and breach of warranty claims,” Ubisoft’s lawyers wrote.
So I actually read the article, even though there are huge outstanding questions on the nature of ownership, that’s actually not what the court argument is about:
Well yeah… software as a service is a thing but Ubisoft is straight up lying…
My two cents: no one is expecting online services to be up forever, so imo the correct solution is open source the game after the company meets their 10 (or 20) year obligation which should be clearly pointed out during the initial rental agreement (shouldn’t call it purchase)
If a company decides to stop hosting it’s online service they should be required to open it up for third party hosting. By ending their support they are admitting the profit capture is over so if another company wants to host it for profit so be it.
Perhaps the real problem is the length of copyright. The direction copyright has gone is the exact opposite of the speed of technology.
They shouldnt be required to do anything with it. Theres no public safety issue that requires it be maintained, its just a game. You also seem to imply making money from creating a game is immoral. This whole “art” belongs to everyone thing is stupid and only hurts artists.
You should reread my comment.
I didn’t imply there is a public safety issue. I didn’t imply anything about morality.
If a company drops the hosting for online servers they shouldn’t prevent third parties from picking it up. That’s the whole statement so you don’t need to find anything between the lines.
Art does belong to everyone but that’s completely unrelated to my comment above.
You are implying its about server costs then? Activision sunset the crew because they had been developing the crew 2 for a long time. It had to come out eventually. Allowing third party hosting of the crew would have cost them a lot of money. Why should they take a loss in that situation?
They should take a loss because they sold a product and it’s availability shouldn’t be a lever they use to drive traffic to their new game. Is this where I say you are implying that corporate profits are more important than honesty?
Are you implying that they didn’t insinuate that this game would be supported longer when they had an actual expiration date on the product code, 2099? If the Crew 3 has been in development for 10 years and they spend a billion dollars developing it would it be ok to sunset the Crew 2 after a couple weeks to “motivate” buyers to buy the new version? Who decides what is the “appropriate” amount of time a product should be available.
If they don’t allow private or third party hosting for the Crew then anyone should be able to refund it since they bought a product that has been rugpulled.
You can feel free to ignore all of that because there isn’t a good reason to support Ubisoft here and this model unless you like the taste of shoe polish.
There really aren’t, though. There is only the well-established and correct understanding of it as embodied by things like the Uniform Commercial Code, and lying criminals trying to gaslight us into letting them steal our property rights.