Comment on Th EU iniative for Stop Killing Games has reached the goal of 1 million signatures!!
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago‘The Crew’ by Ubisoft was sold for several months before they decided to shut it down. This would have at least forced them to communicate that before taking peoples money. I am also pretty sure that publishers don’t want to put this information on the package because it could seriously hurt sales. So the effect might be that publishers build the game in a way that enables self-hosting.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
If you are saying they knew it was closing and they sold it for months anyways, that sounds like fraud. Has there been proof ubisoft decided to do this anyways?
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Yes, I think calling it fraud is a fair conclusion but what do you mean with “they knew it was closing”? This decision is completely in the hands of Ubisoft. Something doesn’t stop being fraud just because someone only decides to defraud you 2 months after they sold you something.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
For all we know when the decision to pull the game was formalized, they pulled it that day. It depends what they did after they decided the game was being pulled. Did they leave it up for a few months to get some stuff in order beforehand, but kept selling it? I’d have a tough time accepting a reasoning from Ubisoft for that.
Thats why I asked for any sort of comment or reporting on it.
Kelly@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crew_(video_game)
People who paid around us$40 for the game on December 13 were being sold a lemon.
Given that it was released in 2014 it seems likely that their licenses were given a 10 year duration and they always intended to shutdown in 2024 at the latest (of course if its user base failed to reach critical mass they could have pulled the plug earlier).
Does selling a game in 2023 when you plan to kill it in 2024 legally qualify as fraud?
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Thats not what I’m asking. You just have me evidence that they didnt sell it as soon as an EOL date was announced. Are you saying they should have stopped selling it before they publicly announce the EOL? Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?
Kelly@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
My unsubstantiated theory is the the licences they signed for all the vehicles and real world content had a 10 year lifetime.
Usually those contracts would just require that they stop selling the game, but they may have included something about the servers in the contract too.
Either way they new something was going to change in 2024 and realistically they knew which of these possibilities were viable:
I’d they waited until December of 2023 to have that meeting that that is feels negligent.
If they had that meeting earlier and continued to sell the game (until ≈100 days to EOL) without warning customers that feels fraudulent.