2 Gamers Seek Class Action Suit Against Ubisoft For Delisting, Breaking ‘The Crew’

The whole “You don’t actually own what you’ve bought” mantra we have here at Techdirt is really, really frustrating. It’s become such a regular topic that, in my personal life, I regularly respond to news from friends and family about a digital “purchase” they bought by asking if they actually bought it, or have any actual idea if they bought it. Yes, I’m a real hoot at cocktail parties, too. But with all the complaining, most of us never actually do anything about it. Still, with the anger around the breaking of digital and physical products on which we’ve spent money coming so frequently these days that it’s reached a crescendo, there are some out there trying to make change happen.

We discussed one of those people, Ross Scott, earlier this year. He runs the Stop Killing Games website, where he advocates for consumer rights around the ownership of video games. Interestingly, the impetus for his setting that site up was Ubisoft’s shutdown of The Crew, a game that had both online and offline components, both of which were broken when the company decided to delist the game and shut its servers down. His stated goal in all of this was to spur action by local or federal governments to protect consumers.

Well, at least two of those consumers aren’t going to wait around. Two gamers that paid to play The Crew, only to have their ability to play it revoked at the whim of Ubisoft, are suing the company over it and are seeking to turn the suit into a class action lawsuit. You can read the suit in its entirety here.

Both plaintiffs purchased The Crew late into its lifecycle, in 2018 and 2020, and picked up physical copies. This plays a significant role in the lawsuit. “Plaintiff Cassell was under the impression that by purchasing the physical Game disk,” the lawsuit reads, “he acquired the full bundle of ownership rights over the Game, and that he would be able to use the disk to play the game whenever he wanted in the future.”

Ubisoft misled the plaintiffs, the lawsuit claims, through language on the game’s packaging. “Defendants also reinforced this belief by including language on the Product packing stating that the online portion of the Game could be retired, thereby representing to consumers that an offline portion of the Game existed that would be unaffected. Second, through the totality of the Product’s packaging, Defendants falsely represented that The Crew itself was encoded onto physical disks consumers could buy or the digital files consumers could pay to download.”

Now, we’ve talked for quite some time about just how useful or not class action suits can be. A big part of the problem with them tends to be the fact that the lawyers that file them tend to be the greatest beneficiaries of the class action status, reaping a huge percentage of whatever rewards come of them. Combined with a regular willingness to accept terms in settlements that too often push the class in question into buying more from the defendants and it can be a real downer.

But when the class action suit is chiefly designed to punish a bad actor, rather than compensate the plaintiff, they can work quite well. And when you’re trying to affect broader change through that punishment, all the more so. And this might very well be one of those cases.

The aim here is certainly laudible. Publishers like Ubisoft and the storefronts that sell their games have been all too happy for far too long to allow their customers to believe that they actually own the games they’ve bought. It would be a very simple thing to hit the public over the head with the fact that they’re buying a limited license to play the game, rather than buying the game itself. That they choose not to take that simple action is illustrative in the extreme. Even Steam’s recent update to its own rules about what words publishers can and cannot use on its storefront are mild changes at best.

So if the courts can set some precedent here that tips the scales back towards protecting and informing the consumer in any real way, it would certainly be a win. But I will also stipulate that the lawsuit’s opening statement is probably not helpful.

“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed. Turns out the pinball machine manufacturer decided to come into your home, gut the insides of the pinball machine, and remove your ability to play the game that you bought and thought you owned. Even though you paid full price to receive this game, you never knew that the manufacturer could come in one day, and, without your control, leave you with a skeleton of what you thought you paid for.”

Um, no. I can poke about ten holes in that analogy. It never should have been used and is something of a cousin to the whole “You wouldn’t steal a car, so why steal music?” bullshit argument. Hopefully that bit was a matter of over-exuberance and not the kind of logic we’re going to see throughout any trial that may occur.

The bottom line is that companies like Ubisoft often do not make it clear to their customers what they’re buying, which becomes both a surprise and a problem when those same companies decide to unilaterally take actions which rip away the ability for their customer to use the thing they bought, in whole or in part. If this suit moves the needle on that problem, bring it on.