Kelly

I'm using the word "feel" because I'm not qualified to provide a legal opinion.

It lasting 10 years doesn't mean much to the people who were sold the game in the last 6 months without any warning they were buying into the final hours.

Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?

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:

• sign new deals with all licensors and continue business as usual
• sign new deals with cooperative licensors and modify the game to remove the others
• remove the game from sale and keep the servers running for current customers
• remove the game from sale and kill the servers - tell people to buy the sequal

I'd they waited until December of 2023 to have that meeting then that 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.

Call me crazy but I expect businesses to guarantee their products.

On December 14, 2023, Ubisoft delisted The Crew and its expansions from digital platforms, suspended sales of microtransactions, and announced that the game's servers would be shut down on March 31, 2024, citing "upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crew_%28video_game%29

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?

It looks better than the art for the new snow bros game

https://youtu.be/yGsHq-mZI8U

Its a pretty good outcome but the games with "resolved" issues are not all good news.

Some examples (all from different games):

• Remaining on the title screen for 30 seconds will cause an error to trigger and the game will close. Please navigate away from the title screen before the error occurs.
• Inputting a particular sequence of controls in a stage may on rare occasion cause the game to close.
• Slowdown may occur in some parts of the game
• Screen distortion may occur in some parts of the game
• When Nintendo Switch 2 players battle Nintendo Switch players online, Nintendo Switch players' character models will have distorted textures.

Still, if they have identified these issues it says a fair bit about how though their testing was.

Nice to see this made it in

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/104689

At that point is not really oblivion?!

PSx

Transferable licence.

They can be sold, gifted, inherited, etc.

Its the same concept as a stub game disc which requires a full online install (something Xbox used for cross-gen one/series titles).

Its nothing like the account tied physical sales they proposed at the Xbox one announcement.