“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”. As reported by Polygon, that’s an argument put forth by a new lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by two Californian players of The Crew. They’re suing the company in a proposed class action lawsuit over shutting down the racing game’s servers, rendering it unplayable.
Ubisoft pulled the ol’ snippy Johnson on The Crew’s server wires back in March, effectively killing the online-only game. The following month, it started disappearing from owner’s Ubisoft Connect libraries. In response, YouTuber Ross Scott started a Stop Killing Games initiative, petitioning France’s Directorate General For Competition, Consumer Affairs And Fraud Protection (DGCCRF) to investigate.
The analogy makes no sense.
Your pinball machine keeps working until it breaks, relying only on electricity you provide.
A server-based computer game relies on running it on a server you aren’t paying the upkeep on.
If you buy a game that relies on servers that don’t belong to you, you should expect this to be a temporary lease, not something you can expect to use forever.
Of course, the language in the store’s UI needs to match that. You can’t “buy” a server-reliant game.
What you say makes sense for a multiplayer-only game! But the game has a full single player campaign. There is no technical reason to remove access to that part. That part can be kept working without incurring recurring costs.
With games people used to setup their own servers. (And we liked it that way. Way more sense of a community.) So that could be an option. Allow people to run their own servers again.
The analogy makes perfect sense if it manages to effectively communicate the issue to a judge or jury in a way they understand.