The French publisher must now defend itself in court after the first The Crew became completely unplayable.

Two gamers from California have filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft. This was reported by Polygon. The two claim that the French publisher violated California consumer protection laws. The two are seeking a class action lawsuit and financial compensation for the affected players. The lawsuit also alleges that Ubisoft previously took down the online servers of games that could be played offline (Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed III) while they remained available and playable. They could have followed that example with The Crew.

“Ubisoft deceived consumers by telling them that they were buying a game when, in fact, they were merely renting a limited license to access a game that Defendants, for their own noblesse oblige, chose to maintain. The product’s packaging falsely represented that The Crew itself was encoded on physical disks that consumers could purchase or the digital files that consumers could pay to download, when in fact the physical disks and downloaded files that consumers paid for were more akin to a key that they could use to open the gates of this remote server that Defendants might one day decide not to maintain,” the lawsuit reads.

Last December, Ubisoft decided to remove The Crew from digital stores and confirmed that the game, which requires a server connection, would be completely unplayable as of March 31. The company also cited server infrastructure and licensing issues. Of course, the response was not very positive and it is no wonder that Ubisoft is implementing an offline mode for The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest.

It’s understandable that Ubisoft is taking legal action, because when The Crew was released in 2014, no one expected the game to be completely unavailable. It was not an MMO.

Source: VGC, Polygon