this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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You can choose to accept their terms or not play the game.
You are not entitled to have everything on your terms.
Except... For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.
Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.
40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.
Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.
I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.
You can also choose to call them out on having anti-consumer practices. You are entitled to criticize shitty business practices.
I wouldn’t call this a shitty business practice. You agreed to a game they own and control. You went into the game knowing this. If they are losing money on the game why should they lose more just to “preserve” the game after shutting down?
They don't have to. They can release the code and let people run their own servers once they're no longer interested in doing so. This costs them nothing.
Your last sentence is incredibly incorrect. Does exaggeration usually win you arguments where you are from?
Instead of just saying it's incorrect, say why. I can just as easily say that you're incorrect.
It doesnt cost them nothing. There.
That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:
There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.
Okay, if the crew was released at EOL, it would have cost ubisoft money on sales of the crew 2. I would not expect them to choose to lose money in that situation. It was only later with multiple issues with multiple games that ubisofts market value tanked and they had to assess a new position/direction for the company.
Also, we are talking about video games, not a basic right like food, water, and air.
And by what mechanism would it have affected sales of the sequel? Historically, and demonstrably, greater access to a game increases the sales of sequels. Why do you think developers put games in a series on sale when a new game in a series is coming out? I would definitely argue that having released the server hosting code for The Crew to allow people to host private servers would have potentially added to The Crew 2 sales. Also, if they release the server code, but not the game code, they could continue the sales of the game on storefronts at a reduced price having it marked that it will no longer receive updates and still made even more money from those sales. I would definitely prefer if they just release the whole game, but either would have worked.
Its just as likely to do either, its all speculation. I still don't want to force a developer to do anything really. Prohibiting things is a bit different though.
In this case, it is a prohibition on sunsetting a game without providing the means for purchasers to continue playing without your support. They are taking an action in their sunsetting decision, this is a prohibition on one choice made in that process.