French Consumer Group Sues Ubisoft Over The Crew Shutdown

Ubisoft is in court. Again. This time it's France's own consumers coming for them.

UFC-Que Choisir, described as France's leading consumer association and founded all the way back in 1951, announced on 31st March that it has filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft. The case centres on the 2024 shutdown of The Crew, the always-online racing game that Ubisoft effectively killed by pulling the plug on its servers in March of that year. Once those servers went dark, the game became completely unplayable. No offline mode, no workaround. Just gone.

The core of the lawsuit is pretty damning. UFC-Que Choisir claims that Ubisoft misled buyers of The Crew, pointing out that until the game's closure, the company never made it clear to players that they had not purchased The Crew itself, but only a temporary licence to access it. Buyers thought they owned a game. Ubisoft's position was that they'd bought a revocable licence. That's a gap most people paying £40-£60 for a title would absolutely not expect to find buried in the terms.

UFC-Que Choisir lawyer Brune Blanc-Durand described it as "a particularly clear, textbook case from a legal standpoint," adding that the consumer group simply cannot see how Ubisoft finds it appropriate to sell a user licence that could be "revocable at any time."

This isn't the first time Ubisoft has faced legal pressure over this. At the end of 2024, a lawsuit was also filed by two Californian players, though the current status of that case remains unknown. What makes the UFC-Que Choisir action different is the weight behind it. The organisation has a track record of taking on big companies, having previously pursued Activision over unjustified account bans and won early rulings against Nintendo over Switch controller obsolescence.

What the lawsuit actually wants

The goal of the lawsuit isn't to force Ubisoft to bring back The Crew, but rather to stop this sort of thing from happening again "by obtaining a pioneering decision essential to clarifying the obligations incumbent upon videogame publishers." The group is seeking removal of clauses in terms of service agreements that allow publishers to shut down games without warning or recourse, an end to what it calls harmful practices, and formal acknowledgement of the damage done to consumers.

Worth noting: after shutting down the servers, Ubisoft began stripping away players' licences for the game, meaning you couldn't even install it. So it wasn't just that the servers went offline. Players who had legitimately bought the game found themselves unable to even download it. That detail makes Ubisoft's argument that buyers had "enjoyed The Crew for a decade" ring particularly hollow.

Stop Killing Games backing the case

The lawsuit has drawn strong support from the Stop Killing Games initiative, the movement that grew directly out of the backlash to The Crew's shutdown. Stop Killing Games has already taken the fight to the EU Parliament, gathering over a million signatures across Europe in support of better game preservation laws.

This case is seen as a good test, specifically because nothing in The Crew technically required servers to function as a solo experience; the multiplayer side was entirely optional, meaning the always-online requirement looks less like a necessity and more like a kill switch.

Ubisoft has not yet issued a public statement on the UFC-Que Choisir lawsuit.

The bigger picture

The Crew situation didn't exist in a vacuum. UFC-Que Choisir itself has noted that the case reflects a worrying trend across the games industry, where more and more titles require a permanent internet connection, giving publishers the ability to remotely deactivate games that players have legitimately purchased, without justification or any alternative offered.

Game preservation has become one of the more pressing issues in gaming, full stop. Online store shutdowns have already made hundreds of titles permanently unavailable across older platforms, and online-only games face the same fate the moment a developer decides the servers are no longer worth the cost. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot previously defended the decision at a shareholder meeting, arguing that maintaining a game's servers represented significant ongoing costs and that "a service is not eternal."

For what it's worth, fans haven't entirely given up on the game itself. A mod called The Crew Unlimited brought the title back via fan-run servers in 2025, though players need to already have the game downloaded on PC to access it, which is its own problem given Ubisoft pulled the licence.

Whether UFC-Que Choisir wins or loses, this case will likely set some kind of precedent. A win for the consumer group could force publishers to rethink how they handle game shutdowns. A win for Ubisoft would entrench the licence-based model further, giving publishers even more legal cover to pull the plug whenever they see fit. For players who've spent real money on games they can no longer access, that outcome matters a great deal.