Ubisoft are shutting down the servers for several old games – including one full-price multiplayer-only game

A $60 VR game is going down alongside the multiplayer component of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and many other games.

Ubisoft is cleaning up its online services and decommissioning various old games’ online services as part of it. While this practice is fairly common, the number of games impacted and the extent of that impact has drawn some ire.

In a post on their support site, Ubisoft detail the 15 titles affected. Nine of them simply won’t be able to go online – so no multiplayer, online features, or account linking to the central Ubisoft system. Annoying, but probably fair enough.

A further five are more heavily affected, having DLC that will no longer be accessible. The majority of this DLC is also online-only, maps or modes for multiplayer, that kind of thing. Still, that’s content people may have paid for that is no longer accessible.

Finally there’s Space Junkies, a VR shooter released in 2019 for $59.95. To call it a commercial failure would be generous, with a lifetime concurrent peak of 61 players on release. It hasn’t had more than five people online for months – it’s dead, and it’s unlikely to come back. It’s multiplayer-only so, as Ubisoft put it, “you will be unable to play the game going forward.”

There’s a debate to be had about accessibility to content people have paid for and the morals of completely removing access to a game like this, no matter how few people are playing it. That’s long and ongoing, and you can understand why Ubisoft would want to save a few quid by shutting down whatever is running their end for it.

However, the game is still on sale. There is no notification on the page that it will shut down in just a couple of months, beyond reviews posted by users pointing it out. It’s even on sale as part of the yearly sales on Steam – something Ubisoft has to manually support every time.

Game preservation is one thing. Still selling something you’re planning to bin off in a couple of months is something else entirely.

Written by GLHF.