Last year, Ubisoft yanked The Crew from digital stores and a few months later killed its servers, making it impossible to play the driving game even if you bought it on disc. People didn’t like this and now Ubisoft is promising not to kill its sequels, The Crew 2 and The Crew: Motorfest.
Late in December 2023, with no real warning, Ubisoft delisted the open-world driving game The Crew and announced its servers would be shut off a few months later. This effectively killed the game and it made it completely unplayable. As you can understand, people who spent money on The Crew weren’t happy about it being killed. And this incident helped kickstart the Stop Killing Games Movement, which is now pushing the European Union to create new rules that would force publishers to make online-only games playable offline instead of letting them vanish when the servers get turned off. And hey, would you look at that, Ubisoft is promising to add offline support to the remaining Crew games.
On September 10, Ubisoft held a small showcase announcing new content and updates for The Crew Motorfest. But before they got to all that fun stuff, Ubisoft took a moment to address player “concerns” about being able to play Crew games in the future.
“Today, we want to express our commitment to the future of The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest,” said Stéphane Beley, senior creative director of the franchise. “We are currently exploring different solutions and can confirm an offline mode to ensure long-term access to both titles.”
Ubisoft didn’t give a date on when to expect these offline modes, but did tell players that news was coming in the “next months.”
While I can’t imagine every feature of The Crew 2 or Motorfest will be included in the upcoming offline modes, it will still be nice to know that when the servers go offline one day, these games won’t disappear completely. And as more games become online-focused live-service things, I hope more publishers realize that offering offline modes can avoid a lot of frustration and even possible lawsuits.
Sadly, Ubisoft didn’t have any news on the original Crew or plans to bring that game back via a similar offline mode.
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