If you’re a fan of The Crew, you likely know that publisher Ubisoft deactivated the always-online racing game back in March. That effectively made all physical copies of the game paperweights and bricked digital copies as well as their purchased downloadable content. It’s one thing for a game to be delisted and rendered unpurchasable—that unfortunately happens all the time with racing games, that have real-world car licenses that expire after a number of years. But it’s another thing for a product people paid for to be destroyed by the company that sold it, and that’s pretty much what Ubisoft did in this case. Thankfully, it seems the publisher might have learned its lesson, and won’t be killing off The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest in the same way, years down the line.
We heard your concerns about access to The Crew games
— The Crew Motorfest (@TheCrewGame) September 10, 2024
Today, we want to express our commitment to the future of The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest.
We can confirm an offline mode to ensure long term access to both titles, stay tuned for more news in the next months. pic.twitter.com/KDlz8h09OT
“We heard your concerns about access to The Crew games,” the official X account for The Crew posted on Tuesday. “Today, we want to express our commitment to the future of The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest. We can confirm an offline mode to ensure long term access to both titles, stay tuned for more news in the next months.”
What this would essentially mean is that, unlike what happened with the first game, the sequels would receive updates allowing offline play sometime before their servers are shut down. This would keep the games playable in a single-player capacity for the foreseeable future, which is all that players have really been asking for.
It’s an unfortunate truth that servers cost money and aren’t kept up and running forever, but there should always be a fallback, for when that day inevitably comes that live service ends. Gran Turismo Sport got exactly that earlier this year, and if the preservation of this medium has any hope in the future, developers and publishers will need to start preparing for these inevitabilities as games rely ever more on connectivity.
In The Crew’s case, the fans allegedly found an offline mode hidden within the game’s files, that Ubisoft evidently chose not to activate. Servers are one half of the battle when it comes to dealing with aging racing games; the other, that’s especially unique to the genre, is automotive licenses. It’s possible that the agreements with manufacturers Ubisoft ironed out for The Crew were expiring, and the publisher saw little value in renegotiating them for a decade-old game. But since The Crew 2 and Motorfest are still live right now, they can begin taking those steps to ensure those titles are primed to continue being enjoyed by their fans long after the multiplayer side of things has come to a close.
All in all, it’s a win for players. But The Crew assuredly won’t be the last game to be killed by its creator, so I’d like to point anyone interested in this story to check out StopKillingGames.com. There, our readers based in Europe will be able to sign a legal petition seeking consumer protections against publishers designing games to stop working after a set date. There’s unfortunately no similar legal initiative brewing in the United States and Canada quite yet, but a positive result in one region could establish a precedent and send ripples through every market, globally.
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